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When the doors closed on two art shows in the Sussex town of Lewes last weekend, a record number of people had crossed the threshold of Southover House to look at works by Picasso and Grayson Perry.
For 18 months, the former council office building has housed a pop-up outpost of Charleston, the former home of key members of the Bloomsbury group, which is nearby in the village of Firle.
But despite its popularity over half-term, Lewes’s new Charleston site is at risk. District councillors are to decide on Thursday whether to pull the plug or extend the lease on the site for another 25 years. A fresh lease would allow for a collaboration with three prestigious cultural institutions; the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate.
While many who live in Lewes and the surrounding area at the foot of the South Downs hope that Charleston wins the day, members of a vociferous local campaign group are dismayed to see a council property given over to what one told the Observer he regards as an old-fashioned “legacy”, or establishment, arts organisation.
Other protesters have argued that the site should be given instead to the NHS, or to a youth organisation – or perhaps used to create much-needed housing.
A few angry fly posters have encouraged local people to rise up and “Evict the Charleston Scroungers”, urging the council to give health professionals the keys to Southover House, which they claim has “inexplicably been given to a group of undeserving conceptual artists”.
Nathaniel Hepburn, Charleston’s director, knows that some will be against a longer lease but said he hopes the district council will see the risk of ending the self-funded cultural project after “an amazingly successful first 18 months”.
The leader of the Green-led Lewes district council, Zoe Nicholson, is a fan. “It’s done a fantastic amount, but one of the most important things to me is the amazing job they’ve done of exposing our young people to what the arts can be, especially when the government funding for this area has dropped away,” she said. “As a small local authority, we would be doing something that really makes a difference, without any grant funding or national funding and yet with some great partnerships.”
Charleston, the historic home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, took over the 23,000 sq metre site when the district council offices moved to Newhaven.
Within a few months, at a cost of less than £1m – raised largely from local donations – it set up a venue that now attracts about 2,000 visitors a week and runs an educational partnership with the neighbouring further education college.
While it receives no public subsidy, almost half its visitors enter for free, or on concessionary tickets, due to a monthly “pay what you can” scheme.
At the heart of the row is the popular image of the Bloomsbury group as an entitled cluster of indolent aesthetes. In fact, although largely well-born and London-raised, Grant, Bell and their frequent visitors, Roger Fry and Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, had all turned their backs on respectable society and material comfort to pursue art, learning and their radical theories in peace.
Woolf was anti-authority and evangelised for public access to books and art, once writing: “To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.”
Nicholson said the factors being weighed in the renewal decision are the likely benefits to the town’s economy and the work planned to make the site accessible to low-income families. “We don’t want to sell off our assets if we don’t have to,” she added.
“If we can do something for the public good, we will try to protect it in perpetuity. I’ve heard people asking why this shouldn’t be a place for our youth or perhaps new council houses. They are good questions, but we looked at converting it into housing – and we’d have to spend a lot to make it acceptable. Anyway, we are doing that in other places.”
A new health centre, she added, is also planned in the area.
Charleston, close to the home of Woolf and her husband, Leonard, was once a centre for discussion and creativity in the 1920s and 30s and is now the custodian of the Bloomsbury collection of art. Among its portraits is one of another regular guest, the philosopher and economist John Maynard Keynes, currently on loan to Sotheby’s.
“When Keynes was conceiving what later became the Arts Council, he lived at Charleston and then at nearby Tilton,” said Hepburn. “He was thinking of towns like Lewes when he wrote: ‘Certainly, in every blitzed town in this country one hopes that the local authority will make provision for a central group of buildings for drama and music and art. There could be no better memorial of a war to save the freedom of the spirit of the individual.’ Now, more than 80 years later, the new arts centre he dreamed of might be about to happen.”
A plan to develop the site as the National Bloomsbury Gallery, agreed with directors of the three national museums, would see large Bloomsbury group collections being taken out of London storage for display. Hepburn might well use Woolf’s own words this week when he tries to persuade Lewes to secure a building he argues will bring treasure to their doorstep. “Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having,” Woolf wrote.
