Britain’s battle of brutalism has finally reached an exhausted conclusion with the listing of London’s Southbank Centre. The so-called “concrete monstrosities” of the Hayward Gallery, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and its skatepark undercroft have finally been Grade II-listed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Traditionalists may be spitting feathers, but as football pundits are apt to assert: “It was the right result.”
However, it turned out to be a very long and very tetchy game. Constructed between 1949 and 1968 in an uncompromisingly brutalist style, the Southbank Centre was once voted Britain’s ugliest building. Since 1991, the Twentieth Century Society (C20), champions of all things modern, and Historic England had recommended listing on six separate occasions, yet their advice was rejected by successive secretaries of state. Until now. The decision brings to an end an unprecedented 35-year-long impasse, one of the longest-running battles in British architectural heritage.
