Smelling the coffee

It takes a person of rare optimism to turn up early for a meeting in the middle of a distant conurbation and actually feel happy to find that there is nowhere to sit down for a coffee. Tony Hall, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House (ROH), is one such. Arriving at Purfleet station to discuss the ROH’s potential move to Thurrock in the Thames Gateway area, he realised that there were no coffee shops, and indeed no shops at all within walking distance. He says his first thought was “this is fantastic”. Perhaps optimism – seeing an opportunity where others might see a wasteland – had to be the default setting for an organisation which was about to be kicked out of the East End, where the ROH’s workshops and rehearsal spaces are among the casualties of the Olympic Park. Finding a new site was a necessity, but a telephone conversation with Andrea Stark, Chief Executive of Arts Council England, East (ACEE) turned it into a virtue. “She was saying, do you know of any projects we could move into Thames Gateway which might be iconic and give a sense of purpose,” Hall explains. “I said, what about our workshops, and it took off from there.”

Room with a view
The project is supported by a partnership between Thurrock and Thames Gateway Development Corporation, the East of England Development Agency and Thurrock Council, and was announced at the Thames Gateway annual fair. Hall relates how one of the local councillors came up to him and said, “This is like John Lewis’s coming to town – it‘s making a hell of a big difference to the way we see ourselves”. Hall’s vision for the site, which overlooks the point where the M25 meets the Thames and is bordered by the high speed line to Paris and Brussels, stems in part from his upbringing in Merseyside. He remembers visitors being proudly shown round the local stately homes and museums with a sense of “real local pride”, and wants to create something like that in Thurrock. He’s also motivated by the sheer unexpectedness of the idea. “It’s the very last thing you would expect the ROH to do, you know – away from the centre of London Covent Garden, all the hustle and bustle and the wealth… to Purfleet, where, to be blunt, there ain’t much culturally.”
This contribution to local regeneration comes with a new state-of-the-art building, boasting the highest ecological standards – including a sedum roof and eco water systems – and world-class technical facilities. Hall will also be swapping a “not very prepossessing site” in Bow with one which includes Grade II listed buildings and a garden “which has disappeared, overgrown, but which we’d love to restore”. Cheekily, he adds, “I have to say it would be a brilliant transformation programme for TV”. The old facilities meant painting backdrops on the floor: the new building will have a proper paint frame. The old site was cramped, with little room to manoeuvre: the new will have workshops and space for small- and medium-sized enterprises that will supply the ROH with metal-working, fibreglass modelling and other techniques essential to modern stagecraft. Eventually, the ROH archives, including not just papers but also costumes and sets, will be moved there and should also be accessible for the public to visit.
Education and skills
A new education space will soon appear – a member of staff is already in place to run education and community projects in the area. “We’ve had on two separate occasions a thousand families from Thurrock come to family day performances here, and work from Thurrock schools in the Hamlyn Hall,” he enthuses. “We’ve been doing a lot of work in schools in Thurrock, culminating in a big production called ‘Sun and Heir’, which is a sort of community project involving music, dance, acting.” He is frustrated, though, at the lack of attention that such projects receive. “We’re working in quite a big way briefing local MPs, councillors, people who are interested, because you then get more links and the whole thing begins to snowball.” He also feels that the local dimension is crucial: to create an organisation with the same values as the ROH, “but also a sort of independent culture which reflects what people in Thurrock would like out of a national institution”. His approach is to try to work with the community to add to what it can do, rather than offer a pre-packaged deal.
It is not only education, but training which has a significant place the project. Hall is Chair of Creative and Cultural Skills, the Sector Skills Council for the creative industries. “A group of us are pushing for the Skills Academy [the proposed training organisation for the sector], and the hub will be alongside our workshops in Thurrock. You’ll have what they are calling the ROH Production Park, but will also be a centre for training and skills in the whole of the sector, and also music and the performing arts… it becomes a very, very big working park, but with a strong skills base too.” The ROH already has five apprentices, and one of them, Ian Cowie, a scenic apprentice, has just been awarded the Apprentice of the Year by the Building Crafts College.
Wowing the world
It’s clear that the Opera House is getting something out of these developments too. It is carving itself a new profile as a national, and indeed international beacon for artistic and technical excellence, and surely gaining brownie points from politicians local and national for extending itself geographically as well as developing its training and community work. As Hall wryly says, “you want to involve as many different people as you can, especially if you’re given a grant of our size”. Its recently announced move to create a performing presence in Manchester is another symptom of this. Hall says he wants to “wow the world”, but also to show that “you can regenerate or even generate communities through what you do backstage as well as what you do on the stage”. He waxes lyrical. “You and I know, when you come and see a performance, you leave changed, and you hope people will be as passionate as you are and I am about opera and ballet. But if we can get to people through stagecraft, through design, through sets – all the things that go into making theatre – then I think that would be a fantastic legacy.” More prosaically, perhaps all this means that one day there will be a coffee shop at Purfleet station.