The hoardings came down last week on the first phase of New Broadcasting House, the new wing of Auntie’s old flagship and herald of the corporation’s much trumpeted architectural renaissance. And it’s not bad, abstractly mimicking George Val Myer’s 1930s original — itself restored for the digital age, ready to be reopened by the Queen next month — though rather clunkily, like an uglier twin. It’s trying to be both bold and polite, but is nervous perhaps at the responsibility of being the linchpin of one of London’s few grand vistas.
The BBC once had great plans. At a speech in 2003 its then Director General Greg Dyke derided the “Ceausescu Towers” the corporation had been building for two decades, such as the despised White City behemoth crouching beside the Westway in West London. “Today the BBC needs buildings which connect with our audience, not buildings that frighten them,” he rhapsodised. Its staff deserved “ working environments which inspire and excite them”.
The Beeb had just been made “client of the year” by the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal for a supposed architectural renaissance that had begun two years before, when it appointed those cool modernists Allies & Morrison to build a new media village in White City to distract attention from the original carbuncle. David Chipperfield was to design BBC Scotland’s new HQ at the Govan Docks as a chic minimalist box.
Later that year the radical young firm Foreign Office Architects would win the competition for the new home of the BBC’s orchestras and music departments, the Music Box, with a far-out design like folding ribbons of pasta. And for the prize job, New Broadcasting House, reuniting the BBC’s news and radio in the world’s biggest live news room, who better than Sir Richard MacCormac, one of Britain’s most respected elder statesmen architects, and expert in “contextual modernism”? There, something for everyone: the perfect BBC architectural formula — a bit of trad, a bit of modern and a bit cheekily radical, too. To congratulate itself, the Beeb published Building the BBC: A Return to Form, in which its chief architectural celeb Dan Cruickshank lauded the “artistic renaissance”, the BBC a “patron of the arts” again, an august institution dressed in august architecture, as it was under Lord Reith.
The plan of the BBC’s director of finance and property, John Smith, was for the private sector to pay for it. In September 2001 the BBC had outsourced most of its property division with a £2.5 billion, 30-year deal with Land Securities Trillium (LST), part of Britain’s biggest property developer. LST would manage the BBC’s buildings and build its new projects, which the BBC would rent back, a little like a private finance initiative — Reithian public service, but at no cost to the licence-fee payer.
One year after his speech, of course, Dyke was gone, replaced by Mark Thompson. He promoted Smith to third in command, appointing him Costcutter General. And that’s when things started to go a little wrong.
They had started so well. Allies & Morrison’s media village was finished soon after, on time and on budget, and very pleasant looking too. Graham Morrison has nothing but praise for the corporation. Though, he says, being first, “we did have the fair wind of momentum behind us”. But soon afterwards Chipperfield was replaced as executive architect in Glasgow. Last May the LST deal was scrapped, netting LST £16 million in compensation and £23 million in profit after the BBC bought back the White City freehold. The National Audit Office criticised the corporation for “misunderstanding” the White City deal, and the “excessive returns” of LST were attacked by MPs in the Commons Public Accounts Select Committee.
The BBC says that since the deal was struck, easier and cheaper ways have emerged to fund and manage its buildings. But mud stuck. It’s now being investigated by the NAO for spending £800 million of licence-fee payers’ money on New Broadcasting House.
In October, after rumours of overspend and delay, MacCormac was replaced for the larger, second phase of New Broadcasting House (already a year late) by the reliable, if uninspiring, mega-firm Sheppard Robson. MacCormac is under a legal vow of silence, but it’s thought that he was asked to compromise too far.Just as in the wider organisation, cost-cutting has come to the BBC’s property division, which is selling off scores of fragmented sites, consolidating the BBC at Portland Place and White City, and making sure new developments, such as the proposed move to Manchester, are low-cost and privately funded/owned.
“The BBC is still committed to its architecture,” insists its director of real estate, Chris Kane. Though there’s little talk today of “artistic renaissance”, he promises no dumbing down at New Broadcasting House or Pacific Quay in Glasgow.
As with programme-making at the corporation, architecture is wedged between the rock of accountable public service and the hard place of doing so in an aggressive marketplace. Though well-meaning, the BBC’s experience does smack of those Great British things — muddled strategy (proposing a move to Manchester after making job cuts and building the White City media village) and inexperience in managing quality public building projects.
Like the Scottish Parliament, the corporation was too ambitious in choosing great designs bound to require a flexibility with the finances it never had. The BBC has got one icon, Broadcasting House. I’m not sure it can afford another.
John Humphrys, Today presenter’s view
“It will be very difficult to surpass the marvellous original Broadcasting House. I’m not a fan of steel and glass. In the context of extensions I always thought that if you have a wonderful brick or stone building your extension should keep in character and use the same material. It seems perverse not to. The Queen’s coming to open it, so I suppose we’ll all have to stand there in a line and say nice things about it.”
