f68
would have properly environmental, cli- mate-controlled areas, we’d have lots of different spaces, with lots of different temperatures according to what you’re storing in them, which we can’t quite achieve within this building. So what has happened is that all the original stock, the film stock and a lot of the tapes and so forth have gone off-site to the British Film Institute and the British Library Sound Archive on a permanent loan, but we have things like CD versions and some of it is online – that’s a side that we want to start to increase.”
“Y The recently renovated Vaughan Williams Library
artist development project, bringing in some non-folk dance artists and choreog- raphers to work with some morris dancers and musicians – Laurel Swift was one of the artists involved with that.”
“So we’d started to do enough things and had enough plans going forward to be in the right place when the Arts Coun- cil, having done all this survey of the sec- tor, were doing their last bits of thinking and consultation internally. Somebody, quite rightly, said, ‘You have only got £200,000 here: if you start chopping that up you’re going to waste a lot of money on admin and overheads.’ So then sudden- ly I got this call from the Arts Council music department. I went in for a meeting with Penny King and Phil Butterworth. And them both saying, ‘Well, we’ve all thought about how we should use this money, and we think now that we should just offer it to one organisation; we’ve thought of three very good reasons why the other two are perhaps not right, so we’d like to offer EFDSS to put in a plan.’ I mean we didn’t just walk away with the cheque, we had to then go back to them with a full plan of how we were going to deliver on all these areas over the next two years.”
“We joined as what was then called
Regularly Funded Organisations, which then about four years later I think evolved into what are now called the National Port- folio Organisations, and despite the cli- mate around those over the last ten years, we’ve managed to increase that grant.”
and with that went refurbishment of the foyer and some of the area downstairs, putting in more disabled toilets and those sorts of things. Again, that was a little bit of chance I suppose, or good timing. We’d had two sizeable legacies and we’d been talking internally about a lift. Plans for lifts had gone back donkeys’ years before I ever joined, and were constantly being looked at. So talking with our Operations Director, Rosie [Pagan], we just thought,
“T
he first sizeable capital project we did was around making this building physically acces- sible, putting the lift in,
right, we’ve got this chunk of money, we’re not just going to stick it into reserves and let it sit there, we think we should look into a lift. And then we thought, well, maybe we should engage some architects because it is a Grade 2 list- ed building, so we can’t just do what we like. So we ended up with a bigger project and the budget obviously kept getting larger and larger.”
“At that point the Arts Council, who had not done a lot of capital funding for a period of time, brought something specifi- cally called Small Capital Project Funds, which was perfect. We had that legacy money on the table, and an agreement internally from the Trustees that it could be used. We had a few other smaller bits of funding and we did an individual giving campaign as well. So by the time we’d fin- ished I think the project ended up just shy of £500,000. It transformed the building.”
And most recently they’ve refurbished the main performance space, Kennedy Hall, and the library.
“That’s right, two public areas, almost part of the original fabric of the building. In Kennedy Hall, most of the panelling is original 1930s, the windows are 1930s. The mural was unveiled in 1954. The curtains were also 1954 or thereabouts, mid-’50s. The floor we weren’t quite sure about; we think it had been replaced in the ’70s but the floor gets a major pounding one way or the other. It’s a semi-sprung floor and it was very important to keep that as well. Lots of conversations had been going on for decades about how could this building be more radically changed to be more fit for purpose, because it was built as a cen- tre for dance. It pre-dates the merger of the two societies, so it was built for the dance society. This massive hall that actual- ly is probably half the building and acous- tically not great, was never designed to be a concert hall.”
I’m curious about the situation with all the archives held by the library? There has been talk for a long time that stuff was fairly poorly stored and there wasn’t space to expand.
“Most of the collectors’ notes are still
here. We have the two archive rooms down on the lower ground floor in which we’ve improved the environmental condi- tions through quite simple things like boarding up windows and having dehu- midifiers, so we’re gradually keeping a reasonable level of consistency with things like temperature. A few years ago we were able to buy some of those lovely big roller bookcases, stacks, so that you can get more into a space, which did improve quite significantly the amount of stuff that wasn’t yet on shelves.”
“I think we have now digitised most of our collections; the only ones that are potentially outstanding are the newer collections, ones that have perhaps been donated in the last ten, twenty years. We also have online those collections from other places, from The Full English. Not all of those collections were based here in the first place, so they stay with their original libraries, museums, universities – we have the digital access to them. So it’s now starting to look at the more modern collections, and what we do with those in terms of the digitisation. Gradually they’re all being properly catalogued and properly archived.”
So you’ve got the building a lot better, you’ve got decent funding. Your live music programme here is immeasurably better than it used to be. I couldn’t ever believe that it was possible to get a good sound in Kennedy Hall, but since Jamie Orchard- Lisle has been in charge everybody now knows that you can. You’re doing a lot more in terms of mentoring artists and so on. What’s next, where do you want it to go? Are there areas of it you want to expand, or is there anything fresh that you don’t currently do that you’d really like to?
“Certainly in terms of the artist devel- opment programme, there’s a lot more that I would like to do. For example there’s quite a large raft of artists who are at the top of their game, they get great crits on their live shows and albums, they get BBC Awards etc, but they don’t appear to move up in terms of audience numbers. Now that might be because they don’t want to, and if that’s the case then that’s absolutely fine. I’m not necessarily talking about somebody trying to fill great stadiums, I’m talking about artists that should, certainly in Lon- don, be able to do 200 seats easily, yet there’s an awful lot of them that struggle.
es, well that again has been about the behind the scenes changes. If you were creating a new facility then we
Photo: Rosie Reed Gold
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