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Fortune favours the bold

Bold Tendencies has welcomed almost a million visitors to the upper levels of Rye Lane’s multi-storey car park since it began in 2007. We meet director Hannah Barry as the commissioning project’s 10th season gets underway

Words: Emma Finamore

Talk to anyone unfamiliar with Peckham – especially those north of the river – and if there’s just one place they’ve heard of here, the chances are it’s Frank’s Café, famous for its ice cold Campari cocktails and one of the best views in London.

Frank’s is part of Bold Tendencies, a not-for-profit commissioning project that was founded in 2007. This year will be its 10th season – and the brains behind it all is Peckham-based gallerist Hannah Barry.

The folders lining the shelves on the wall behind Hannah, who is sitting opposite me in her eponymous gallery just off Rye Lane, serve as a physical reminder of how central she has been to the art scene here over the last decade.

One file is labelled Bold Tendencies 2010 Artistic Programme, some feature the names of Hannah Barry Gallery artists such as Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq and James Balmforth, while others bear more mundane markings: Bold Tendencies VAT returns.

Hannah first came to Peckham as a young art history graduate following a chance encounter with artist Shaun McDowell, who invited her to an exhibition he organised at Sassoon Gallery.

“No one had ever said to me, ‘Come and see a show in Peckham’ before,” she says, recalling the first time she set foot in SE15. “It was also the first time I’d met an artist of my own generation.”

Arriving in Peckham in January 2006, she quickly discovered the thriving community of artists living and working here. “That was it,” she remembers. “I just didn’t stop coming back to Peckham.”

This community centred around 78 Lyndhurst Way, where painter Bobby Dowler acted as a caretaker for the owner, preventing squatters from moving in.

Dowler split the house up into studios, and the artists living and working there held numerous shows with Hannah’s help. “There were lots of people just making art in the house – I had never seen anything like it,” Hannah says.

“I definitely hadn’t been welcomed into a situation like that before; I found it very exhilarating and exciting. I don’t want to romanticise it because it really wasn’t a romantic time, but it was certainly one of the only periods I’ve felt completely free.”

The first exhibition in November 2006 was entitled 10 Rooms and a Sculpture Garden and more than 50 young artists went on to exhibit there. Hannah would work during the week at her post-university PR job and visit Lyndhurst Way at the weekends.

Even though she was never an official resident, she may as well have been. The house is imprinted on her memory and she can still describe the layout of the building, and the size of the rooms, like it was yesterday.

Hannah shows me photos of the artists who lived and worked at the address and pictures of the tiny sculpture garden, as well as a book she made about the house, commissioning friends to write essays on the shows that took place.

At one point she disappears into a back room and returns with yet more bundles of folders, along with notebooks full of to-do lists and inventories of artists for various Lyndhurst Way exhibitions.

There’s the tenancy agreement between Dowler and the property’s owner; and the budget for a November 2007 dinner held at the Bussey Building to celebrate the Lyndhurst Way artists, along with the invite and a table plan.

There are notes from Harriet Harman on House of Commons letterhead addressed to 78 Lyndhurst Way and the Bussey Building, letters from Hannah to Sir Norman Rosenthal (curator and art historian), and even a receipt for £8 from Khan’s Bargains.

Hannah looks a bit bewildered as we sift through the piles of papers. “It was so intense,” she says of those early years in Peckham. “It all feels so far away now, even though really it’s not so long ago. It was all a big effort, it really was.”

Out of all this work came the Hannah Barry Gallery, which she launched in January 2008 at the Bussey Building. “It’s probably a yoga studio now,” Hannah muses. “It’s strange to talk about, because I haven’t thought about it all in such a long time.”

The space was large but there was limited room to hang artworks, so Hannah moved to what is now the Copeland Gallery later that year and then to her current site, a former meat and fish market on Holly Grove, in 2013.

Running alongside all this was Bold Tendencies. The first exhibition in 2007, Bold Tendencies 1, was actually the final Lyndhurst Way show. It was held on the rooftop of Sumner House, a school building turned council office in north Peckham.

Rather than letting the Sumner House show be a one-off, Hannah had an idea for an annual sculpture event, and a contact at Southwark Council would sometimes show her interesting spaces and buildings.

