‘We can’t allow the cultural infrastructure to literally crumble’: One of London’s most popular arts attractions needs a $200 million fix

LONDON — From Michelle Obama to Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin to Nina Simone, London’s Southbank Centre has featured them all, and it is one of the U.K.’s most popular attractions.

But to secure its future, the arts complex needs £165 million ($217 million) to repair ageing buildings — which include performance venues, a gallery and public spaces across 11 acres on the south side of the River Thames — as it approaches its 75^th anniversary in 2026.

In March, the Southbank Centre’s CEO Elaine Bedell appealed to the then Conservative government to contribute £27 million toward the “urgent” cost of repairing and upgrading the complex’s buildings, in an article in London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

And according to Mark Ball, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, money for those repairs will involve a “big conversation” with the U.K.’s newly installed Labour government and other supporters — a significant portion of the center’s funding comes via a public grant, with the rest coming from donations, retail and partnerships. “We can’t allow the cultural infrastructure to literally crumble in our hands, because … without investment, it won’t be here,” Ball told CNBC.

Ball is responsible for programming performances and exhibitions for the center’s four main venues — concert halls Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, smaller live music venue Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery — as well as commissioning artwork for outdoor spaces across the site. (The neighboring National Theatre and British Film Institute Southbank are not part of the Southbank Centre.)

Ball has been in the job since January 2022, joining from a role as creative director of the Manchester International Festival. During his first year at the Southbank Centre, he oversaw more than 5,400 events and shows. The center is the U.K.’s fifth most-visited attraction, with visitor numbers up 8% to nearly 3.2 million in 2023, but — like other arts institutions — figures are not yet back to pre-Covid levels, which topped 4 million, according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.

The Royal Festival Hall, the center’s first venue, opened in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, a government-funded event held across the U.K. to provide positivity after World War II. “That was a festival set up by a Labour government, coming in on a landslide, after a war, in a country battered by austerity. And there was a need for cohesiveness, there was a need to look really optimistically at the future,” Ball said.

“It transformed this … what was derelict, bombed out, part of south London, into this huge cultural space,” he says. Ball is hoping for the new government to see arts institutions in a similarly optimistic way and described its pledges to support arts subjects in schools as “very exciting.”

But, as a result of what Ball described as a “real terms deduction” in public funding over the past few years, the center has sought commercial partnerships with the likes of Apple, and the Royal Festival Hall began hosting the BAFTA awards in 2023. The government’s grant totaled £19.95 million in the financial year ended March 31, 2019, then rose in 2020 and 2021 before falling to £19.67 million in 2023.

Ball attended new Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s speech at the Science and Industry museum in Manchester in July, in which she talked about the government’s aim to support culture and creativity against a backdrop of rioting in the U.K.

CNBC spoke to Ball as the U.K. was reeling from the summer’s violence. “We look at what’s happening now, and it’s … very shocking, but it makes it more important, I think, to understand that culture does have a real role in putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “That’s what artists do all the time. They create stories about other people that allow you to have empathy,” he said.

Ball shared a school experience in the 1980s during a “legendary” performance of “Richard III” by the Royal Shakespeare Company, starring Antony Sher. “As a young, closeted gay kid, seeing this performance of this outsider trying to find a way to be accepted, which is essentially the characterization that Antony gave him, just totally resonated with me,” he said.

“It literally changed my life … I became much more actively involved in the arts. I dropped some of my science subjects and started doing drama. Twenty years later, I was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” he said.

The Southbank Centre announced its forthcoming season on Thursday, including a large-scale retrospective from artists Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George.

The program also includes classical music festival Multitudes, which will see collaborations between contemporary artists and the center’s resident orchestras and other performers. Conceptual artist Marina Abramovic will perform “Vexations,” a short piano piece played repetitively over around 16 hours, with pianist Igor Levit, and, in a separate event, “All of this Unreal Time,” a movie starring Cillian Murphy, will be shown alongside a live music performance.

“One of the things that struck me when I came here is that amazing artists came through the building, and they were brought through the building by individual artform teams. But they never met,” Ball said. “One of the things I’ve been trying to do … is to get our artform teams to be working much more collaboratively. Artists instinctively now [are] less genre specific,” he said.

Ball hopes such collaborations will encourage new audiences to see and hear classical music live. There has been a “massive rise” in the number of young people streaming classical music, he said, but that hasn’t translated into attending performances. A 2022 study by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra showed that people under the age of 35 listened to classical music more often than those over 55.

“[Young] people going to other contemporary music gigs are not necessarily taking the leap into going to live classical music events, because they perhaps don’t see it as something that’s for them,” Ball said.

The Southbank Centre is also working on a game with online platform Roblox, where people will be able to compose and share music — a “real experiment,” according to Ball. “We’ll get an audience for Southbank Centre that may never come [to the center in person], but [it] is a totally legitimate audience engaging with culture in their own terms,” Ball said.

Apart from the issues of raising funds for building repairs and making sure teams collaborate, Ball said, one of his biggest challenges is ensuring people see art and culture as a central part of life. “How do we ensure that people benefit from the value of arts and culture, either just in terms of taking them out of the everyday, or of providing that empathetic moment where you where you can connect to other people, or of having a real life economic opportunities that come from it?” he said.

“The two things that I really want us to focus on are, how are we a space where artists feel they can make their most adventurous work … and secondly, how do we become … a ‘people’s palace’ on the river where local people in particular feel that this is a space for them?” Ball said.

And with that, he is off to plan the center’s 75th anniversary celebrations.