Heritage: A User’s Manual Exhibition

Heritage: A User’s Manual was an exhibition at Southbank Centre’s Archive Studio, London, UK. This temporary space created by Jonathan Tuckey Design in the Royal Festival Hall foyer was the home of a research-based project founded on the belief that the heritage of a building is characterised by the continually changing contributions of its community.

The Archive Studio space was activated to reflect multiple perspectives on Southbank’s 1960s Brutalist buildings. Particular attention was paid to the early years of Hayward Gallery in anticipation of its forthcoming reopening and 50th anniversary in 2018. Through interweaving archival material and contemporary responses to Southbank’s Brutalist architecture, Heritage: A User’s Manual revealed connections between the construction of Hayward Gallery and the life of Southbank Centre today.

The starting point of Heritage: A User’s Manual was the Southbank Centre’s archive, which is a trove of information and artefacts relating to concerts, events and exhibitions held at Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Rooms and the Hayward Gallery. It includes documents, oral histories, programmes, photographs, posters, artworks and objects dating back to the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Using the Archive Studio as a portal to access the social and architectural heritage of the site, the project asked how site users themselves actively contribute to the creation of the space. To this end, we carried out workshops with Southbank site users and local residents in order both to elicit memories of the time of Hayward’s opening in 1968 and to consider current uses of Southbank Centre spaces. The project also featured a collaboration with dancers who habitually use the Royal Festival Hall basement cloakroom as a rehearsal area. The exhibition presented a film of the ‘cloakroom dancers’ in response to the environment of Southbank Centre, and live dance performances at the opening event by BDblaq Dance (Rikkai Scott, Raef Commissar and Cecilia Berghall) and Ella Fleetwood. At the centre of the exhibition was a commissioned piece of ‘nanotecture’ designed by Billy Adams, an architecture student at Central Saint Martins.

The core of the project is the recognition that ideas, relationships and experiences shape Southbank’s heritage just as much as its concrete buildings. Working with local residents and day-to-day users of Southbank, Heritage: A User’s Manual activated alternative ways of experiencing Southbank, animating the unique sense of history that the site embodies.