Page 124 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

18 February 2020

Barbican and Guildhall, making

music together

Milton Court is a rare venue combining performance, concert-going and teaching. Simon
Tait finds a unique artistic partnership there between an arts centre and its conservatoire
neighbour
When in 2013 the £89m performing arts centre Milton Court opened in Silk Street in the City of
London its architect, David Walker, said it had no right to be there.
“The miracle is that it exists” he told AI. “There’s an alchemy of timing when the needs of both
sides of a private/public partnership come together. It doesn’t often happen, but it has here.”
Milton Court is one of London’s three main chamber music public venues, but it is much more. It
has a 608-seat concert hall with a flexible acoustic that musicians at all stages of their careers
cherish, a 233-seat theatre where the conservatoire puts on a full-scale opera three times a
year (with an acoustic sweet spot that singers fight for), a studio theatre, three rehearsal rooms
and a TV studios suite.

The miracle in 2013 was of the matching of needs of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
and Heron, the developer of a 34-storey residential tower Milton Court is a part of, a miracle
wrought by the Corporation of London, the planning authority, freeholder and proprietor of the
Guildhall, meaning that the cost of creating the arts centre was absorbed entirely by the
developer.
Since then, the alchemy has stretched to the art, and the unique relationship between the
Guildhall’s Milton Court and the Barbican Arts Centre 100 yards away. The proximity, at one step
removed, is key to their joint future.