Can architecture and culture revive coastal towns and make a difference as society gets older? The Towner Gallery has been transforming Eastbourne since 2009 and still has moves to make. Story by Herbert Wright
The developing story of the Towner Gallery tells us a lot about Eastbourne, a town of 100,000 nestled beside the chalk hills of the South Downs on England’s South Coast. In 2009 Towner relaunched in a new building that would alter Eastbourne’s destiny, and now it has the green light to open a new dimension to its future. This story is driven not just by art but by architecture. But first, what’s the backstory of Eastbourne?
After King George III’s children holidayed in Eastbourne in 1780, the village became a health spa and the bourgeoisie came to frolic by the sea. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that a sea wall was built, and soon elegant white stucco terraces with sea views spread above the Grand Promenade. The magnificent 300m-long Eastbourne Pier opened in 1872, with buildings topped by whimsical golden cupolas, possibly influenced by Mughal domes which architect-engineer Eugenius Birch saw in India. (Nowadays, a sign at the entrance says Sheik’s Pier, which sounds like Shakespeare, because it’s owned by Indian-born local hotelier Sheikh Abid Gulzar). In the nineteenth century, the working classes also discovered Eastbourne, bringing mass tourism. They arrived at a handsome Eastbourne Station, rebuilt in 1886 to FD Brick’s design with a brick campanile-like clocktower. The Pier marked the class frontier for visitors – sophisticates to the south-west, the masses to the north-east. The divide is still there, with affluent, quiet streets and private schools on one side, low-rent housing and streets recently energised with ethnic diversity on the other.
When Mediterranean package holidays were invented in the 1960s, big-volume tourism drained away from more northern seaside resorts. Eastbourne became a retirement destination. There’s many more walking sticks, mobility scooters and Zimmer frames on the streets than you’d find in cities like vibrant Brighton 30 km to the west (which feels like a detached London borough) or hipster-friendly Hastings 20 km to the east. In fact, three quarters of Eastbourne’s population is still under 65 years old.
Nevertheless, the town’s reputation as ‘God’s Waiting Room’ screamed for a reboot. That started when the town’s art gallery, the Towner, closed in 2005, re-opened in 2009.
The new landmark building, connected to the big modernist showcase Congress Theatre (by Bryan and Norman Westwood, 1963) next door, was designed by London-based American architect Rick Mather. The compact concrete structure has upstairs galleries entered from passages ending in two-storey vertical windows, and a restaurant at the top has a balcony looking west towards the South Downs. The building’s almost-square footprint is cut on the south-west corner to create a curving diagonal facade incised by seemingly random rectangular openings and above, the restaurant’s canopy cantilevering out. This white facade created a cool, refined look with an echo of seaside art deco and a hint of le Corbusier’s Ronchamp.
The architecture got national attention, and Eastbourne had a venue that could host headline art shows to lure the cultural elite. It was ahead of the curve in the coastal contemporary culture game — Margate’s white glass-clad Turner Contemporary, by David Chipperfield, came later in 2011, then Hasting’s black-tiled Jerwood Gallery (designed by Hana Loftus and Tom Grieves, 2012), since re-named the Hastings Contemporary. Young creatives priced out by London had already settled in those hipster-friendly towns, and they have an ecosystem of artists, studios and small galleries. Niamh Pierce, Towner’s deputy director, concedes that Eastbourne is not like that, but it’s ‘a more nuanced place. The (permanent) collection gives us depth’. As for artists, she concedes ‘there is a lack of space… artists are here, but invisible’. And independent from the Towner, the local Devonshire Collective is bringing new art into the town, for example in empty retail premises.
The Towner’s ground floor was transformed just five years later by Manalo and White. The original lobby, as Pierce recalls, had ‘large empty spaces, an awkward L shape and bad acoustics’. When she mentions the modernist leather sofas, it sounds like a Mies van der Rohe office lobby, and in fact it effectively extended the Congress building, to which it connected. The revamp brought two new flexible gallery spaces, and opening the café up. Glass brought transparency, colour brought warmth and green curtains improved acoustics., Upstairs, they revamping the restaurant, and everywhere brought warm colours. The Towner’s original cool monochromatic aesthetic was further blasted away in 2019 by a dynamic, joyful mural of radiating colours by German artist Lothar Götz across the curving facade, called Dance Diagonal. Mather’s apertures for a vertical window and the lift entrance now look like a huge colourful exclamation mark! The mural has rebranded not just Towner, but Eastbourne itself.
The Towner’s big show until 14th April is the four finalists for the last Turner Prize, the UK’s top contemporary art prize. Supporting the show is the Eastbourne ALIVE program, with public art and performances around the city. It includes the Assyrian god Lamassu, who protected Ninevah, Iraq for 2,700 years until ISIS destroyed his statue with a drill in 2015. Artist Michael Rakowitz originally resurrected him using cans of dates for London’s prestigious Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth, but now the old god staying in Eastbourne just outside the Towner. Even the oldest Eastbourne resident is a mere zygote compared to Lamassu.
Any major art gallery should attract visitor from pensioners to students, but surprisingly, the new art films Towner’s cinema screens also attract the elderly. The Towner has spanned the divide between generations. Now, it has the go-ahead to span another divide — between urban and rural.
Just inland of Beachy Head, a great sea cliff two kilometres from the edge of town, Black Robin Farm sits in the windswept South Downs landscape. This year, work starts transforming it into a complex with art gallery and facilities for makers, education, eco-awareness and growing food, designed by Fielden Fowles and set to open in 2026. Director Fergus Fielden describes the farm as ’a bricolage of buildings’, some old stone vernacular, others modern steel sheds. All of them will be re-used, and materials will be recycled – ’it’s a very circular project’, he says. “Strocks” – bricks of clay and straw – will create the galleries. There’s a 25m fall over the site, and Fielden explains that ‘ramps will gently cascade, and new buildings will nestle in the slope’.
It seems crazy to build a cultural complex in such a harsh, remote place, but Fielden Fowles’ Weston gallery (2019) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park set a precedent for using more natural materials and ‘more of a connection to the landscape’, as Fielden comments. Pierce points out that in Towner’s permanent collection ‘the focus has always been on landscape’, including paintings by the great local pre-war Eric Ravilous. Black Robin Farm will have a new footpath, nearby busses, and rough-terrain wheelchairs are under consideration. Fielden and Pierce envision many hiking over the hills to reach Towner’s outpost. But isn’t the overlap between hikers and art aficionados pretty slim? ‘I disagree!’ says Pierce. ‘It’s something we want to explore’.
Maybe Towner’s farm project is an experiment — but a necessary one. For too long, landscape has been abused to maintain urban civilisation, which tends to ignore it. We need to re-engage with it and get out there. And as the digital world erodes reality and perverts our experience, we need to create and engage with creativity. It reinforces our humanity, whatever our age. As for the landscape, but Towner’s new project aims to do all this. Eastbourne is engaging with the future. God can wait.
This original English text was first adapted and published in French in Chroniques d’Architecture, March 2024. Both versions © Herbert Wright
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