Gallery is ready to reveal its
OVERHAUL AT COST OF £3.8M TAKES VENUE INTO A NEW ERA
Culture editor NEXT Saturday the historic Hatton Gallery in Newcastle will reopen to the public after its £3.8m redevelopment supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The gallery, founded in 1925, has had ups and downs – 20 years ago author Dame Catherine Cookson saved it with a £250,000 donation – but now it stands on the brink of an exciting new era.
A preview tour of the gallery this week, which was also a first chance to glimpse its opening exhibition, Pioneers of Pop, revealed that it has moved into a different league.
Even if you entered with your eyes closed you could tell significant work has been done.
The large rooms now have stateof-the art temperature and humidity control, making the gallery fit to accommodate some of the art world’s most fragile and valuable loans. To aid this process glass doors now separate the rooms. They open and close with a ‘hush,’ enabling each to be sealed.
A new entrance has been created, to the side of the original one, where visitors will pass through a shop selling art-related merchandise.
The most ardent fans of the gallery, notably the Friends of the Hatton, will be heartened to see that the building’s attractive architecture has been retained in the modernisation process.
The new Hatton Gallery, also a facility long used and enjoyed by fine art students at the university, is still recognisably the Hatton.
Most important to many, the gal-