Outside Artland
Annabel Rivkin reports on a new hip, happening gallery in Soho Over the past few months, a building on the wrong side of Soho has been discreetly reinventing itself by virtue of the personalities who have begun to inhabit it. The graffiti artist Banksy — every Londoner feels that they ‘own’ their local Banksy has leased one floor of the large, white, double-fronted building that sits opposite the guitar-led mysteries of Tin Pan Alley.
On the floor below, the eradefining photographer Rankin has planned a six-month rotation of exhibitions to showcase various aspects of his work. Next door, Clare de Roen (lately of Zwemmer), has installed her intricately sourced and beautifully edited art and photography bookshop in a nook behind the staircase. Johnny Sarpong, the hairdresser who grooms sirens such as Sienna Miller and Brad Pitt, has carved out a closed-off styling studio for himself. Downstairs, David de Rothschild, the youngest Briton ever to reach both geographical poles, has set up a space in which to show environmentally aware artists and equipped another area in which his educational brainchild, Adventure Ecology, can seek to turn the minds of the young towards the plight of the planet. In the basement lies Soho Books, one of a chain of licensed sex shops. Naturally, somewhere amid this display of contrasts, there is a bar.
In the mid-1990s he became a restaurateur and had considerable success. Randall & Aubin on Brewer Street came first, followed by a larger, sloanier sister establishment on Fulham Road. He owns the Ifield, a gastropub in Chelsea, and recently sold another one, in Belsize Park, to the Australian Pan-Asian food professional Will Ricker.
Jamie’s father (formally owner of most of Soho’s sex cinemas and still proprietor of the 13 Soho bookshops which sell conventional reading on the ground floor and spicier stuff below) bought The Gallery building with a view to opening a sex department store. But Banksy’s management approached Jamie through a mutual connection with the popular erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, who was killed by a train earlier this year. The graffiti artist was no doubt attracted by the pareddown, urban feel that the gutted space retains, and hired the building for his Christmas party. Evidently the party was a success: he never left.
Jamie wrestled the vision for the space away from porn and towards painting, and started to put on exhibitions for Peter Blake, Olli and Suzi, and Abigail Lane amongst others. It says something for his charisma that these established artists were prepared to show outside Artland and in an untested gallery. ‘The space had guts and I wanted to keep those guts,’ says Jamie. ‘And as we looked at it, it began to evolve. When I first saw the building I had an instinct that it should be a raw, interesting space. But I don’t want to sell it as cool; I want it to become cool. The first coup was Clare de Roen, who’s been here since we opened.’ It was through Patrick Cox that Jamie met Rankin, who was shooting a campaign for the footwear designer. The photographer is happy to be part of this odd co-operative. ‘I chose this gallery knowing that I would be part of a creative, energetic space, each component on the one hand complementing the others and, on the other, jarring slightly. I respect what Banksy is doing; I will be working alongside one of the best photographic bookshops in the UK and a lot of my work is not shy of incorporating a sexual element — so, in that way, exhibiting above a sex shop makes sense.’ David de Rothschild is also cheered by the street feel of the project. ‘We are trying to create a movement so that when people think of environmentalists, they don’t think of beardy weirdies in cords,’ says the hirsute explorer. ‘Banksy uses images to get people to think outside their box and I want to do that for ecology.’ Combine the avant-garde gloss of Dover Street market and the brashness of the Old Kent Road market and you have The Gallery. It’s a funny fit: part filth, part gloss. ‘All the people who go to the Serpentine and look all snazzy might come in a couple of years,’ says Poulton. ‘But I’m not trying to draw in a bunch of society-arty-partygoers. If I walked into the bar and they were there, I’d worry that I’d done something really wrong.’ The Gallery, 121–125 Charing Cross Road, London WC2 Tel: 020 7930 8069
Previous page
