Simon Jenkins: ‘Net curtain-gate’ just makes us laugh rather than show sympathy

The row between Tate Modern and residents of the luxury flats next door says so much about new-money London
Up close and personal: the viewing platform at Tate Modern, left, looks right into the Neo Bankside apartments
Simon Jenkins27 September 2016
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

That’s the trouble with London’s rich. Take away their nannies and next minute they are fighting like rats in a sack. In Kensington they become maniacal moles, digging under each other’s houses. In Battersea they buy-to-leave and sue for the title deeds when they divorce. Now in Southwark of all places they look up each other’s knickers and scream blue murder.

The saga of Tate Modern and “net-curtain-gate” has more irony than an Alan Ayckbourn play. The Tate’s boss, Sir Nicholas Serota, once objected to residential towers going up behind his beloved power station. He lost, and a tower by Richard Rogers duly rose next door, and now he has hit back with a truly hideous tower of his own. That is what rich people do to each other. Serota’s viewing balcony leers down on Rogers’s svelte “Neo Bankside” glasshouse just 20 metres away.

The battle is, as these people say, on the cusp of iconic. Tate visitors who make it to Serota’s 10th floor without seeing a single real work of art on the way are left hanging from the parapet, starved of aesthetic stimulus. There, tantalisingly out of reach, is pure performance art, rich housewives in £4.5million flats going about their chores in full public view. One panting visitor tweeted: “I could swear I spotted a Francis Bacon on one of the walls.” It was more than he had found in the Tate. It was lucky that the tower did not topple in the stampede.

Cue catfight. The residents are understandably furious as people queue up to peer into their rooms, lenses trained, Instagram at the ready. One lady protested that her daughters were being photographed in their rooms, and must now live in blinds-down gloom. They did know that a gallery was being built next door but not that they would be its defining work of art. A resident retaliated with a cardboard cut-out of Serota in his underpants for visitors to photograph.

Next, Serota loftily entered into the spirit of the spat. He was derisive. The residents “knew Tate Modern was going up next door… The character and uses of the building were also widely known.” He said they bought their flats “with their eyes wide open”. As a concession he would ask visitors “not to gesticulate or photograph” the flat-dwellers. But since gesticulation appears to be an important facet of modern art appreciation, Serota suggested that if the neighbours wanted privacy they should get net curtains.

The net curtains did it. Curtain-gate went viral. “Outrageous insult,” said the local Liberal Democrat councillor, Adele Morris. Serota, she said, was referring to net curtains only because the residents were rich. “He would not have said it if they were council flats,” she added, which was almost certainly true.

The artist Grayson Perry lasered in on the net curtains. They were, he informed the BBC, “a perfect storm of class taste, the strongest of class signifiers”. Serota was “really skewering” his neighbours. As Jilly Cooper once put it, “the world is divided between the haves and have nets”. In Perry’s part of Islington a net curtain “would have the neighbourhood watch round to tell you to take it down”. Proper people have shutters. Anyway, said Perry, the Neo-Banksiders were rich and were driving poor artists out of town. He made no mention of any ordinary mortals.

Two aspects of curtain-gate are quite baffling. Serota has to be right that legal searches for a property of this value would surely have disclosed the Tate’s plans in detail. The Tate was clearly likely to block the Neo Banksiders’ view of St Paul’s, so the obvious question was “with what?” If I were a resident I would sue my lawyer.

On the other hand I find it equally inexplicable that Southwark planners can have given the Tate permission for a viewing gallery that so closely overlooks people’s homes. Given that the only view from the balcony at this point is of the flats, a screen of sorts would surely have been in order.

At the very least there should have been some reflective coating on the windows, though this was reportedly stopped by the architects. Once the rich have been parted with their money they lose all rights.

The trouble is that Southwark no longer has a planning department worth the name. As any stroll around the north of the borough will attest, nothing there has been “planned” there for years. Neo Bankside was already controversial when it failed to provide on-site affordable and social housing. The developers and council did a “section 106 deal”— cash straight to the council.

This lucrative loophole is now depopulating central London. The reality is that any developer in north Southwark can do anything he wants. It is open country, the Canary Wharf of central London.

Planning requirements are merely “indicative”. When hundreds of millions of pounds are swilling about the luxury flat market rules are only for wimps.

What I find surprising about curtain-gate is that there are actually people living in Neo Bankside. These places are usually empty investments. We hear no similar complaints from the new Battersea Power Station since no one is expected to inhabit it. That is why Wandsworth council has allowed massive over-building, with residents so close to neighbours that, if there were any, they could almost shake hands.

As for these gated estates in London generally, the only advice is “caveat emptor”. Anyone who buys a flat by a modernist architect knows it will have no privacy. Modernists don’t do walls. They do glass.

In this battle between the aristocracy of modern art and aristocracy of modern cash there are no losers — just fools. The rest of us should imitate Oscar Wilde who, after reading of the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, said: “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT