The National Gallery in London today opens its Roden Centre for Creative Learning. In a thorough remodelling and renovation of the gallery’s 50-year-old north extension, which has been home for many years to the gallery’s learning department, the centre becomes one of the largest of its kind in any UK museum. It is open free to booked school groups Monday to Friday in term time, to drop-in visits by families at weekends, and at other times for ticketed revenue-generating events and courses for adults.
The Roden Centre is the first element of NG200—an £85m programme of capital projects to mark the 200th anniversary of the museum’s foundation—to open to the public (the Sainsbury Wing reopens on 10 May). It is sited on Orange Street, between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, a short walk down the slope from the the National Portrait Gallery’s new main entrance, and open to all on the evening of 28 February, starting at 6pm, in a special edition of one of the gallery’s Friday Late sessions. The centre is open to drop-in visitors all weekend, and the first school groups arrive on the morning of 3 March.
The centre has been named to mark the financial support given by the hedge fund manager and philanthropist Stuart Roden and his wife Bianca Roden. Other backers named in the building's spaces are the Clore Duffield Foundation (the Clore Studio), the Julia Rausing Trust (the centre's creativity room). The centre’s donors also include Kate de Rothschild Agius and Marcus Agius; the Band Trust; Garfield Weston Foundation and City Bridge Foundation.
A connection to the National Gallery collection
The centre’s remodelling has been overseen by Karen Eslea, head of learning and national programmes at the National Gallery and the architect Hannah Lawson, director of the east London practice Lawson Ward Studio. Both Eslea and Lawson tell The Art Newspaper that the abiding impression they wish members of the public to take away from visiting the centre is one of contact with the gallery’s pictures—its matchless collection of European art from the early Renaissance to the early 20th century.
The lettering on the refurbished entrance to the Rodence Centre for Creative Learning is by the Cardozo Kindersley Studio, in Cambridge, founded by David Kindersley, creator of the equivalent lettering on the facade of the National Gallery's 1991 Sainsbury Wing Photograph: Ben McMillan
Entering the remodelled entrance to the building—opened a half-century ago by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 and refurbished in 2011 once before as the Pigott Education Centre with financial backing from the Anglophile US industrialist Mark Pigott—the visitor is struck at once by the muted mixed-timber tones, the oak floor, the hushed acoustics and an immediate, allusive, impression of the collection, not least the architectural legacy of its celebrated sequence of early Italian masterpieces.
To the left of the long entrance gallery is a broad pale-timber-faced flight of what Lawson calls theatre steps. Those steps subtly allude to the setting for a dramatic composition of grouped figures, perhaps by Raphael or Sebastiano del Piombo, or to the depth of field in the gallery’s own The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486), by Carlo Crivelli, or Saint Jerome in his Study (around 1475), by Antonello da Messina. The steps are somewhere that visiting school children will be able to gather and collect themselves immediately when they arrive, almost as they might have done if they had poured on to the shadowed piazza steps at the heart of some Tuscan city seven centuries ago.
To the right, leading the eye towards a large digital screen at the far end of the entrance hall is a range of locker doors, each painted with an historic pigment central to the artistic process of the gallery’s greatest masterpieces. Behind each pigmented door is a space where visiting school groups will hang coats and deposit bags, secured with a padlock controlled by their teacher, for the time of their 90-minute-plus stay, without having to ask outside permission, and without having to delay the business in hand of studying and discussing the collection.
Immediately in front of the visitor is a beguiling Fragment Screen, made up of finely made panels, cut from a varieties of woods closely associated with the history of Western art—poplar, pear, oak and walnut among them—and representing details from paintings in the gallery’s collection. On a tour of the building last week, the gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, was challenged by colleagues to recognise all of these elegant fragments. There are details from Saint Jerome in his Study, from Claude Monet’s The Water Lily-Pond (1899) and other gallery favourites.
