London’s Southbank Centre says it needs over $200 million in repairs

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…