The
New Look South Bank Centre, London
SE1
Festival
Riverside is the first phase of this
important redevelopment
Concert
goers to The Royal Festival Hall
have certainly noticed it, commuters
scurrying home across the
Jubilee Footbridge have watched
with mounting
interest, even tourists on their
way to that South bank landmark The
London Eye can't have missed
the buzzing new Festival Riverside,
with its teeming cafés, bars and
restaurants. The timing of
its opening couldn't have been
better, showing how universal is
London's
continuing redevelopment, and not
just for the Olympics of 2012.
The
old service road at the front of
the concert hall (or was it the back?)
has gone, to make room for an elegant
flight of steps made of black Chinese
granite. Acacia trees and newly planted
grassy areas soften the edges, and
the new space is there to encourage
street performers to present music,
poetry, dance and the visual arts.
Meanwhile
the main concert hall itself has
closed
for its most extensive
refurbishment since it opened
as the centrepiece of the 1951
Festival of Britain. Audiences
were invited to try out the new seating, and believe me it looks set
for a real improvement, as the old
seats
were rather like those of a cut
price airline
in terms of lack of legroom. The main hall doesn't reopen until early
2007, but symphony concerts will
continue in the smaller Queen Elizabeth
Hall
next
door. In a way this pause will give the fine new Cadogan Hall in Chelsea
a chance to establish itself as
a major medium size concert venue.
The
new Festival Riverside area is also
a great place for refuelling the
body as well as the mind. Nicholas
Lander, the restaurant critic of
the FT has led a team that has attracted
some of the better quality restaurant
chains to the area, such as Giraffe,
Wagamamma and Strada. EAT, is already
well known to concert goers, who
really go for their hearty home made
soups and delicious cakes. On
the Belvedere Road side of the Hall,
Festival Square Café will continue
to provide excellent cooking (we
reviewed this bar-restaurant favourably
last year).
One
of the features of the old hall was
that the foyers remained open all
day so record collectors, CD and
book buyers could drop in at any
time. Festival Riverside has now
gone even further, with the first
ever branch of the world's most famous
bookshop, Foyle's, outside
the Charing Cross Road. For music
enthusiasts there's the new MDC
Music and Movies store, whose
stock promises to relate to the artistic
events being staged in the complex.
As
primarily a restaurant review ezine,
however, Dine Online can't
wait to see what will happen to the People's
Palace, which was the fine dining
restaurant in the concert hall. It
was one of the very first restaurants
we reviewed back in 1996. I still
remember the confit belly of pork
with lingering affection! Perhaps
we'll celebrate our tenth birthday
there when it or its successor reopens.
Related
venues and attractions:
The
Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell
Room www.rfh.org.uk
The
National Theatre www.nt-online.org
The
National Film Theatre www.nft.org.uk and
the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI)
Festival Square www.dine-online.co.uk/festival.htm and
Jubilee Gardens
County Hall, Saatchi Gallery: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/ and
the London Aquarium www.londonaquarium.co.uk/
The London Eye www.londoneye.com/
The Old Vic Theatre www.oldvictheatre.co.uk/
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