Recently I went to have a sneaky peek at the gargantuan new exhibition space down in Olympia. Over the years I’ve seen dozens of events there, and even attended a Vivienne Westwood fashion show, back when her partner Malcolm McLaren was alive — I remember him pacing up and down outside the venue beforehand, surveying the incoming crowd as though he were a Studio 54 doorman (“Does this one have to come in?” he said to an usher, pointing to a decidedly démodé guest).
Olympia is not going to be just an exhibition space, though — it’s still more than 18 months away from completion and is currently one of the biggest building sites in the city — but rather a cultural hub that will rival any other arts centre in Europe. It’s like a little city within a city, a citadel inside a citadel. The 14-acre estate is being completely redeveloped and will include a huge entertainment venue, exhibition space, four-screen cinema, 1500-seat theatre, a 550,000 square-foot office building designed by Heatherwick Studies (it’s all faux-Deco and municipal chic), two hotels, restaurants, landscaped roof terraces and a school for the performing arts operated by Alpha Plus Group with a Brit Kids partnership. There will also be a shedload of fancy shops, but what it won’t be is a glorified shopping centre.
It is — and I don’t say this lightly — exactly the kind of thing that we should be building in London, and hats off to the developer John Hitchcox for having the vision to attempt it.
Hitchcox is a culture nut, and it shows. In his office on site, he has a framed poster of a Christmas music extravaganza that took place at Olympia back in the Sixties — the bill featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Animals, The Move and dozens of other bell-bottomed luminaries.
And that’s a very high bar.
The site impressed me not just because of what it’s going to be, but also because of what it’s not. And what it’s not is Battersea Power Station.
I had been fascinated with the power station for most of my life. For many years I lived opposite it, bought the Pink Floyd album with the flying pig on the cover (the one that finally convinced me the punk revolution was a very good thing indeed), and later devoured the many hairbrained schemes floated by hopeful and equally hairbrained developers hoping to turn it into this, that and the other.
When Battersea Power Station was finished, everyone said ‘meh’ and then looked the other way
Then, almost unbelievably, unfathomably, it happened, and the slow, anticipative transformation of one of London’s most iconic, if debilitated, landmarks began. And then it was finished, and everyone shrugged their shoulders. Meh, we said, and then looked the other way.
As a family we went to visit when it opened at the end of last year. Obviously, the building looked magnificent — truly magnificent, one of the most impressive edifices anywhere in the world. But, having looked at it every other day since I was a child, all it really was, I found, was a tarted up, cleaner, architecturally overhauled building. When we walked inside, it was, well, a shopping centre.
Sure, there were a couple of middling-to-middling restaurants, and an elevated walkway, and the promise of some sexy new developments, but basically it was a load of old shops. The type of shops you see everywhere from Westfield to, er, Westfield.
The closest thing to culture on the entire site was a decidedly unimpressive bookshop. Now, as a tourist destination it’s doing quite well — the numbers are impressive — but after you’ve seen it once and eaten in one of the middling-to-middling eateries (we ate in one and not only can I not remember what it was called, I can’t remember what we ate) there’s absolutely no reason to ever go back.
I haven’t, and I’m not sure if I ever will (although the new chimney lift on the north-west tower looks pretty cool). It occurred to me the other day that the whole thing looks as though it was designed by AI. And not in a good way, either.
Nah. I think I’ll wait for Olympia. Actually.
