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0 London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has made a most unexpected acquisition: a ticket kiosk on a small traffic island just outside its new entrance. But it is the hidden space below street level that is important: a former underground Victorian public lavatory, which closed in the 1970s.
This unusual site will offer a unique opportunity to create what will in effect be a new NPG annexe. With a separate entrance, it could open longer hours than the gallery, attracting evening visitors from the West End’s entertainment quarter around Leicester Square.
Although the elegant hexagonal kiosk at the Trafalgar Square end of Charing Cross Road, at the junction with Irving Street, may look Edwardian, it dates from the 1980s and was used for selling theatre tickets. After closing a few years ago, it was put on the property market in 2021.
The Art Newspaper can report that several months ago the NPG succeeded in buying the “Iconic Island” from a property company, for a sum of roughly £3m, with funds provided by Len Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born American British businessman.
The underground space is six times larger than the kiosk space, which provided an entrance for the triangular-shaped 1890s public lavatory below the street. Women at that time were treated dismally: the lavatory had 13 urinals and 12 male cubicles, with only five female cubicles.
Nicholas Cullinan, the NPG director, has ambitious ideas for this underground space. Subject to planning consent, the kiosk could be demolished and replaced with a new entrance to the space below ground. This large area, nearly 1,500 sq. ft, would then be completely refurbished, providing a venue for changing gallery displays and/or performance and film relating to portraiture. To take a theoretical example, it could be used to show a multi-screen film installation by Isaac Julien.
But progress on the kiosk project will have to await the opening of the refurbished main building, now scheduled for 23 June. An architectural competition would probably be launched for the new site, planning permission would be needed from Westminster Council and, finally, there would be the building work. All this would take several years. In the meantime, the NPG is exploring how the existing kiosk could be temporarily used next summer.
Snub to the original donor
The refurbished National Portrait Gallery (NPG) will have a new main entrance as well, facing north just off Charing Cross Road. When its original building opened in 1896, the gallery’s major donor, William Alexander, had wanted the entrance to be on the east side, where it has been ever since. This will remain but as an additional entrance.
Tradition has it that Alexander argued against a north entrance since it would face Soho, then a den of iniquity, as well as the slums around Seven Dials. The NPG was built on the site of a former workhouse and the street where the new entrance is being completed is named on a 1682 map as Dirty Lane.
The area around the new north entrance will soon be very different, creating an enhanced public space halfway between the east sides of Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. It is to be named Ross Place, acknowledging the £4m donation by David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse and the current NPG chairperson.
The new entrance is just one part of a refurbishment of the entire NPG building, which closed to visitors in March 2020. Led by Jamie Fobert Architects, the building work is nearing completion and internal redecoration of the galleries is now underway. Rehanging the collection will be a massive operation since there will be more than 1,000 workers in 34 rooms.
At an early stage of fundraising, the National Lottery Heritage Fund pledged £9.4m, an encouragement to private philanthropists. The NPG has now raised over £44m for the project, significantly more than its original £35.5m target. Surpassing the target means that it will be possible to kickstart a further development phase, including the conversion of the former ticket kiosk.
