Not for me, not for you, but for us

We have been inspired by the Royal and Derngate in Northampton who are shaping plans for a new arts-led secondary school. By the Fun Palace movement enabling hundreds of grassroots projects led by local communities. By 64 Million Artists asking everyone in Britain to sign up to their January creative challenge. By The Agency in Manchester and Battersea leading change in their communities. By Agents of Creative Change who are using creativity to tackle real challenges.

Creating space for everyone

We have been inspired by Haworth Tompkins who are architects with a difference. They’re up for sharing the authorship of the buildings they create and we are very grateful for the careful, sensitive way they have gone about reshaping Battersea’s former Town Hall, opening it up as an accessible space. By the four artists from outside London who have designed eight bedrooms for visiting companies. By the couples who have tied the knot here for the first time since the fire and by everyone who has continued to stand with us as we work towards re-opening the Grand Hall in 2018.

People came together for London Stories: Made By Migrants

We have been inspired by the storytellers who shared their powerful true stories of coming to London and making a home, including 10 amazing Homegrowners, in this new BAC Moving Museum project. It is because of them that the show was chosen as one of the Observer’s top 10 shows of 2016 and raised over £2000 for the South London Refugee Association. We look forward to continuing our journey with the storytellers in 2017, including a film of London Stories.

Artists on the small screen

We have been inspired by Jeremy Deller and his brilliant film for BBC4 describing the We Are Here project. By Kate Tempest and her incredible new epic poem, story, album and uproar, Let Them Eat Chaos. By all the artists who are planning new digital collaborations for Performance Live working with BBC and Arts Council England. By our very own Beatbox Academy who soared to new heights on Gareth Malone’s The Choir.

Creative risks around the country

We have been inspired by producers in Medway, Wigan and Peterborough who joined the Collaborative Touring Network with Gloucester, Darlington, Hull, Thanet and Torbay, delivering year-round cultural programmes. By six Creative Museums who have creatively involved their visitors and local communities in bringing their collections to life. By everyone everywhere who has been working to highlight that, together, we have #MoreInCommon.

With support from The Great Hundred Club, we have been able to bring precious artefacts and our building’s radical history to life like never before.  These generous donors have enabled us to carry out important restoration works to unique architectural features of Battersea’s old Town Hall, preserving them for future generations.  Here are the key features that have been restored with support from The Great Hundred Club:

The Robert Hope-Jones Organ

Fortunately our unique theatre organ – a prototype of the Mighty Wurlitzer designed by Robert Hope Jones, a telephone engineer – was off site for restoration during the Grand Hall fire last year, so only the external casings were lost.  What makes our Hope-Jones organ unique is its use of electric batteries, which was revolutionary for the time it was created.  The Great Hundred Club’s contribution has allowed us to work with the top theatre organ restoration experts to carefully refurbish all its remaining parts.  After it’s reinstated as part of the Grand Hall rebuild, it will be playable in its full glory for the first time in nearly 50 years.  This means we will be able to use it for theatre shows (like in Orpheus) as well as for concerts, as it was when the Town Hall was built in 1893.

Jesse Rust’s Mosaic Floors

Jesse Rust, a glass-maker and chemist from Battersea, designed the colourful mosaic floor in our foyer when the Town Hall was built in 1893.  During this phase of the Capital project, we’ve uncovered even more mosaic flooring around the building that had been hidden for decades.  Our floors are one of the last remaining examples of Rust’s work in London, and the unique bee designs symbolise the collaborative spirit of the Battersea community.  Support from the Great Hundred Club has enabled us to repair and relay damaged tiles with a specialist mosaic restoration company, and preserve them for future generations.

Our Painted Glass Dome

The glass dome above the Octagonal Hall was also rescued from the fire, suffering only minor smoke damage.  The individual, leaded glass panels have been removed from their frame and are being repaired by specialists, to be reinstated when the Grand Hall works are complete.  One of the most beautiful features of our building, the golden panes of the dome shine light onto two inscriptions, which read: “The purest treasure mortal times afford / Is spotless reputation – that away / Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay” (Richard II, William Shakespeare).  The Great Hundred Club has enabled us to restore this remarkable piece of our building’s history and seal glass panes to protect the Octagonal Hall from leaks.

The Great Hundred Club has also enabled us to create dynamic performance spaces for artists and audiences to enjoy, embrace energy-saving technologies to become more resilient, and to open the thoroughfares of our building to dramatically improve access routes.  Part 2 of this blog series will celebrate how The Club’s contribution has impacted our performance spaces, including the first floor rooms, The Courtyard open-air theatre, and the artist bedrooms.

Firstly, you can get a sense of the old Courtyard via a photosphere on Google Maps, taken just after the decking had been lifted. In the last year of its old life, we enjoyed a cracking summer, with our outside furniture and planting, so it had a great sendoff.