The theatre steps, left, run into an adjoining hand-railed staircase in the remodelled entrance hall where the architect Hannal Lawson has replaced stone surfaces with oak and the ceilings are acoustically designed to create a calm, inviting, welcome for visitors Photograph: Ben McMillan
'About welcome'
Lawson says she has had conversations with Annabelle Selldorf, architect of the renovation and remodelling of the neighbouring Sainsbury Wing, about their shared desire to make both projects welcoming to the public, to counter threshold anxiety and give permission to every passer-by to come through the door, to visit, free, one of the world's great art collections. "We've met with Annabelle a number of times," Lawson says, "and we talked about the different approaches that we were taking and the audiences and the whole overarching banner of NG200 being about welcome. And we wanted to make sure that both buildings were doing that and how we could really be accessible for everybody; to create a new kind of permeability and accessibility for galleries."
(In a December 2024 interview with The Art Newspaper, Selldorf spoke of encouraging anyone entering the remodelled Sainsbury Wing after its reopening to "take heart" from an open, uncluttered, welcome and from being able to see straight through the immediate wayfinding points to the rest of the museum—the foot of the main staircase and the lifts.)
"We hope this place will be comfortable," Eslea says. "We've got a Changing Places toilet [for people with limited mobility] and when the Sainsbury Wing opens we'll have two. [It] will be the only museum or gallery in the country that has two and that of course makes a difference to whether you can leave your house or not and actually come to a gallery."
Stakeholder consultation
Lawson says that the project had the benefit of a three-month consultation with the centre’s stakeholders, especially the schoolchildren who will be its main users, before starting the work on site (the building work was completed in just under two years). “We visited a whole mixture of galleries, experiences, learning centres, and then we sat and talked about what [the schoolchildren and their teachers] needed; really got under the skin, talked about what they'd want people to take away as a feeling; what would be a creative space to learn in; what do adults think, what do children think, when they align. So we had a really lovely long design process, and then a quick site process, which, if you're going to do it, is the right way around to do it.”
The redesign follows the principles of the professor Stephen Heppell, who studies the optimal environmental conditions for children to learn in schools, including lighting, sound levels and air quality.
One of the most direct requests from the schoolchildren the team consulted was that the centre should not be brightly coloured. They wanted to be the ones to bring colour to the spaces through work done during their visits. This is just one of many indications at the centre that the brief was devised not for children but by them. Another is the set of wheeled timber "play boxes", filled with materials or building blocks, that are stored under the Fragment Wall. They were devised in consultation with schoolchildren, and the makers of participatory art projects Leap Then Look. The play boxes are inspired by the gallery's collection and can be pulled out into the entrance hall, and used individually or joined into pairs or groups.
“We had some great collaborators who headed local school groups that we worked with: family groups and teachers,” Lawson says. “It was really important that it wasn't just inspiring and beautiful in their eyes, it had to function. You've got to get a lot of children through here quickly so that they're not spending time just getting through the doors and sorting out their lunch packs.” The collaborators asked not to have a reception desk, but to “have a person, a host that will actually meet them, at the door, help them. So it's a kind of hosted experience". Those hosts are members of Eslea’s 11-strong team of educators who will take school groups up to the first floor and through two doors into Gallery 18—the Rubens Room—and the National Gallery collection proper. The heart of every school visit.
The main entrance to the Roden Centre (a remodelling of the 1975 north wing) with new north-facing windows (right). The architect Hannah Lawson devised the new windows to let in more light on ground and first floor, but also to advertise the creative purpose of the centre by allowing passers-by walking from Leicester Square to Trafalgar Squre the chance to see the materials and equipment used at the centre Photograph: The Art Newspaper
The double-height Clore Studio
At the far end of the first floor is the double-height Clore Studio, one of the most dramatic architectural interventions in the remodelled building. The building as Lawson found it was divided into multiple classroom-like spaces with low ceilings and poor lighting. The building was largely corridor, with only 345 sq. m of the building's 900 sq. m devoted to learning space, compared with some 600 sq. m following the remodelling.
