Hall's Selfridges saviour

Selfridges heiress Dame Vivien Duffield, who helped save the Royal Opera House, is now to raise tens of millions for the overhaul of the Royal Festival Hall.

She is masterminding the campaign to raise an extra £20million needed before work can begin on the South Bank next year. It is expected that much of the money will come from her personal fortune.

Dame Vivien, who was left vast sums by her late father, the property developer Sir Charles Clore, helped raise £100 million for the Royal Opera House - a quarter of which came from her own pocket. However in the process she fell out with several members of the Royal Opera House board.

Tate Modern, the British Museum and the London Coliseum have also benefited from her largesse.

The fundraising skills of Dame Vivien, who has homes in London, the Home Counties and Switzerland, are considered vital to the success of the facelift of the South Bank - for which detailed plans will be unveiled tomorrow.

The centrepiece will be the planned £71 million refurbishmentof the Royal Festival-Hall that will close from July next year for 18 months.

The revamp of the area - which includes the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room and the Hayward Art Gallery - is not expected to be finished until 2014.

The Royal Festival Hall, which was built for the Festival-of Britain in 1951, will be redesigned with a grand entrance facing Waterloo Bridge. Michael Lynch, chief executive of the South Bank Centre, has said he wants it to face the people of south London rather than the Thames.

He said one of the problems with the centre was that people were confused about the locat ion of the main entrance. After a decade of false starts £40million has been secured from Lottery and £10million will come from the Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund.

Separate plans by the British Film Institute to build a sophisticated film centre have been scaled down.