You could say that the marriage of the National Theatre and Southbank London has been a long and rigorous journey. In fact, it had taken over a hundred years for the idea of a subsidized national theatre company to even exist in London, from a proposal by London publisher Effingham Wilson in 1848 to passage of law in 1949 (National Theatre Bill), but to build a theatre expressly planned for the purpose took even longer. To gain interest, the project had been dressed up at different times in the propaganda of imperial grandeur - 'a national shrine in the capital of an empire' - and the rhetoric of social concern - 'a people's theatre'. In the middle of public debates to finance the theatre, the first site was acquired in 1937, located in Kensington by Cromwell Gardens opposite the V&A Museum, ready for construction until the beginning of the Second World War indefinitely delayed the project. In 1942, the London County Council (LCC) negotiated an agreement whereby the Kensington site is exchanged for a new site on the war-devastated industrial land on the South Bank along the River Thames, designated as one of the country’s first comprehensive postwar redevelopment areas designed by architect Charles Holden. The scheme would later receive little attention, as it was almost immediately superseded by plans to develop the area as the site of the Festival of Britain.
“Do the English people want a national theater? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.”
Views of post-war Waterloo Bridge and South End sites
Map showing bomb-damaged buildings following the Second World War. (Red circle indicates future site of National Theatre) Images from London Metropolitan Archives.
Festival of Britain
Conceived as a national exhibition to celebrate Britain’s post-war rejuvenation, the Festival of Britain was the brainchild of British newspaper editor Gerald Barry, referring to it as ‘tonic for the nation’. The layout of the South Bank site, overseen by appointed architect Hugh Casson, was intended to showcase the principles of urban planning that would feature better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities following the war. Predominately, this included buildings in the International Modernist style, with asymmetrical levels of buildings, elevated walkways, expulsion of ornament and avoidance of a street grid. The resulting construction effort of the South Bank site opened up a new public space in the city, including a riverside walkway, where there previously had been industrial warehouses. Opened in 1951, the project seemed to be a success, attracting around 8 million visitors in a five-month period, however there had been some opposition to the project from those who believed that the money would have been better spent on housing. After the Festival’s opening, National Theatre’s proposed new building planned to join the grounds with a foundation stone laid on a site next to Festival Hall; however, by next year it was determined that the theater should occupy a better site and all the festival grounds, excluding the Royal Festival Hall, would later be destroyed by the incoming Churchill government, which believed the Festival’s style too 'socialist'.
Aerial rendering of the Festival of Britain (1951)
Current view of Southbank Centre's River Walk (former site of Festival)
NTOP (National Theatre and Opera House)
While still looking for a permanent home, the National Theatre company negotiated a deal with the Governors of the Old Vic theatre in 1962 to establish a temporary home for operations. By the next year, one of Britain’s leading Modernist architects, Denys Lasdun, was chosen to design the new theater on another South Bank site, just upstream from the Royal Festival grounds, between Hungerford and Westminster Bridges on Jubilee Gardens. Of interviewing Lasdun for the job, Lord Cottesloe, the Chairman of the Arts Council and the South Bank Board, wrote “the committee was particularly impressed when he said he knew nothing about designing theatres and would have to sit down and learn what was needed from our committee.” While focused on client discussions and program experimentation, Lasdun brought his own idea of the ‘urban landscape’ from previous experiences that had fused civic architecture with the public realm, encapsulating his vision of a theatrical space.
When design work commenced, a new National Opera House program was introduced on behalf of the client, and it was agreed they should stand together on a site next to the Thames in front of the recently constructed Shell Tower. Using the new high-profile project as a distillation of Lasdun’s notion of public architecture, he believed rather than being treated as individual objects, the National Theatre and National Opera House (NTOP) should blend together as a continuous horizontal range of urban landscape terraces or ‘strata’, creating a grand metropolitan composition that was conceived on the scale and function of the immediate context (Chamber’s Somerset House, etc.) and promoted human relationships. By creating a rhythmic construction of artificial hills and valleys, it opened up the entire length of the South Bank for public use, while experiencing the magnificent views of both the Thames river and surrounding city. Despite a widespread favorable reception to the design in 1966, the opera house was dropped from the new building scheme on the grounds of budgetary concerns. (the Sadler's Wells Company, due to be housed there, eventually moved to the Coliseum in Trafalgar Square to become the English National Opera). The resulting amputated building would be dwarfed in size by the Shell Tower and surrounding site, unacceptable to Lasdun and the client.
