We need cash from the City boys

Plain speaking: Michael Lynch takes defiant pride in his status as a London arts world outsider

5 April 2012

As Michael Lynch, chief executive of the Southbank Centre, gazes from his plate-glass office at the crowds milling about the all-new Royal Festival Hall, he allows himself a small sigh of satisfaction. The £111 million refurbishment of the RFH - Lynch's baby from start to finish - will open to the public today on time and on budget; and for the first time in a very long time, he is starting to enjoy unbroken nights of sleep.

"We started this two years after Wembley, and you do find the spectre of projects like that hanging in the back of your mind. Sure, I've found myself lying awake at five in the morning on many occasions."

It has been a huge job of painstaking restoration and renovation, and it has not been without its headaches - chief among them the slow struggle to raise the necessary funds. Despite his obvious relief at reaching the project's end, Lynch today reveals his "vast disappointment" at the distinctly ungenerous response from corporate London to his appeals for money. Generating the millions needed to restore London's finest example of modernist architecture has been "very, very hard work indeed. On both a corporate and an individual level, we have found the City extremely slow to get on board. It's been European and American companies in London who have been most receptive.

"I find it really difficult to look at the extraordinary amounts of money that hedge funders and venture capitalists and the like were paid in bonuses in this city last year, and how little of it appears to have been spent philanthropically. It seems to me it's all chasing private art collections, or ridiculously expensive houses and cars. It's not a great reflection on this city."

As London gets wealthier, the arts world has found, paradoxically, that it has become harder and harder to raise funds.

Essentially, the City is tight - and at a time when foreign corporations cite London's cultural vibrancy as one of the chief reasons to locate here. Lynch, 56, is by far the most senior figure in that world to voice criticism so explicitly. But as Tate Modern launches its own appeal for £215 million to build a new extension and aims its campaign directly at the City's new rich, his blast will sound alarm bells across London's famous cultural institutions.

A charismatic, plain-speaking Australian - who previously ran the Sydney Opera House, but whose CV also includes founding Australia's leading casting agency and work on two Crocodile Dundee movies - Lynch bantered with the press upon taking the job at the SBC in 2002: "So long as I'm not labelled the next Sir Les Patterson, I'm sure I'll be fine."

Yet his immediate administrative and artistic reorganisation of the Centre, and his delivery of the sparkling RFH after two years of closure, has impressed critics and artists alike. This week the re-worked acoustics at the RFH's auditorium were given the seal of approval by both Sir Simon Rattle and Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Russian conductor and pianist.

Lynch takes a certain amount of defiant pride in his status as a London arts world outsider. He has been much missed in Sydney, where he was well liked (to the city's further dismay, his wife, Chrissy Sharp, followed him out to London in 2003, leaving her post as head of Australia's largest cultural event, the Sydney Festival, and becoming general manager at Sadler's Wells a year later). You get the impression that London's vast new wealth both amazes and appals him. "I find the Damien Hirst skull verging on the absolutely obscene," he says, referring to Hirst's new work For the Love of God, a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, with a price tag of £50 million.

"Is there anyone stupid enough to want to pay that for it? The danger is, in this city, there probably is. But those are the people who would quibble at the idea that I would ask them for £1,000 for a seat [in the RFH auditorium] or to make a contribution to pay for a room, or even to put their name over parts of the place. I guess that's where I feel that values are distorted."

As City Editor Chris Blackhurst commented in the Standard last week, new money apparently eschews the arts world, and so it is to the same old families and foundations - the Wolfsons, the Westons, the Rothermeres, the Cohens, and principal among them Dame Vivien Duffield, who gave £5 million to the RFH - that arts organisations turn.

"When I opened that letter from Vivien Duffield, it was like winning the Lottery," says Lynch. "Actually, it was better than that. I think there's been a feeling [within the City] that the RFH and the SBC are the responsibility of government, and I think, coming at the end of a number of big arts projects, there's a certain amount of donor fatigue. Given that, I still found the lack of response from those boys who got £20 million as a bonus last year, well, very difficult and very surprising."

The RFH had to raise about half the total itself. Some £25 million came from the Arts Council; £22 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund; £5 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and £7 million from the Mayor's London Agencies. "What I am thrilled about is that about 20,000 audience members raised £2.5 million through our audience campaign," says Lynch. "I think that's unprecedented in any large capital fund-raising effort."

But these families and foundations do not preside over a bottomless pit. As "the major world city", says Lynch, London must radically "evolve its attitudes to philanthropy". "There's not much I admire about American society, but one thing I do admire enormously is their sense of philanthropy - it's the sine qua non of what private individuals should do if they accumulate wealth. There's a responsibility to put back; it kind of defines the good corporate citizen. I think Britain still has a lot to learn in that respect."

Our continuing dislike of naming rights - whereby galleries or auditoria are named after major donors - is old-fashioned and unsustainable. "I don't think that has to get in the way. In America, they give a lot of money and the plaques on the wall are very small."

Despite it all, Lynch has enjoyed himself. An adviser on the cultural input to the Olympic Games in Sydney, he is doing the same for London 2012. And if one week defines his experience of London so far, it is that fateful first week of July 2005.

"We'd busted every piece and part of us getting the RFH project to the point that we could close the building [for its renovation]," he says, "and on 30 June we finally did that. We signed all the contracts on the first of July, and the builders moved in on the fourth. On the fifth we won the Olympic Games bid, and I got hit in the head by a beer can during the celebrations. Then on the seventh, the bombs went off - and the builders walked offsite. I will never forget the range of emotion I went through. It's tinged with every possible emotion you can reach, and it's probably the most indelible week in my memory - apart, perhaps from the first amazing week of the Sydney Games."

I ask him what he loves most about the RFH re-fit. "I'm thrilled by the acoustic improvements in the hall itself and that we'll have musicians and conductors actually thinking this is a great place to play. But we've also improved access to the place, which is really important. I spent a year in hospital from the ages of three to four with polio, and it's nearly killed me over the past couple of years of the building project, pounding my body almost into submission across the site. Now we have this glass lift which goes right through the building. I had my first ride on it the other day, and it's great."

As for the immediate programming this summer, he's obviously looking forward to the official opening gala on Monday night, featuring the RFH's four resident orchestras onstage together for the first time. But Lynch is also up for the return of Brian Wilson in September, who premieres his new suite and plays several Beach Boys songs that have never been heard live.

"As a kid growing up on a beach in Australia, I've got this thing about Brian Wilson. I'm a huge fan. And maybe the opening programme will persuade a few of the hedge-funders to come on down and see what they're missing." There is still about £6 million to raise, he says, so perhaps a City kid or two can even be parted of the odd £50,000 - the cost, say, of restoring a box. "If they really want to be famous, we can even give them naming rights," jokes Lynch. "I'm quite happy to negotiate."

Overture, a weekend of free events to mark the RFH reopening, starts tonight. See www.southbankcentre.co.uk.

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