To make the double-height first-floor studio, Lawson went to the trustees to say that she would like to take the floor plate away. "It is a really challenging thing," she says "to ask people to take space away but everyone agreed it was important for a number of reasons. The first was allowing that sense of wonder and sense of significance to coming and using this space. We heard a lot from the children and a lot from teachers that, 'We don't want to travel halfway across England or halfway across London to sit in another art studio that looks like the one in our school.' So how can you make this feel incredibly special? It was also about making sure that it was [the] highest quality environment for both adult learners and young learners. You shouldn't be learning in an art studio at the National Gallery that isn't anything but incredible."
Lawson gave the first-floor studio a new north-facing window, to provide the most favourable artist's light (the new window opening continues down to the ground floor, bringing new light into the entrance hall), but also to project, especially at night, the function of the studio to passers-by, with artist's materials stacked high on its double-height shelving. With the window, Lawson says, "comes a visual connection to audiences. So as people come from Leicester Square [on their way down to Trafalgar Square] ... this will become an incredible window to celebrate the National Gallery for a whole new audience."
The studio is also equipped with state-of-the-art "hybrid capabilities” so that creative workshops can be held on site in the Clore Studio but also live-streamed online, using high-specification cameras, to anyone in the world.
The social space and the creative space
On the second floor of the centre the principal areas are a creative space, and a large social space where schools can eat lunch, but with myriad other possible uses as any vibrations will not carry through to the galleries in the neighbouring building that house delicate historic paintings. It has a delightful serpentine fluorescent light fitting—"somewhere between Dan Flavin and a scene from [the 1984 Disney sci-fi film] Tron," as Lawson says—with adjustable levels.
The creative space, funded by the Julia Rausing Trust, does not have much daylight so, Eslea says, "we thought we'd make a virtue of that". It was really difficult in the past, she explains, for groups from special schools to visit the learning centre, "because the acoustics were so awful. So that if a special school wanted to book in the past we had to make sure we didn't book any other schools on the same day. But now the acoustics are amazing and we can book special schools to come whenever they want to come. And we asked schools, 'What would make you make that gargantuan effort to come here?'"
The project was developed in collaboration with special schools, Eslea says, including the Marjorie McClure school in Chislehurst, Kent, "and they've given us amazing ideas about equipment which we've been able to buy that they couldn't afford. So we've got something called a Soundbeam. It has a series of what look like microphones but even if you can only nod your head or wave your hand you can have an impact on the sounds that relate to that painting." The room is equipped, she adds, with "wonderful resources and equipment which enables people to explore the paintings through other senses".
A sense of play
The centre makes use of reconstituted materials for wash-up areas and benches on the upper floors. Offcuts of frame mouldings and other fragments from the conservation studio have been set in a coloured resin by the British terrazzo manufacturer Foressoto create benches of what initially appears to be stone. Only under closer inspection does the grain of the constituent wood offcuts become apparent. The pattern and colour has a subtle but immediate resonance with the Purbeck marble that Selldorf has used in a bar area in the mezzanine area of the Sainsbury Wing next door, adding to the sense of shared purpose between the two projects.
Back in the entrance hall, on the way out of the building, the visitor's eye is drawn back up to two window seats on the first-floor balcony overlooking the double-height space—what Lawson calls "two particular kinds of fragments". They appear to be inspired by details from paintings in the collection: by Duccio—The Healing of the Man born Blind Artist (around 1307-11) from the Maestà predella of Siena Cathedral—and by Pieter de Hooch—The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658). They are spaces where people can sit and read and draw, and were devised by local school children consulted by Lawson. They are places to take time out but also convey a sense of play that characterises everything that Eslea and Lawson and their teams have achieved in creating a genuine welcome for visitors to the new Roden Centre for Creative Learning.
