You can’t really miss it. “Peter’s Box”, as the locals call the new Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, after Peter Box, the Labour leader of the borough council, sits uncompromisingly on the south bank of the River Calder, a work of art as original as the sculptor whose work it houses.
Designed by architect Sir David Chipperfield, it is the most exciting art museum to have opened for many a year, but it would probably never have happened without a concerted political campaign that just beat the Con-Dem cuts. It cost £35 million, not a king’s ransom in public spending terms. For that, the taxpayer gets the largest purpose-built gallery built in Britain for half a century with 5,000 square metres of space.
The money came from the Labour-controlled council, the Arts Council, the Hepworth Estate, the Heritage Lottery Fund, and from Europe and Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency now in the throes of dissolution by the Tories. When Jeremy Hunt, the Conservatives’ answer to Hermann Goering, became Culture Secretary, the project was too far advanced to cancel. The result is a triumph, although not everyone agrees. “A fucking waste of money”, fulminated the angry man in the baseball hat in the Black Rock pub.
You can’t please all the people all the time and the grey-box Hepworth is certainly a challenge. A popular challenge, thankfully. Over the first weekend, more than 15,000 people queued to get in. On the day I went, it was thronged with visitors. A free bus takes you there from the city centre and entry is free, so its popularity may have something to do with Tyke thrift.
There are 10 galleries on the first floor, with five devoted to the work of Wakefield-born sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her artistic context (notably Henry Moore, a contemporary born in Castleford, one of the borough’s “five towns”) and the St Ives years. The daughter of a council surveyor, Hepworth travelled the West Riding with him at work and the landscape imbued her with ideas of art. “The hills were sculptures, the roads defined the forms”, she later wrote. The “concavities, hollows and peaks” inform her work – intriguingly, as you can gather from the sometimes-bemused looks on the faces of visitors. This is Yorkshire “as primitive man saw it”, she asserts.
There is much here for cultured man. Besides major work by Hepworth, the gallery also exhibits Piet Mondrian, John Piper, John Passmore, Paul Nash and Roger Fry, pictures from the Camden Group and statues by Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. And perhaps my favourite, an exhibition of two dozens paintings and drawings of Wakefield’s Chantry Bridge, housed in a gallery with a floor-to-ceiling window looking across the river to the much-begrimed 14th century chapel of St Mary the Virgin, rebuilt in Victorian times by George Gilbert Scott. This is a sight not to be missed.
It’s easy to scoff at municipal culturalism, as the late Peter Simple did with his satirical Alderman Jabez Foodbotham, chairman of Stretchley’s Fine Arts and Tramways Committee. But the city elders of Wakefield have been collecting art since the 1930s, not with much money, but with a discerning eye.They were helped by a succession of imaginative curators, and the tradition continues with loans from other galleries and a recreation of Hepworth’s studio with her own tools and materials.
Outside, on the banks of the Calder, there is a garden with public sculpture, and across the river, over a new pedestrian bridge neither wibbly nor wobbly, is a cluttered boatyard that looks as if it’s an extension of the artistic experience. I noticed that rhubarb has been planted by the pool below the weir, a humorous acknowledgement of the city’s position at the centre of Yorkshire’s “rhubarb triangle”.
Among the display cases is a copy of the Daily Mirror dating from August 1963, about the first Henry Moore exhibition in his own county. “It’s pulling in the customers almost as fast as bingo”, my paper reported breathlessly. However, only 400 people turned up to see the £120,000 show. The gallery cleaner offered: “I wouldn’t like to criticise, really, but I wouldn’t give some of the big ones house room.” That she would be so fortunate to have a house large enough to give Moore a room.
The gallery is where it starts, not where it ends. It’s part of a £100 million project, Waterfront Wakefield, transforming a derelict and inaccessible area into a conservation neighbourhood with homes, offices and leisure facilities. Old mill buildings and the 18th century stone Navigation Warehouse are being restored. Wakefield was slower off the mark than Leeds to exploit its situation by the river and the headwaters of the Calder and Hebble Navigation Canal, but the commercial impetus is gathering pace.
All this, plus a new central retail development and a £140 million mixed residential and business quarter, Merchant Gate by Westgate station where London trains depart, has been achieved by a Labour council determined to make something of its city.
They didn’t need a directly-elected mayor and don’t particularly want one, but in all likelihood will have one foisted on them by renegade Tory Tyke Eric Pickles, the Bradford boy who had to go all the way to Essex to find a seat.
Con-Dem bosses always accuse Labour of “interference” from Whitehall, but the dawning reality is that they are the real intruders, bossing local people about. “Power to the people” may be their slogan, but “power to our people” is their real aim.
