The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) of London recently acquired a ticket kiosk on a small traffic island just outside its new entrance. But what’s really exciting is the hidden space below street level: a former underground Victorian public lavatory that closed in the 1970s.
This site will offer a unique opportunity to create a new NPG annexe. This annexe will have its own entrance, which will make it open longer hours than the gallery. This annex could attract evening visitors from the entertainment quarter around Leicester Square.
The kiosk at the Trafalgar Square end of Charing Cross Road is from the 1980s, and it was used to sell theater tickets. It was closed a few years ago, and it was put on the property market in 2021.
The Art Newspaper says that a few months ago, the NPG (National Portrait Gallery) bought the “Iconic Island” from a property company for £3 million. This was done with money supplied by Len Blavatnik, an American-born British businessman.
The underground space is six times larger than the kiosk space, which was used as an entrance for the triangular-shaped 1890s public lavatory below the street. At that time, women were treated poorly by society: the lavatory had only 13 urinals and 12 male cubicles, with only five female cubicles.
Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), has plans to remodel an area of the gallery that’s currently underground. This would create a new entrance to the gallery below ground, which would be used to show different art exhibits and movies related to portraits.
The refurbished main building is scheduled to open on June 23rd. An architectural competition would need to be launched in order to find a new site for the kiosk, and planning permission would need to be obtained from Westminster Council. Then, there would need to be building work done. All of this would take several years. In the meantime, the NPG is exploring how the kiosk could be used for the summer.
Snub to original donor
The National Portrait Gallery is getting a new main entrance on Charing Cross Road, near the north end of the building. This entrance will be separate from the east side where the gallery’s original entrance is.
Some people believe that Alexander argued against a north entrance to the NPG because it would have faced dangerous areas like Soho and the slums around Seven Dials. The new entrance is being built on the site of a workhouse, and the street it is being built on is officially named Dirty Lane.
The new north entrance to Trafalgar Square will soon be very different. It will be named Ross Place in honor of a £4 million donation from David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse. This new space will be a much-needed halfway point between the east sides of Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square.
The new entrance is part of a remodel of the entire NPG building. The project is nearing completion and internal decoration of the galleries is now underway. The rehanging of the collection will be a big job, since there are more than 1,000 works in 34 rooms.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund pledged £9.4 million to help start a development phase for the project, which includes the conversion of the former ticket kiosk. So far, they’ve raised over £44 million, which is more than their original goal. This means that they’ll be able to start a new phase of the project, which will include more development.
The largest private donation ever given to the National Portrait Gallery is from a family foundation belonging to billionaire businessman and philanthropist, Mikhail Blavatnik. This money will be used to refurbish the first floor of the building that the gallery is currently located in, and also to create a new gallery dedicated to Victorian statesmen. Mikhail Blavatnik is a big fan of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and this may have influenced his decision to contribute to the gallery.
The East Wing used to belong to the National Gallery, but in the 1980s it was converted into offices. In 2018, the NPG bought the freehold of the wing for £2.6m. Now the East Wing is being converted into gallery space, and the Garfield Weston Foundation is providing £6.5m for this project. The Clore Duffield Foundation is also donating money to the project.
The Sackler Trust had pledged one million pounds to the National Portrait Gallery, but in 2019 they decided not to give the money after protests about the family’s involvement in the addictive drug OxyContin.
The historic galleries on the upper floor of the Blavatnik Wing will have portraits from the Tudors up until around 1840. The walls of these rooms have been newly covered with fabrics, many in bold colors like red, blue, and green. Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, believes that these colors are appropriate for portraits from this period.
Many of the portraits from the 20th and 21st centuries will be on the ground floor. These spaces will have lighter walls because of the shutters that were installed in the 1990s. There will also be four “Making” rooms that focus on different subjects: Tudor portraits, miniature paintings, prints, and photography.
Before the closure, the NPG received around 1.7 million visitors. Covid-19 has caused a lot of people to stop coming to museums, especially in central London. But Cullinan hopes that once the pandemic is over, the museum will attract two million visitors.
The visitor will see a lot of new changes when they visit us. We’re doing this so that there is always something new to see, and so that visitors won’t get tired of our place after a short visit.