Brutal but beautiful: Southbank Centre’s second-tier listing is the cherry on a concrete cake | Build

forBritain’s brutality battle has finally reached its exhausting end with the listing of London’s Southbank Centre. The so-called “concrete monsters” of the Hayward Gallery, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and its skate park have finally been grade II listed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The traditionalists may be spitting feathers, but as football pundits tend to assert: “It was the right result.”

However, it turned out to be a very long and infuriating game. Built between 1949 and 1968 in an uncompromising brutalist style, the Southbank Center was once voted the ugliest building in Britain. Since 1991, the Twentieth Century Society (C20), champions of all that is modern and historic England, has recommended inclusion on six separate occasions, but their advice has been rejected by successive Foreign Secretaries. yet. This decision ends an unprecedented 35-year impasse, one of the longest battles in British architectural heritage.

“Not being included has become quite an anomaly,” said Catherine Croft, director of the C20 group. “The Southbank Center is admired as one of the finest Brutalist buildings in the world, so this decision is clearly well deserved and long overdue. The arts complex is a highly sophisticated sculptural masterpiece, with an enormous richness of form and detail inside and out. The experience it offers concertgoers and gallery visitors is unlike anywhere else in the country, and its creative spaces remain unrivaled.”

Ironically for feather-spitting traditionalists, the origins of the Southbank Center and its current form can be traced back to Winston Churchill, whose Conservative government swept away most of the old Festival of Britain site, with the exception of the Royal Festival Hall. This scorched earth policy paved the way for new development along the Thames, in the style of the time.

Enter Norman Engelback, who led the London County Council’s young architectural team tasked with designing the Southbank Centre. Eschewing the more Scandinavian-style modernism of the adjacent Royal Festival Hall, Engelback and his gang instead opted for a paradise full of concrete walls, walkways, stairs and roof terraces, punctuated by concrete air-conditioning ducts and pyramidal glass.

As an architectural movement, Brutalism oscillated greatly in public affection and critical status. But the wheel turns, and since 2010, it has been rediscovered by a new generation of fans, attracted not only to its aesthetic qualities but also to what it represents in terms of progressive social reconstruction in the post-war era. The inclusion of the Southbank Center is just the long-awaited cherry on the concrete cake.

However, the saga was not without its strange twists and turns. The abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 led to the creation of the Southbank Council, which sought to generate more income from the site, and the reviled “concrete monsters” were an obvious target for redevelopment. The next four decades saw many supposed attacks, ranging from cosmetic modifications to outright destruction.

A 1989 proposal by Terry Farrell, the emperor of postmodernism, would have encased the buildings in a Po-Mo veneer, but it was abandoned in 1993. The Wave Project, a £70m Richard Rogers scheme from 1994, would have included a curved glass roof enclosing the buildings and outdoor spaces, like a giant and somewhat preposterous conservatory. It was criticized for its lack of practicality and high cost, and was dropped after failing to obtain National Lottery funding. The 1999 masterplan for the entire South Bank by Rick Mather was described by some as “the perfect antidote to the monotonous misery of the centre”, but it once again remained unimplemented.

In 2013, Fielden Clegg Bradley introduced the Festival Pavilion, a £120 million offering featuring a 60-metre glass pavilion looming over the Hayward Gallery and commercial spaces housed in shipping containers. After this plan was strongly opposed by the G20, it was also dropped, largely due to protests by skateboarders who frequent the lower part of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and whose “Long Live the South Bank” campaign attracted more than 80,000 supporters and the support of the Mayor of London.

Following a £16.7 million grant from Arts Council England, Fielden Clegg Bradley continued to lead an exemplary conservation and restoration program for the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room in 2018.

The Brutalist era produced some of the boldest and most austere architecture in Britain, built on a scale unlikely to be replicated. Ironically, a style that was once seen as ugly, aggressive and off-putting now serves as antiseptic decoration on plates, cups, tea towels and a host of other goods. However, as the Southbank Center vividly demonstrates, the real power of Brutalism lies in its buildings: objects of great weight, surprising beauty, and bold ambition.

“The battle has been won,” Croft said, “and brutality has finally reached its maturity.” “This is a victory over those who mocked so-called ‘concrete monsters’ and shows a mature recognition of the way Britain has led the way.”