Sophie Farrah meets Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Riverside Studios, William Burdett-Coutts, to hear more about the return of Hammersmith’s iconic arts venue...
For William Burdett-Coutts, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios, life has always revolved around the iconic arts venue in one way or another.
“When I was working up in Edinburgh at the Festival in the early 80s, we used to share shows with Riverside, and before that, I actually lived on a barge moored outside The Dove in Hammersmith, very near Riverside! So I’ve known it pretty much all my life” he explains.
In 1993, after a stint as Head of Arts at Granada Television, William found himself returning to that very same stretch of the river once more, this time to actually join the ranks at Riverside. In 2014, the venue closed for complete redevelopment and now, 5 years on, it’s finally ready to show off its brand-new multi-million-pound building, which is part of the new Queen’s Wharf residential development.
“For years, I would walk over Hammersmith Bridge on my way home to Barnes and look back at the old derelict Queens Wharf building and think; ‘the view from there would be magnificent’ - and now we’ve got it!” William smiles.
“But the old building had a very special atmosphere. It’s one of those intangible things – you can’t quite put your finger on it, but people really loved it. I think it was the magic of all the different things it had done, and the legacy of all the different people that had worked there. That was almost the hardest thing in terms of creating the new building – could we retain something of that feeling?”
The former Victorian iron foundry was first converted into a film studio in 1933, which produced classics such as Father Brown with Alec Guinness and The Seventh Veil with James Mason. In 1954, the studio was acquired by BBC Television and became home to programmes such as Hancock’s Half Hour, Blue Peter, and Doctor Who, before becoming local community arts centre, Riverside Studios in 1978.
For decades, the Studios brought the world to West London with a programme of theatre, dance, television, comedy, music and art; just some of the names to have appeared there include Helen Mirren, Tadeusz Kantor, David Bowie, Prince, Van Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Vanessa Redgrave, Antony Gormley, Alan Rickman, Benjamin Zephaniah, Allen Ginsberg, David Hockney and more. In 1996, television production also returned to the building, with the likes of TFI Friday, CD: UK, The Last Leg and Never Mind the Buzzcocks all recorded there.
“Whilst we’re a cleaner and better version of what was there before, I think we’ve still got something of that atmosphere” explains William.
“The new building is basically all the best bits from the past, put together in a nice new wrapper!”
Inside, there are multiple performances, rehearsal and broadcast spaces which will be unveiled in phases; Studio 1 (Riverside’s flagship television studio), the Studio 8 Café and Bar, the large, river-facing foyer, and Sam’s Riverside (a new high-end brasserie by local restaurateur Sam Harrison) are already open.
This month sees the launch of a new state of the art cinema, along with Studio 3 and its inaugural production, Persona (Jan 21 – Feb 23); a theatrical adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic film, starring Alice Krige and Nobuhle Ketelo. This will be followed by Love, Loss & Chianti (Feb 25-May 17) starring Robert Bathurst and Rebecca Johnson and in March, Studio 2 is due to open; a flexible performance space with up to 500 seats.
“We want to do work that is very accessible but also has a degree of ‘edge’ to it, and we want it to be artist-led - I like the notion that we are driven by peoples’ passion” William explains.
“We’re not a single genre building - the nature of the place is that we can do anything. We have very adaptable black box spaces which can be anything that your imagination wants them to be really. I don’t want it to be like The Lyric or The Bush, I want it to have its own kind of feel, so at all levels, we are trying to make the place somewhere unique, with its own identity. ‘Independent’ is the word.”
Another distinctive feature of the new building is that all the performance areas are digitally enabled and connected to a central control room, making it possible to either record or transmit live work from the building to a global audience, helping Riverside to achieve its fundamental ambition of making high-quality arts accessible to all.
Today, Riverside Studios is run by the Riverside Trust, a charitable entity. The organisation is not publicly funded and operates on a model that uses commercial revenue to support its charitable objectives.
“The most important thing for me is making what we do more accessible to the public” explains William.
“I want to make Riverside a very serious producing venue that is devoted to the work that goes on in it, and I’d like to see us build up our relationship with the local community - we want to be a home to a lot of people that live around us.”
