The Bargehouse

The Bargehouse, located at Oxo Tower Wharf in London, is an untouched four-storey art venue famous for its raw, unfinished historic interior. Originally the site of Royal State Barges in 1530, it housed a Post Office power station in 1900 before Oxo converted it into cold storage in the 1920s. Preserved by Coin Street Community Builders, the building also featured as a gallery location in Netflix's thriller You.

London Β· from the walk β€œThe Artist's Thames” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, London SE1 9PH

How did the Oxo Tower at London's Bargehouse site bypass 1920s advertising bans?

Look at this building. Really Look at it. As a visual artist, you can feel it immediately... those raw brick walls, the rusting iron staircases, the peeling plaster. This vast, untouched four-storey space exists in its raw state... a blank canvas with tremendous scope. This is the Bargehouse. And it is one of the most extraordinary places to encounter art in all of London.......... But let's rewind. The very ground you're standing on has a story that goes back Five Hundred years. Barge House Street commemorates the old Barge House and stairs where the King's State barge was housed from Henry the Seventh to Charles the First. Around fifteen thirty, on this site just west of today's Blackfriars Bridge, stood the dwellings of the Royal Barge Master and sheds for the State Barges. There was a long, gently sloping beach at this point on the Thames... the ideal place for building and storing the large impressive London barges and boats. Imagine Henry the Eighth walking Right Here to board his gilded vessel for a procession to Greenwich or Westminster.......... Then came industry. Around nineteen hundred, a power station was built on this site to supply electricity to the Post Office. It was subsequently acquired by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company in the nineteen twenties, manufacturers of Oxo beef stock cubes, for conversion into a cold store. And here's where it gets delightfully sneaky. The company wanted to include a tower featuring illuminated signs advertising their product. When permission was refused, the tower was built with four sets of three vertically aligned windows, each of which "coincidentally" happened to be in the shapes of a circle, a cross, and a circle... because skyline advertising was banned along Southbank. A masterclass in creative rule-breaking! As an artist, you have to admire that kind of lateral thinking.......... By the early nineteen seventies, the building was derelict. By the time Coin Street Community Builders bought the Wharf, the only activity was related to two barges used as a floating helicopter port. While the main Oxo Tower was refurbished into restaurants and designer studios, the Bargehouse was deliberately left... Unfinished. And that's the genius of it.......... The Bargehouse remains as a decaying, edgy series of spaces, much loved as a unique venue for art and design exhibitions. When exhibitions happen here, the art doesn't sit politely on white walls. It crawls up rusted beams. It breathes through cracked windows. The building Becomes part of the work. It was even featured as a filming location for the Netflix thriller You... the art gallery scenes in season four were shot right inside these walls.......... Now look around you as a painter would. Notice the textures... industrial decay meeting the polished glass of the South Bank. This tension between the raw and the refined, the abandoned and the curated... that is what makes the Bargehouse so powerful. In an age where every surface gets smoothed over and monetized, this building insists on remaining Rough. And that roughness... is its art.

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