Tate v NEO Bankside: a theme fit for Ballard

Tate v NEO Bankside: a Theme fit for Ballard

On the viewing deck of Tate Modern’s interesting new extension (Switch House), there are a number of notices fixed to the concrete pillars: “Please respect the privacy of our neighbours”. Is this is a Tate snigger, or a futile Canute command?

It is rather astonishing how close the new building looms over some of the expensive residential tower blocks of NEO Bankside. The flats nearest the Tate have glass sided living areas tri-angled towards the Thames, into which Tate visitors may gawp. Residents using these spaces can be considered goldfish in a display tank; or, as some professional commentators have gleefully suggested, inadvertent participants in a gigantic art installation created by the proximity (theme: high end consumer sterility and conformity).

I speculate that the creator of many modern fictional dystopias, the writer JG Ballard, would have relished the dark imaginative possibilities afforded by the interaction of these buildings.

He might, updating High Rise (novel and recent film), populate NEO Bankside with the feral rich, who would enact their depravities and atrocities before a baying audience of increasingly bloodthirsty Tate patrons. Tate could dispense with gallery displays. Or he might draw on the bourgeois revolt theme of Millennium People, and have the NEOs murderously attacking the complacent Tate, perhaps opening fire on the viewing gallery. (Indeed, one of the outrages in Millennium People is a bomb attack on Tate Modern carried out by the radicalised upper middle class.)

In fact, there has indeed been something of a pre-emptive war between Tate and the NEO Bankside development (and other encroaching clusters). In the early years of this century, the Tate authorities noticed the beginnings of the luxury developers’ land grab in the neighbourhood. The Tate realised that, if it wanted to expand by building a new structure, it needed to get on with it – waiting until the apartments were put up, and owned by the rich, would mean that any development it tried then would be smothered to death by multiple planning objections.

So the Tate got its beach towel down quickly. The result is that the new building stands, in one sense, as a last ditch, and last moment, barbican against the encroaching NEOs.

The twisted, brick clad, shape is certainly impressive from the outside (unless one is gazing at it from a neighbouring fishtank, no doubt).

Inside, the materials, mostly soft coloured stone, are pleasing; also the visual discontinuities and generosity of space (except on the stairs).

I have reservations about a couple of things: The open honeycomb brick cladding, dropping over expanses of glass, has a somewhat imprisoning effect from the inside. And on some floors the windows are high and narrow, when anyone would wish for expansiveness. The spacious new Members’ Room, for example, is on the eighth floor – but you can’t enjoy the view unless perched on a high stool at the counter that runs along some sides. If you are seated at a table there is no looking out.

Some say that the NEO Bankside apartments (costing millions) are mostly owned by foreign absentee investors or similar transitory residents (hence the title of this post).

Come winter darkness, we’ll be able to verify that theory from the viewing gallery – do the lights go on in the NEO fishtanks?

August 2016