Now, however, it is being given a new breath of life. Quite apt, since the architect of the building, E.W. Mountford, saw the courtyard as the lungs of this grand old edifice. In the London of 1893, Battersea Town Hall was constructed at the peak of Lavender Hill, and visitors would look north across the changing landscape towards the smog and dirt of the city. He knew that with the coming of the railways and a greater concentration of housing throughout the borough, there would be more traffic and the activities of the metropolis across the Thames to the north would encroach eventually on Battersea’s relatively open spaces.

So he made sure that fresh air would always be available by opening the internal windows of the building onto the courtyard, drawing in cleaner air, rather than from the surrounding streets.

Over the decades since the Town Hall opened, various changes took place, as the Grand Hall Kitchen encroached into the northwest corner, and then a more modern lift was built into the southeast. Windows were covered, bricked over, and lost. The rooms immediately behind the north face of the courtyard became toilets and bathrooms (those behind the south wall were already so), and further temporary spaces were subdivided through the west corridor.

Eventually, only the east corridor, running from the main Foyer to the Octagonal Hall entry to the Grand Hall was left with windows opening directly onto the courtyard. In some ways, this was very typically BAC – it became an almost secret space, something to be discovered when taking a wrong turn, and found itself a balance between lost and loved.

The Haworth Tompkins design formed part of the overall building plan several years ago:

All of these served to create a sense of excitement within us all on the Building Project, but as the winter months have trudged by, and more rain than any of us could have anticipated poured through temporary roofing and scaffold and boards, plastic flapping in high winds, it seemed it would never end.

This week, we have a few shots of some of those new walls, and a larger space within the core of our building. As the footprint of the space has almost returned to its Victorian size, we’re starting to get a sense of the potential.

One of the most exciting aspects of our capital redevelopment is the creation of eight new artist bedrooms, which will allow artists from all over the world to stay in our building whilst making work with us.

At the heart of this capital redevelopment project is an ethos of ‘playgrounding:’ the practice of applying the idea of ‘Scratch’ to the architectural process by collaborating with users and testing small elements along the way.

Playgrounding develops ideas through collaboration, before testing them through a series of low cost investments. This allows for more fluidity and flexibility, giving good ideas the opportunity to mature over longer periods of research. We believe this process delivers richer, more creative results that better meets artists’ and audiences’ needs.

Read more about Playgrounding>>

During the One-on-One Festival several years ago, we commissioned artists to create pieces of work specifically for six small bedrooms.  Once the festival finished, the spaces were kept intact and used as bedrooms for the next few years while we identified what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do better.  Insight and input from artists, architects and our own team gave way to exciting and varied design proposals for the eight new bedrooms set to open at the end of the month.

Ground Floor bedrooms – Victoria Melody (Chester)

Victoria grew up in Chester, where her father – an antiques dealer – is still based.  As a child she accompanied him to car boot sales across the country, hunting for unique pieces of furniture, decoration and bric-a-brac from yesteryear.  She drew inspiration for her floor of bedrooms directly from this experience, filling each one with handpicked artifacts she collected with her father.

Attic bedrooms – Emma Frankland and Myriddin Wannell (Cornwall)

Emma and Mydd live and work in Cornwall, and honoured its rich landscape in their designs for the bedrooms in our east attic.  Each room is hand-painted, with one signifying the sea, another the cliffs along the coast, and the third Cornwall’s copper mines.  In April they made a pilgrimage – called ‘A Pasty’s Progress – from Truro to Battersea with a Cornish brass band and a giant pasty (pictured above), to pave the way for future artists who will call these bedrooms home.  Read about ‘A Pasty’s Progress’ here>>

Basement bedrooms – Tom de Freston (Sidmouth)

Tom de Freston, who is primarily a visual artist, designed the bedrooms in the basement.  For his design, Tom takes inspiration from his hometown of Sidmouth in Devon, the cliff scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, and his relationship with his late father.  Tom made a short film to document his process – watch it here.

That was just a short introduction to these vibrant, quirky bedrooms, which are now complete and (in some cases) occupied.  Private tours of the Artist Bedrooms are available upon request to members of the Great Hundred Club. Please do get in touch with Anne at [email protected] if you would like a tour to learn more about the artists and their inspiration.

A jungle-gym of scaffolding fills the Courtyard of our building.  Ladders and gangways allow builders to move vertically and horizontally through the space, creating levels that didn’t exist before.  When the works are complete, the Courtyard will be twice the size of its original footprint – it will become the lung of the building, and a brand new open-air theatre.

Our building project has now restarted following the fire of 13th March, but in the meantime, there has been constant change for the staff here. You may have been following our Twitter where you’d have seen plenty of pictures of temporary offices with 30+ people sitting practically in each other’s laps, and walls papered with amazing and touching well-wishes and offers of help and support.