“A horizontal plane or series of horizontal planes is the first essential in any system of formal arrangement intended to embrace the activities of organized or collective life”
Proposal by Denys Lasdun for the National Theatre and Opera House in front of Shell Tower
Waterloo Bridge Site
The situation was quickly redeemed at the beginning of 1967 when a new riverside site, just east of Waterloo Bridge (referred to as Prince’s Meadow), was offered by the Greater London Council. The new site would suit the scale of the new smaller project and Lasdun would carry over his design methodologies from the original proposal, but the new site required new responses, and it presented some difficulties. Among them were the problems of access and orientation. Here the presence of a new object proved decisive: Waterloo Bridge. This was the most prominent feature close to the site and was the link back to the West End and Greater London. Lasdun took advantage of this urban connection and christened it the 'umbilical chord' as if the life of the Theatre depended on it. Not only would Waterloo bridge’s elevated street manifest into a physical connection to one of the theatre’s ‘urban terraces’, establishing a direct pedestrian path of entry, but it also constituted a boundary to define a public courtyard and entry on the ground floor, orienting the project’s axis toward the bridge at a 45 degree angle. With that, the logic of internal functions and external access would remain the same as the NTOP, with production areas to the rear, foyers facing the water for view and auditorium for assembly in between. The focus on Lasdun’s stratification of foyers along the waterfront would prove beneficial not just for views, but for emphasizing a strong linear public passage along the river, composing a walkable boulevard that the Festival of Britain complex once championed along the Thames.
From the moment that he had been offered the site, Lasdun had been immediately impressed by the relationship to the city’s viewscape. Even though the new site was only about a mile up the river, it had a more natural relationship to significant urban conditions, such as St. Paul's Cathedral to the east, Somerset House across the river and Waterloo Bridge, connecting the West End theatre district. Lasdun referred to these perspective relationships as ‘the triangle’, influencing a triangular geometry felt in every facet and angle of the National Theatre. The idea of view was a crucial site component in connecting to nature and urban context, making the aesthetically-dominate horizontal levels such a significant component to the theatre design, as vertical obstruction was kept to a minimum. Urbanistically, the bands are seen as hovering landscapes set aside for the rituals of public life, opening out its contents to the passerby. They extend into the context as they flow down towards the river, connect with Waterloo Bridge or with the upper levels of Southbank Centre, to welcome those who wish to enter the site. The Theatre’s ‘strata’ becomes public property in the full-sense, with the city as a living scene in the background.
“.... The National Theatre must be its own advertisement - must impose itself on public notice, not by posters and column advertisements in the newspaper, but by he very fact of its ample, dignified and liberal existence. It must bulk large in the social and intellectual life of London. It must not even have the air of appealing to a specially literary and cultured class. It must appeal to the whole community.”
