Review: The Public – The Lost Fun Palace of West Bromwich
by Graham Peet
This is a timely book. It’s five years since the Public was closed by Sandwell Council. This is not a blow-by-blow account of its creation or its problems but a general overview of how it came to be and what it was like. It’s partisan in the sense that Peet was the exhibition curator but benefits greatly from his close involvement with the project, as well as his background in photography and graphic design. It’s primarily a pictorial record but the words are carefully chosen to support and explain the images, most of which come from Peet’s archive, and text from other sources is juxtaposed with Peet’s own writing.
There are no chapters but there are other organizing principles. What Peet has produced is a sort of coffee table book with the aesthetic of a superior extended pamphlet. It works as a commemorative object for people who were there and also perhaps as a sort of dip-in for people who weren’t. The idiosyncratic structure is logical once you ditch conventional wisdom, which is fitting for a book about The Public. The text appears in several different colours and sizes but is always easy to read.
In terms of the actual information, all of it is interesting, to me at least. I was heavily invested in The Public but not someone who’d been on board from day one. While I’d heard of c/PLEX (the working title of The Public), I’d never seen the models and almost abstract sketches of Will Alsop. These are fascinating snapshots of the evolution of the building in the architect’s mind. I had no idea that the original design was used to construct another building in Canada.
With regard to those parts of the backstory I did know something about, it’s good to see so much of it flagged up by Peet. The Public’s first director, the underappreciated Sylvia King, gets more than just a namecheck here. Two of the photographs that weren’t taken by Peet show King on a Sandwell estate in the seventies, as a grassroots arts activist surrounded by local kids. While Peet doesn’t make detailed connections, he indicates how the Jubilee Arts movement grew out of the same soil as the Joan Littlewood/Cedric Price concept of a giant ‘laboratory of pleasure’ which found such a brilliant champion in Alsop. The history is potted but deftly and imaginatively done. All the quotations are well chosen. I was pleased to see that Peet had also included a full transcript of the Stephen Morris article from The Guardian, a much better piece of journalism than the Oliver Wainwright review that seems to pop up whenever you search for The Public on the internet.
Tellingly, there aren’t any snippets from the local press, just a note that one of our papers seemed to have warmed towards The Public by the end of its short life. It’s unsurprising that Peet hasn’t found anything worth repeating but the statistics in this book show what a cultural hub the place undoubtedly was. In its four brief years it exhibited work by 700 artists, there were 500 workshops and 600 theatre shows. It had a million visitors, sixty percent of which were estimated to be local, and 38 companies had moved into the building. As Peet observes, in its last few months, what had been steady progress was rapidly accelerating.
Of course, a bittersweet sense of lost promise hangs over the whole book, but Peet focuses on what The Public achieved while it was allowed to exist. Where this book really comes into its own is through its combination of showing and telling. Peet uses his techniques to emphasise the phantasmagoric aspects of The Public, revelling in a place where the weird and the wonderful collided with the everyday. On one page, for example, is a shimmering piece of electronic art, on another a picture of the weekly knitting group. There are many striking images of people interacting with The Public's dazzling interiors, such as the man sitting on Alsop’s Cloud Chair and the three girls moving through the Zoe Partington installation.
Peet mentions that Zoe Partington is a disabled artist and this is not just an incidental reference. The Public set out to create a level playing field for users and creatives alike. The concept was literally built-in. Its floors were exceptionally flat and the ramp, which wound towards the higher levels, was a gentle incline. Entrances were wide and generous. Anyone could walk, shuffle or wheel themselves into The Public and experience it in their own way at their own pace. The security was there but the touch was light. It was family friendly, like an indoor park. The photographs taken by Peet reflect this, depicting the place much as I remember it, with giant prams, crawling babies, rampaging toddlers, and kids skidding on the floor or running around Ben Kelly’s metal trees.
The Public was keen to reflect society as a whole and did this in at least two different ways. One was hosting events that would tend to attract particular communities, illustrated by Peet with images from an audience with the Indian superstar Kushi. The other thing was less tangible, suggested by the wide range of people caught by Peet’s camera. It had something to do with The Public’s guiding philosophy, which contained contradictions but was still best expressed by its dominant colour, a playful shade of pink. The subtitle of this book is relevant here. The Public had serious aims but wasn’t constrained by a fixed, patrician notion of what art was supposed to be or who was allowed to join in. As Peet makes clear, The Public was a place where digital art was displayed alongside the work of Martin Parr and Tracy Emin, while Sunday painters were encouraged to submit to the summer exhibition. He also depicts or draws attention to the sheer range of things that went on there, from children's shows and holiday play schemes to zumba and comedy nights, burlesque shows, music events, wedding receptions, conferences and blood donation. There were also mid-week dance performances in the public square next to the building.
Inevitably, given its format, there are some gaps in Peet’s account. There isn’t much about the working relationship between The Public and its tenant companies, how other creative groups had began to use The Public, or the outreach programmes The Public was working to develop. In terms of what the book sets out to achieve, though, it's a successful and rather beautiful tribute. Short of a virtual tour or digital recreation, it’s probably the closest anyone can now get to the experience of wandering around this multi-layered thought-experiment. Peet’s eclectic, visually-based approach certainly conveys that it was unlike anywhere else in Sandwell, a factor which turned out to be so key in the sudden and brutal rejection of the project.
The Public, of course, never stood a chance. It was caught in the pincer movement of Tory cuts and the tragic inadequacies of our local Labour Council. Peet puts it like this:
"The closing of The Public and converting the building to a 6th Form College deprived the town of an extraordinary building loved by hundreds of thousands,
It also meant the destruction of the ramp gallery, the theatre, public toilets, conference facilities and the public artworks."
Darren Cooper, Leader of the Council said when ordering it to be closed, “I never liked it anyway.” He had only been in the building a few times.
To sweeten the blow to a horrified public the council said they would fund the College to provide arts activities in the building at £200,0000 a year for 5 years.
A Freedom of Information request years later asking what was happening found that the money had just been rolled over into the College's running costs.
Although the book is very much a celebration of The Public rather than a polemic against the Cooper regime, Peet occasionally gives a glimpse of the way the council operated under Cooper, and continues to operate as part of his legacy. Nevertheless, taken together with the Morris article, if you knew nothing at all about Cooper it would be reasonable to assume that he was probably a man trying to make the best of the hand he’d been dealt, somewhat small-minded but basically well-intentioned. This would be a rather charitable assumption.
Perhaps unwilling to speak ill of the dead, Peet steers a careful course around the memory of the late leader, a vainglorious figure well known to regular readers of this blog. This objectionable character had been pursuing his own agenda for years, bludgeoning and backstabbing his way to the top of the greasy pole at the Council, but happened to reach it at the worst possible time. Although he pretended to govern by consensus, Cooper was enabled by his cronies and people scared to cross him, having pushed virtually everyone else out of the inner circle. The man broke all our hearts (including Peet’s, as was obvious at the book launch) and few of us will ever forgive either what he did to The Public or the characteristically conniving way he went about it.
Without wishing to minimise its real impact, austerity was the perfect narrative for Cooper. He was looking for a way to put the boot into The Public and couldn’t have been handed a better pretext. The Public was always more of a commitment that Cooper wished to renege on than the existential threat to bin collection he made it out to be. Everyone who cared about The Public wanted to find a financial compromise but there was no political will to meet us halfway.
For all his windbag piety, Cooper had a streak of spite a mile wide. He viewed The Public much as he viewed political opposition, as something to be stamped out, hence his total lack of interest in the management’s business plan or any other cost-cutting proposal. Cooper, in fact, would not consider paying anything, anything at all, to keep The Public going. He was unabashedly, even gleefully determined to withhold every penny of funding, kick everyone who was mandated to be there out of the building, shred the contract, and have the place gutted by his pet contractors. This process involved zero consultation, except for consultation with the people he’d randomly selected to be its rightful occupants.
In my own view it was The Public’s particular misfortune to find itself at the tender mercies of a man who combined all the charms of petty vindictiveness with crippling parochialism. Although The Public had been mostly built with EU and lottery money, the Council had to fork out to finish the build and Cooper deeply resented this along with the funding commitment. However, he was far from the only councillor who didn’t ‘get’ The Public, as Peet underlines with this quote from François Matarasso:
"Jubilee Arts dreamed of creating a community art centre with the scale, ambition and resources of a cultural institution…But for many of those whose support they needed, that was a category error. For them, community art is small, parochial, unimportant – by definition."
The idea of a Black Country town investing in the arts at the level required by The Public was a challenge to the provincial mentality of our local decision makers. In this context, perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Public was that it ever got built in the first place. As this book makes clear, The Public was, essentially, a visionary project. The men and women (mostly men) who run our Council are not visionaries. Cooper’s predecessors weren’t visionaries either, but they were prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to people who saw further and thought bigger, albeit with some ambivalence. Cooper was simply unable to get past his own limited way of looking at the world. In Cooper’s case, because the arts didn’t interest him personally, he found it hard to believe there was an audience for the arts in Sandwell, which is why he was so reluctant to accept the visitor statistics reproduced in this book. The poison-pen letters and sneering e-mails he’d received about The Public were also a factor in his thinking. Forced to acknowledge that The Public also had a growing fan base he was still determined to take the side of the philistines. Once Cooper got a grip on the levers of power, the dream of The Public was dead.
Peet brings The Public back to life, in 150 well laid-out, glossy pages. His book is rightly dedicated to Will Alsop, and gives the final word to Sylvia King. As I came in quite late on the story of The Public, I’m giving the final word to Linda Saunders, its second director, who contributed so much to that story in such a short space of time:
"People made The Public special, but it was the building that made it unique…The sheer unexpectedness of the building, its total contrast to the uncompromising world outside it, was why it mattered. It offered a vision of a different world and most importantly, gave everyone the key to that."
Robert Warrington
[Skidder note: we now know that the monstrous Cooper was aided and abetted in the destruction plan by his "money-man" Cllr Steve Eling, who is the disastrous current "leader" following Cooper's death during what Labour "comrades" say was an evening of footie, booze and cocaine.]
Here is wonderful Graham with his book:
(This is my rubbish photo and so my apologies for the light reflection of the book).
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