Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.
Eventually the centre will become home to Blake’s own enormous archive: 40,000 drawings created by one of the UK’s best-known and most immediately recognisable artists. Now 93, Blake has spent three-quarters of a century bringing the words of some of our most beloved authors to life. Roald Dahl is the big one, of course – it’s impossible to think of Dahl without seeing Blake’s energetic, dip-pen pictures – but the list also includes Michael Rosen, John Yeoman, Sylvia Plath and Voltaire, as well as Blake’s own books. In other words, it’s difficult to find anyone with the same authority.