View of National Theatre after completion in 1977
Theatre Upgrade
Recently, after over 30 years of operation, the National Theatre began investigating opportunities to subtly transform and extend the building’s relationship with its site. The priorities were three-fold: expand participation and education activities, explore ways in which the building could respond to the dramatically changing environment of the South Bank neighborhood, and to develop a more environmentlly sustainable solution for the project. The conservation management plan, led by Haworth Tompkins Architects (also responsible for the recent Young Vic refurbishment), is an incremental process, broken down into different phases to allow for continued building operation. Currently scheduled to begin next year, the plan will look at various problematic areas throughout the building, including the riverfront north façade and rear connection on the south façade, both with great need for improvement. Currently, a small service yard lot (a remnant of Lasdun’s original entry-driveway design) disconnects the highly-active pedestrian waterfront from the theatre; while on the other end, due to Lasdun’s focus on the waterfront and the programmatic needs of theatre’s production spaces, the southern face of the building is without a public connection. The proposed plan calls for the existing service yard to be transformed into a new cafe and bar, with the existing bookshop to be relocated to the south of the site, providing transparency to the river walk and a clearer entrance sequence to the foyers, opening up the north-east corner of the theatre. Along with receiving the bookshop, the southern part of the site will receive a new glass-fronted production section, giving passers-by views of scenery construction and a programmatic connection toward the Southbank community. Other plans include: a new education centre to welcome 50,000 more people, the creation of a public roof garden beside the Lyttleton fly tower, and the refurbishment of Cottesloe theatre. When completed, the renovations should help improve the building's public connection, open its interior, provide facilities for new operations and radically improve its environmental performance.
Service yard on north section of the theatre, disrupting pedestrian flow along the Southbank river walk.
Proposal by Haworth Tompkins architects for the existing service yard to be transformed into a new cafe and bar, allowing transparency and access to the theatre's northern elevation.
Proposal by Haworth Tompkins architects to create a public roof garden beside the Lyttleton fly tower
Doon Street Development
The Doon Street site (South of the National Theatre) has remained largely untouched as a brownfield/temporary car park for over 50 years. Currently, a partnership between Coin Street Community Builders and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands Architects are proposing a controversial new mixed-use development that will potentially introduce numerous new programmatic elements to London’s South Bank and neighboring National Theatre, including an indoor public swimming pool/leisure center, ground floor retail facilities, residential tower, education/office space, and a new headquarters for Rambert Dance Company. Contextually, the new development would seek to improve accessibility and connections to the various pedestrian routes that converge around the site including Waterloo Bridge, the ‘Bullring’, Southbank Centre and the River Walk. Along with provide the community swimming pool and indoor leisure facilities residents have long desired, plus studios for the Rambert Dance Company, one of Britain’s leading contemporary dance companies. However, to make the project stack up economically and subsidise the costs of the public swimming pool - a notoriously expensive enterprise, the scheme will have to incorporate office space and private apartments in a 43-story tower, which has made the project a very controversial topic in the city and continues to remain in limbo.
Aerial Rendering of proposed Doon Street Development. (Image provided by Coin Street Community Builders)
Rendering of North Elevation, with the proposed residential tower growing between the National Theatre and IBM Building (also designed by Lasdun), a reminder of the original scheme for the NTOP. (Image provided by Coin Street Community Builders)
View of Doon Street Development (before/after) and its affect on the National Theatre's southern elevation.
When visiting the site - at first glance - it was predictable how the exposed concrete structure would be judged by many passersby, with comparisons to bunkers and car parks, and grumbles about public spending and institutionalized culture. Most notoriously, Prince Charles described the building in 1988 as "a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting". Even hearing passing tour guides refer to it as “one of London’s ugliest buildings” was not too shocking, maybe even plausibly right. However, that is a pure aesthetic judgment, but does not justify the theatre’s current success, both economically and urbanistically. In fact, its success constitutes a virtual demonstration of Lasdun’s urban landscape philosophy; a building as a microcosm of the city with strong contextual connections that evokes a sense of time, place and people engaged in creating space and form. These powerful forms generate a recurring theme since antiquity, by reiterating a link between scenography and urbanism, city and platforms with stages and auditoria. The shared ground creates an energetic voice, but the connections to the urban composition – both visually and physically – feed that energy, giving the project a timeless relevance.
Site Diagram / Displaying what Lasdun referred to as 'the triangle' - the Theatre's response to other points of monumental intensity in the cityscape. Also reveals previous proposed sites for the National Theatre within the old grounds of the Festival of Britain (Blue Region).
“One of the fascinating things about the National Theatre is the way it demonstrates how a public building can be designed as a setting for numbers of people; it’s deliberately been made incomplete without people ... I know of no other theatre where the audience are given such a sense of being actors contributing to a festive occasion.”
National Theatre / Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement