Henry Wrong
Arts administrator who battled strikers, architects and City bigwigs to build the Barbican Centre
HENRY WRONG, who has died aged 87, was the first managing director of the Barbican Centre in the City of London, and a man without whose vision and determination the largest performing arts centre in Europe would probably never have got off the ground.
The idea of developing a cultural centre on the one-square mile site north of St Paul’s Cathedral flattened by German bombs, was first mooted in the 1950s and in 1956 a Conservative cabinet minister gave his approval to the idea of redevelopment.
In the mid-1960s the City Corporation decided to build an arts centre as a home for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra, alongside an apartment complex. Construction began on the flats and offices a few years later. But it took until 1971 for work to begin on the Barbican Centre for Arts.
A Canadian who combined a Pickwickian exterior with the manner of a diplomat, Wrong was appointed managing director of the Barbican Centre in 1970 when the design of the building had already been chosen.
It was one of the many ironies in the Barbican’s history that the architects, Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, who had originally been appointed to design the residential areas, made one of the determining factors for their design the belief that within five years nobody would be using private cars any more in London.
It was not their only miscalculation. Initial estimates suggested that the Barbican would cost somewhere between £6 and £8million to build; the final bill came in at £156million. Strikes, legal challenges, and the discovery of a plague pit, all contributed to delays. Three times the City of London’s Court of Common Council threatened to cancel the project.
The bickering was forgotten, at least for one evening, in the glamour of the opening night in 1982, when the Queen visited a lavish exhibition of postwar French art, before enjoying an evening of music and drama presented by the LSO and RSC. Brian Redhead described the centre as like “the Tower of London with carpets”, and the press announced that Mr Wrong had “Got it Right”.
However, the opening was five years behind schedule and visitors found it hard to warm to the centre’s dated “brutalist” design, incorporating enough concrete, so it was said, to build 19 miles of six-lane superhighway. Its location in a lesser-known area of London and its confusing layout gave rise to complaints about how difficult it was to find – and get out of.
Wrong, who was quoted as saying that he would like to shoot the architects responsible, described the centre’s unprepossessing main entrance as “like a man with a particularly hideous or deformed face. One has to force oneself to go up and say hello. And then you find of course that he is perfectly charming.”
He had expended much energy on trying to alter and soften aspects of the original design. The architects’ original proposal for the cinema included placing the screen on the ceiling and having the first few rows of the audience lying on their backs on what looked like a series of beds, while in the main concert hall there was no means for artists to get on to the stage, and inadequate access to the lighting rig. Many such problems took time to rectify and added considerably to the overall cost.
Wrong also fought a prolonged battle over the lighting and the lack of colour or soft materials in the original designs, insisting on the use of warm reds, oranges, browns – along with comfortable seats and effectively used natural wood – to offset the monumental grey concrete. He was especially proud of appointing the designer David Hicks to do the restaurants: “He brought in such a sense of style and colour. The architects were furious with me,” he recalled.
The real problem Wrong faced, however, was that the Barbican Centre opened at a time when the tide was turning against lavish cultural palaces and towards smaller community arts centres. With its three theatres, two concert halls, art gallery, sculpture court, three cinemas, three restaurants and a lending library, in addition to numerous conference facilities, sceptics predicted that it would be a hugely expensive white elephant.
Wrong’s problems were compounded when, early in its residency, the LSO came close to financial disaster due to overambitious programming and the poor ticket sales that resulted. “Is Wrong Right?” asked a typical headline on the centre’s fifth anniversary. It had been hoped that the centre would break even, but by its sixth year it had a £5.6 million running deficit. “I’ve come close to suicide once or twice,” Wrong conceded.
But he stuck to his task, struggling with a plethora of problems, ranging from leaking exhibition halls (caused by the use of porous paving bricks as a roofing material) to the noise of car exhausts and lavatoryflushings audible in the concert hall during quiet passages.
He saw himself as responsible for everything that happened in the building – from concert schedules and wining and dining commercial sponsors, to dealing with the problem of litter. “I saved my sanity,” he once explained, “by going home to Much Haddam, Hertfordshire, and mowing the grass.”
By the time Wrong retired in 1990, following a £7 million refit to improve the acoustics, he had made the centre into a successful operation and built up a notably happy and motivated team of programming specialists and administrators.
The centre’s future was put on a more stable footing in 1988 when the City fathers bit the bullet and came to terms with the fact that their “gift to the nation” came with a sizeable price tag, increasing the centre’s funding by 77 per cent over three years.
It was only after his departure that Wrong was finally able to admit that he thought the Barbican “the ugliest building in the world”.
Henry Lewellys Barker Wrong was born in Toronto on April 20 1930. After graduating from Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1952 he served his apprenticeship in arts administration under Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera, and from 1964 to 1968 he was director of programming for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, an experience which, he recalled (without giving any details), took him five years to get over. He was headhunted for the job of managing director of the Barbican.
After retiring from the Barbican he served as director of the European Arts Foundation and chairman of Spencer House, and sat on numerous arts advisory committees and boards. As a consultant at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford, in 2006 he coordinated the creation of the garden in honour of the late Princess Margaret, whom he had come to know through her interest in the Barbican’s work.
Henry Wrong was appointed CBE in 1986.
He married, in 1966, Penelope Norman, who survives him with two sons and a daughter.