Forty-five faces of women, scribbled by Emin, now beam out from bronze doors – all part of an astonishing revamp that has turned this once unloved London landmark into a great building
The National Portrait Gallery in London has always felt like the poor cousin of the National Gallery, an afterthought tucked around the back of the star attraction. It stands as an awkward rear extension, squeezed into an unloved armpit where the sticky chaos of Leicester Square spills into Charing Cross Road, while visitors have always been shuffled through an apologetic side entrance, as if being invited in to collect the bins.
The reason it is so unwelcoming is that when the gallery was built in 1896 after its first years in temporary premises, it faced directly on to a slum – “a neighbourhood of crime and vice”, as architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner put it – and the insalubrious streets of Soho beyond. This regal repository of painted noblemen couldn’t be seen to be fronting on to such a seedy district, so the architect, Ewan Christian, moved the entrance as far around the corner as he could, to face the more seemly setting of St Martin-in-the-Fields church. As a result, the building’s front has always looked like its back, the palazzo-like facade of arched windows and roundels crucially missing a front door.
Almost 130 years later, three momentous bronze portals have burst through the Grade I-listed stone walls, as part of the most radical transformation in the institution’s history. In the hands of Jamie Fobert Architects and heritage specialists Purcell, new galleries have been opened up, learning spaces and restaurants added, and a public forecourt created, in a £41.3m process of surgical slicing and stitching, giving the rambling warren a vital new lease of life.
“It’s the great building Londoners never knew they had,” says Fobert, standing outside the gallery’s new entrance. “Our job was to open it up, tie its different eras together, and give it a new public face.” As his work at Tate St Ives and Kettle’s Yard attests, he is well positioned to accomplish such a task, free of the usual architect’s urge to stamp his own signature too boldly.
Where once there was a triangular scrap of fenced-off grass on the street corner, now stretches an inviting public space, providing a moment of pause between the bustle of Trafalgar and Leicester Squares. A chunky granite bench (mercifully free of anti-skating studs and anti-homeless bars) sweeps around an existing statue, echoing the curve of the road and merging into a broad set of stairs, while the pavement slopes up behind, bringing level access to the front door in a way that doesn’t feel like a separate “accessible” ramp. On a recent visit, one wheelchair user asked where the ramp was – only to find they had already glided up it, unawares. It’s a simple move, but one that is worlds away from the former indignity of being sent down a side alley to a separate ramped service entrance.
“The idea was to make the experience the same for everyone,” says Fobert, “and intervene in ways that are almost imperceptible.” You probably won’t realise that a hefty concrete platform was craned in to bridge over a sunken lightwell to the new entrance, as the granite paving flows across it seamlessly. More noticeable are the sharply sliced openings, where the architects have taken their scalpel to the base of three windows and slashed through the Portland stone plinth to expose the fresh interior of the rock, in striking contrast to its gnarled outer surface. It leaves the Victorian mouldings playfully truncated, echoing the staccato postmodern facade of Venturi Scott Brown’s National Gallery Sainsbury Wing next door (currently undergoing its own less sensitive remodelling.
