Who ruined the Southbank Centre?
Europe’s largest hub of the performing arts, which great musicians the world over once called home, is now a grim laboratory, obsessed with a ‘diversity’ that taints everything it touches. We hate, thought Keats, things that have ‘a palpable design upon us’. Under the direction of Misan Harriman, chairman of trustees, the Southbank Centre increasingly resembles a political boot camp, where slackers are herded for re-education. The Royal Festival Hall, its centre-piece, is a dump. Where there used to be a well-stocked bookshop and a place to buy records, there are now battalions of laptop-tapping students and scruffs of all ages, some plainly up to no good. And the transformation has been deliberate. ‘No snobs here’ is the message.