This is how she first came across the car park rooftop. “The top floor was shut and cars didn’t even go up there,” she says. “After Sumner House I was interested in roof spaces – the view, the sense of green space and of the sky above.”

Bold Tendencies had one show there in 2008 without Frank’s. Then Hannah started thinking about the possibility of a café and enlisted the help of an architect friend Paloma [Gormley, daughter of sculptor Anthony Gormley] to design the structure.

One of the designers working with Paloma, Lettice Drake, had a mate working at the Anchor and Hope pub in Waterloo, and Hannah invited him to run the Bold Tendencies café. His name? Frank.

Frank’s Café was built in 25 days with the help of volunteers on a budget of £5,000, and opened in 2009. Since then the café, and Bold Tendencies as a whole, has morphed into something much bigger than its origins.

In 2011 the award-winning Multi-Story Orchestra took up residence in the car park and plays annual summer concerts. The symphony orchestra is made up of young professional musicians committed to widening access to classical music.

Multi-Story picked up the audience engagement prize at the Royal Philharmonic Society music awards in May for its “ingenuity, simplicity and impact in the local community”. This year it’ll be making its BBC Proms debut in the car park.

Bold Tendencies also offers a Bold Kids programme, tailored school visits and projects, the Art Trainee programme, and Bold View, a rolling programme of commissions to young illustrators.

Speaking of the event’s cyclical nature, Hannah says: “I like the idea of exercising a principle of permanence in an impermanent situation. Why should you honour something less just because it’s temporary?

“It’s like having a flat on a lease and deciding not to paint the floor because you’re moving out soon, or just letting the bathroom get really shitty, when it’s still every single day you’ve got to deal with it. Life is more beautiful if you make it like that for yourself.”

The new Peckham Levels scheme on floors one to six of the car park has secured a lease from Southwark Council for five years, starting in October 2016, and when that comes to an end, the car park is likely to be redeveloped.

Hannah says this has allowed her to consider the site as a public space. “The way we’re trying to think about it, now we’ve got a finite amount of time, is how we can help it best serve a civic function, as well as putting incredible works of art into it.”

The vast silver floor installation by sculptor Richard Wentworth is staying, she says, as is the Derek Jarman garden, while new commissions include a work by Adel Abdessemed.

This year Bold Tendencies has a new entrance next to Peckhamplex, which features a single artwork by Simon Whybray called hi boo i love you. The artist has painted the entire staircase, walls and ceilings bubblegum pink.

“It’s an accumulative approach, rather than an in-and-out project,” Hannah says of the exhibition. “In London you have to think constantly about how to create a unique experience and opportunity for people.

“The principle of commissioning was something we were interested in right from the start. Even the structure of Frank’s was an architectural commission. Everything we do, we try and commission – design, architecture, visual art, poetry – everything.”

Every year in October the team starts planning for the next summer, and Hannah says she still feels as involved with it now as she did when it first started. She also remains refreshingly un-snobby about it as a visitor attraction.

“I don’t think it matters why people come,” she says. “If they come for the view and a drink, maybe they’re surprised to see a work of art, or they buy a ticket for a concert they didn’t know was happening, or vice versa – they might come to see a classical concert and not realise there’s a great restaurant there.

“I think it proves a point about London too. The project represents, without sounding too communist, the will of many different people. Things don’t survive for 10 years unless a certain number of people will them to do so.

“It’s not about the whim of the council or fundraising – it’s about the robustness and resilience of the organisation, and the determination of Bold Tendencies and Frank’s together, to be better. I think all the time about that – how to make progress.”

Hannah speaks about how until very recently everyone (including herself) was working for free on the project, and the sacrifices they made to create Bold Tendencies and drive it forward.

“It’s sort of got its own life, and that’s great,” she says. “So many people – hundreds of people – have been part of it happening, and that’s a joyful thing.”

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Bold Tendencies and Frank’s Café are open Tuesday to Friday from 5-11pm and weekends from 11am-11pm until October 1. For the full programme of events, go to boldtendencies.com

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Bold Tendencies has announced the dates of its 10th summer in the Peckham multi-storey car park

#Peckham #Hannah Barry #franks bar