The site of their centre, which under the banner of “Art for All” will be free to enter, has many ghosts. Often seen walking the streets with their measured tread, they have themselves become a local conjoined landmark, latter-day pearly kings, a Hawksmoor church with legs. Gilbert and George, who moved into their handsome Spitalfields house in 1968, were part of this wave. Significant contributors to the area’s history, as they have been there for more than half a century, include the artists, writers, architects, conservationists and other kindred spirits who, from the late 60s, started inhabiting the area’s then-disintegrating Georgian terraces, and restored them and campaigned effectively against their demolition. It required engineering gymnastics, and an astonishing 37 party wall agreements with adjoining neighbours Here, the East End becomes a cinematic version of itself. It has been a place of dissenters and reformers, of deprivation and lurid crime. The location is Spitalfields, the palimpsestic territory just to the east of the City of London, shaped by three centuries or more of immigrants, where the built-for-eternity stonework of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s greatest church coexists with jerry-built brick houses and workshops that have tottered on the spot for long enough to have become buildings of historic interest. Only after that, when you get to the clean-lined exhibition spaces, with their tuned lighting and suppression of distracting detail, the better to display the gaudy and luminous artworks, do you encounter what might be called the shock of the new. You then find your way into a low-ceilinged reception space, oaky and ochre in the style of a tastefully restored Landmark Trust rural retreat. It’s all neat and clean and uncrumbly and stinkless to a degree rarely before seen in these parts, but otherwise it looks much as it might have done in Victorian times. The horizontal cantilevered roof of a new pavilion on the left, in which you can watch introductory films about the artists, hints that something more modern is afoot. The gates open into a court of Dickensian cobbles and London stock bricks. This entrance leads to a sequence of objects and spaces that, as the centre’s architect, Manuel Irsara, says, brings together the conservative and the contemporary. A bit heraldic, with something too of the psychedelic graphics of a 70s LP cover, the ironwork spells out “G & G” in big swirly green letters – also, in gold, in liberal-baiting honour of our new monarch, C III R. So it’s in character that, as you approach the new Gilbert & George Centre in the East End of London – a place for the display, study and storage of their work – the first thing you see is a pair of blacksmith-forged gates, kitschy and crafted at once.
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