About Us
Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is a national flagship cultural institution.
It is Europe’s largest arts centre and one of the UK’s top five visitor attractions, occupying an 11-acre site that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames.
Its impact and reach are significant and it is respected internationally as a convener of great artists and diverse audiences and for being entrepreneurial and innovative in response to a volatile and changing financial landscape.
Southbank Centre is a charity that is determined to demonstrate its ambition to remain innovative, disruptive and experimental in what it does and to be highly relevant to the artists it wants to work with and to the audiences it wants to attract.
Southbank Centre believes that a commitment to diversity and inclusion helps it be a more relevant and effective organisation.
Our Artistic Mission
Southbank Centre exists to provide great artistic experiences for everyone. Through art, we invite our visitors to enjoy shared cultural encounters together. To gaze. To listen. To be moved. To discover a new idea or a new perspective.
We are proud that for the last 69 years, the performances and exhibitions here have moved millions. We have provided a home for art and for artists. A community centred on art, where everyone, no matter their job, helps make the experience.
We create a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual, entertaining and eye-opening work.
We want to take people out of the everyday, every day.
Artistic Programme and Venues
The Southbank Centre site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery, as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to four Resident Orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and four Associate Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain). We have partnered with a number of associate performing arts companies and individual artists.
Post pandemic, we aim to present work in all our venues, as well as across our site in all our outdoor spaces, from Weds-Sun every week of the year.
We present annually returning Festivals, including Imagine, Meltdown, Women of the World, Summer and Winter.
We have a wide-ranging Spoken Word programme and present the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival every Autumn. We also host world-class talks events throughout the year for example, with Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Margaret Atwood, Bernadine Evaristo, the TS Eliot Prize and the pre-Booker Prize readings. We present poetry performance on our stages including our monthly Outspoken events, as well as poetry evenings in the National Poetry Library.
We present a world-class classical music season and collaborate with all our orchestras to provide a diverse programme which embraces composers and artists of colour. In conversation with our partners, we are continually exploring new ways of presenting classical music and finding new audiences for it.
Our year-round contemporary music programme spans a range of well-known headline acts, including our artist-curated festival, Meltdown, to providing a platform for new talent through our Futuretense events in partnership with BBC Music.
Our performing arts programme embraces work ranging from Shobana Jeysingh and Akram Khan to our longer-running Christmas RFH shows like Circus 1903.
Our Public Programming team provide free activity and events throughout our buildings as well as on our outdoor summer stage every weekend from July-Sept, and our Creative Learning team presents work for schools – for example, our Art Explorers programme in the Hayward Gallery – as well as instigating projects like Art by Post during the pandemic, to aid the 22% of people who do not have access to a computer and cannot benefit from online art and cultural activities.
Southbank Centre Board
The Southbank Centre Board is the governing body or non-executive Board of Southbank Centre. Governors are also the trustees of the charity. The Chair and Governors are selected by the Board and recommended to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport for approval, after consultation with Arts Council England. The Artistic Director will have a regular and supportive interaction with the Southbank Centre Board.