Finally, we have relocated to the one area we thought we’d never experience – the east attic of the building. The 3 rooms up here have always been the preserve of the companies who have office space within the building, such as Ridiculusmus and the Puppet Centre. Personally, on the rare occasions I’ve entered the rooms, I’ve always been very jealous of the view which, until the last phase of building works is complete and a gigantic picture window is installed, is the best in the building, looking north-east towards the famous power station.

If you’ve been to a show in our Porter’s Mess, you’ll have come through the very narrow corridor towards the Rafters which bounded the edge of these offices, but have probably never been into those rooms, except for during the Masque of the Red Death. One space which forms part of the ‘suite’ is the Dark Room, previously a photographic space during the early years of the building’s use as a community arts centre and then as BAC. Most recently this practically windowless space has been painted entirely black and been packed to the ceiling with all manner of technical equipment.

Obviously at this point, I would normally include a photo of ‘before’ but our digital photo archive has been segregated in the abandoned Lower Hall offices so for the moment, you will have to do without.

However, it’s amazing what you can do when you remove a few partition walls and our BAC support staff get busy with the paint and power tools.

Finally we have a space to call our own for the next year, and even Pluto has a new boudoir.

He’s very taken with his ability to supervise all workers…

Although he does keep leaving his mouse lying about, which has caused a few minor heart attacks as it is mistaken for the real thing.

Metres and metres and metres squared of the stuff. 6,200 of them, in fact.

If you’ve been to any kind of promenade show here, such as 2007/2008’s Masque of the Red Death or our own production of The Good Neighbour, then you will have experienced the sense of exploration that navigating the twisty corridors and interlinked rooms can create. You may well have wished you’d also believed the pre-show info and worn more comfortable shoes.

In undertaking the enormous change to the building that the current works will make, it was important to us that we didn’t ever lose that ability to turn our audiences around and around within the maze-like layout of rooms and passages, taking them further away from the real world outside the walls and into 1930’s Paris (for Little Bulb’s Orpheus), for example.

It’s always been a key focus that our building is one of the greatest characters in any production, which is a driving reason for the removal of our black box theatre spaces over the last 5 years. When the whole space can resonate with the show created within it, an exciting atmosphere surrounds you, and that often necessary suspension of disbelief required is so much easier to achieve.

Around the courtyard, we have started to re-level floors, and the danger could be that in making the access easier, we open up the building to a more simplistic layout.

However, we’re confidant that despite finally connecting the east and west sides of the building at the north end of the Courtyard (previously you’d have had to descend 2 flights of stairs to cross this great divide), we will retain the ability to design new and creative routes for you. In fact, one aspect of the Courtyard theatre space will be doors at every level that we can open out onto whatever rake or scaffold has been constructed within the outdoor area, and link them ourselves with (appropriately handrailed) staircases and platforms.

All of this finally achieves our biggest change, which is to move all staff offices into the newly opened attics on the west side of the building’s 2nd floor. In doing so, we free up every square metre outside of the additional 575 m2 we’re adding to serve our core mission and activities.

In essence, we will have over 10% more internal space with which to create theatre, serve our community, and grow and learn together.

And in that internal space, I have calculated we could fit the following…

And if you consider the internal dimensions of Doctor Who’s TARDIS, there’s probably more space inside the Old Town Hall than there is outside…

We’re also considering what we might artistically do to the walls inside the shaft since they’re exposed as you travel up and down.

Travelling down from the Grand Hall, it’s a little like the entrance to the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, as the room gets taller above you…

We’re asking for a minimum donation of £1 per badge, and all of this money goes into our building project fund.

We’ll be adding more designs throughout the year, so there will be a whole set to collect, all representing aspects of the architecture and design that makes this building such a beautiful and incredible place.

The show may have now finished, but you can still catch the installation which takes inspiration from evacuees’ letters to and from home.

Personally, this is exactly the kind of exhibition I love with artifacts from the past displayed alongside new work created in response to them. There’s something extremely exciting about seeing products, clothing and printed material form another era that can really bring it alive, and the children’s and older folks’ letters and artwork evoke feelings and ideas which help engage with the themes.

The work culminated in a lunch together where we all shared the food which would have been available during rationing, and we announced the creation of a time capsule to be opened in 2080.

All the participants had written letters to the future recipients of the capsule, and it will be hidden away below the floor of Battersea Arts Centre until its opening date in 65 years’ time.  A plaque will be fixed to the wall in our Waiting Room exhibition space to record this fact.

You can also pick up some free postcards created from the artwork in the installation and I’d definitely encourage you to come and see it.

It was actually thrilling to see young and old come together to create something, and new friendships have formed throughout the group.

Pictures by Ludovic des Cognats and Tref Davies