Crispin Woodhead, our chief executive came up with the idea of a new partnership:
“Our accommodation at Kings Place was coming to an agreed end and we needed to find a new home. I felt that we should not be trying to get a conventional office space solution. Even then it was obvious that our operational environment was getting tougher with pressures in all directions and storms ahead.
It simply didn’t seem correct to hand over so much money, given for art in society, to a London landlord just for a pile of melamine and a watercooler. We were fortunate enough to have an unexpected chance to rethink, to be more creative and productive, after all, that is what arts organisations are supposed to do. Not trying to achieve more with our funding seemed indefensible.
The Arts Council asks its funded organisations to make the creative case for diversity, to be dynamic and to commit materially to the needs of the community. How could moving into a generic office block on a generic and expensive contract possibly meet those expectations?
We already had a strong relationship with many schools in Camden through our well-established education programme. Our General Manager, Edward Shaw, informed me that our appeal had brought a positive response from Kat Miller, Director of Operations at Acland Burghley School. She was working on ways to expand the school’s revenue from its resources and recognised that their excellent school hall might be somewhere we could rehearse. Edward spotted the opportunity and fixed up a visit to meet Kat and tour the school.
We were taken aback when we saw the brutalist space. It felt so much like it could be part of the Southbank Centre: a grand, charismatic hexagon that reverberates with possibility. It’s a wonderful, inspiring space and we were impressed. But we were looking for a home first and foremost and good though this was, we needed somewhere to live as well as play.
As we were leaving the school grounds, a young year 7 student who had just finished his additional English class confronted us and wouldn’t let us go before we had read his freshly written story, a riff on the legend of King Midas, and correctly answered all his questions about it.
As funny as it might sound, it felt like a thunderbolt. We knew there and then that we had to make this remarkable place, with an energy like nowhere else, our home.
It wasn’t actually such a difficult step to contemplate. Our national educational programme, developed by our Education Director, Cherry Forbes, over many years of dedicated work, has shown the amazing results achieved by persistently routine commitment to the same people in their own place. So we had every reason to want to take the next step and be a daily engaged presence for the community around our headquarters.
It is a bold move indeed to allow another organisation to take residence on a school campus but Nicholas John, the Head Teacher of Acland Burghley School, is an unusually courageous and dedicated leader. It was his vision that recognised the space we might use on campus and how that could work fluently and successfully and it was his influential voice that paved the way for the innovative agreement with Camden Council and the meticulous working structure that allows Orchestra and School to work in a richly productive interdependence that respects, above all things, the wellbeing and interest of the students.
It is his trust, the trust of his colleagues and of his students that we are proud to repay through our residency.”
