The ear-splitting jackhammers on Whitechapel High Street here meld easily into the sonic landscape of this cacophonous and scruffy section of the East End, home to the Whitechapel Gallery since 1901.
For months now, the Whitechapel’s Arts and Crafts building and its next-door neighbor, a quirky 1892 structure that was formerly a library, have been shrouded in dirty green netting as construction workers swarm through the two buildings. They are being joined as part of a US$20 million renovation and expansion that has shut down most of the gallery since February last year.
More than four years ago, the Belgian architectural firm Robbrecht & Daem won a competition to enlarge the Whitechapel, the first art gallery in London built expressly to house contemporary art.
Working in collaboration with the London-based Witherford Watson Mann Architects, it is carving out 78 percent more gallery space, a vastly improved educational area, studios, a cafe, a bookstore and a research room devoted to the Whitechapel’s archive. (Although the institution boasts no permanent art collection and plans none, it has a rich archive filled with photographs, correspondence and ephemera documenting its long history.)
Until its reopening in April, visitors trying to make their way to the gallery’s offices must navigate through Angel Alley, a narrow passageway next to the original building. Although the place is basically a construction site, the staff is camping out here. And this is where Iwona Blazwick, the Whitechapel’s director, occupies a small, cluttered office with a view of another construction site, an unfinished office complex whose developers suspended work because of the current economic crisis.
“Our timing could not have been better,” Blazwick said with relief. In 2004, when the economy was still robust, she was able to secure about US$5.4 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund for the expansion, seed money that encouraged others to give as well. She said the Whitechapel had raised all but about US$735,000 of the nearly US$20 million needed from sources including the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Arts Council England, the European Regional Development Fund, the London Development Agency and several charitable trusts, private donors and commercial galleries.
Blazwick said the expansion would allow the gallery to show public and private collections that “have been languishing in crates or have never before been seen by the public.” It will also continue to organize shows and commission new works.
“The Whitechapel is about presenting great art and working with a diverse community,” she said.
The Whitechapel, founded “to bring great art to the people of East London,” and the adjacent Passmore Edwards Library were built by 19th-century philanthropists to provide education and culture to an area known for its overcrowded slums, as well as its breweries, foundries, slaughterhouses and, incidentally, the notorious Jack the Ripper murders.
Inhabitants have ranged from the Sephardic Jews and Huguenot silk weavers who arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries to the Bangladeshi immigrants who streamed in during the 20th. An influx of artists has recently brought some gentrification and an explosion of galleries, with about 180 opening up over the last few years. Today the East End has the largest concentration of artists anywhere in Europe, Blazwick said.
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