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Art at heart
From children’s books to theatre, hospitals to prisons, Quentin Blake’s vision of illustration as a universal language has finally found a permanent home – at London’s historic New River Head
reading time: 9 Mins
Summary
Tracing its origins in RDI Quentin Blake’s belief that illustration deserved a permanent public home, the newly opened Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration celebrates illustration as an art form central to communication, imagination and everyday civic life. Director Lindsey Glen discusses Blake’s influence, the centre’s opening exhibitions and the challenge of AI-generated imagery with Nick Wroe.
Main image: Quentin Blake, RDI, FRSA beside A Bridge to the Past, 2026, a new mural commissioned for the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration
The genesis of London’s newly opened Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration can be traced back over a quarter of a century to 1999, when Blake – awarded Royal Designer for Industry status in 1981 – was appointed as the inaugural UK Children’s Laureate, and noticed a glaring gap in the public art landscape.
“He was struck that there was no place where people could come to explore illustration,” explains Centre Director Lindsey Glen. “No place to chronicle and celebrate an art that, even aside from the life-enhancing and life-changing genius of illustrated children’s literature, is at the heart of all our everyday lives. It exists to communicate things, to tell a story, to share an idea, and it’s often how we understand the world. How to learn to read, how to safely cross the road and a million other things. Where was the permanent home for that type of art?”
Drawing together
Blake’s response was to set up a charity which, by 2014, had established a temporary space in King’s Cross, London, known as the House of Illustration. Glen remembers her first encounter with the project as being around this time; she viewed both Blake’s drawings for Roald Dahl’s The BFG and some North Korean graphics during that visit, recalling the exhibits as “so different, but both absolutely fascinating, which sort of summed the place up.”
There’s no question that Blake has been an exemplary front man for the project. Now aged 93 and with a knighthood and a Légion d’honneur, he has illustrated more than 500 books. Alongside celebrated collaborations with Dahl and Michael Rosen, he has provided images for work by George Orwell and Voltaire, to name just two of many standouts, as well as countless other projects off the page, from postage stamps to work in hospitals and prisons.
He has, Glen says, been a “perfect” collaborator. “He doesn’t really want to run a museum. What he wants to do is draw. It’s like breathing to him and he draws every day. He said early on that while he is very glad that all this is happening, he’s also glad someone else is doing it and it is from that stance that he has been indispensable to us with his curiosity and knowledge and help, always asking ‘what about this…?’ and always being right to ask exactly that.”
Illustrating is like directing a play… except that you also get to design the scenery and play all the parts
Quentin Blake
The charity trustees found their ideal site in 2019, in the unprepossessing form of the then-derelict New River Head waterworks in Clerkenwell. Blake jokingly said that “it must have been the gods, the minor deities who sit behind illustration, who led us to this place.” The building’s history goes back to the early 1600s, when a channel was dug from Hertfordshire to London to bring clean water to the city. “It was England’s first utility company,” Glen says, “and one of the first three shareholder companies. It has a really fascinating business history.”
The works operated in various iterations until the 1950s, when electric pumping took over and the site fell into disrepair. The buildings have now been restored by Tim Ronalds Architects – who previously worked on the Hackney Empire and Wilton’s Music Hall – at a total project cost of £12.5m. The result is the world’s largest space dedicated to illustration, comprising three exhibition galleries, a free library with over 1,800 books, comics, graphic novels and zines, gardens, a café and a shop.
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Drawing in
Of the three inaugural exhibitions, one, of course, is Blake’s work. Performance occupies the top floor of the engine house and explores his longstanding relationship with theatre. More than 100 original works on paper, showing the breadth of Blake’s expansive imagination and capacity for whimsy, are on display; many have never been shown in public. The show includes Blake’s depictions of every character from Macbeth (including the dagger) as birds, an illustration to accompany the opening-night review of Laurence Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer and Blake’s recent stage version of The Enormous Crocodile which, in the 1970s, was his first collaboration with Dahl.
“Illustrating is like directing a play,” Blake has said, “except that you also get to design the scenery and play all the parts.” “And what’s also lovely about it,” adds Glen, “is when you go to a fine art exhibition, what you see on the wall is the finished product. Here you can also see the process. The sticky tape and the Tipp-Ex are sometimes visible, too.”
The other opening exhibitions are a solo show titled Ever feel like… by the British-Sri Lankan illustrator Murugiah, whose kaleidoscopic, vividly coloured work explores identity and mental health, as well as the joy of being a teenager. “His work is instantly adorable to children,” Glen says, “but he’s also worked extensively with brands such as Apple and New Balance, showing how his individual perspectives are threaded through commercial work. A really important part of what illustrators do today.”
The third exhibition, Queer as Comics, is the first major exhibition of LGBTQIA+ comic-making in the UK, spanning the 1940s to the present day and featuring more than 60 artists, from Tove Jansson to Alison Bechdel and Tom of Finland. The show traces comics and zines as a medium through which marginalised communities found voice long before mainstream acceptance. “It’s such a rich body of work that has this important social and political side and has a real relevance in what’s going on culturally right now.”
Drawing out
The plan is for one of the galleries to always host a Blake show, with the remaining two galleries highlighting other illustrators. While the Centre has already developed strong links with local schools and community groups, it also intends to start a touring programme next year to take its message across the UK.
Glen is acutely aware that the Centre is opening at a moment of particular tension for illustrators in terms of the rise of AI-generated imagery. “It certainly carries an undercurrent of threat,” she says. “But what illustrators do is bring an individual perspective to a piece of work – almost the opposite of the often homogenised imagery you might see created through AI. There is a very good reason why some of the biggest brands are still actively championing and celebrating illustration.”
Every table in the Centre’s library and café has a stash of colouring pencils and paper. “And the biggest surprise, and pleasure, since we opened, is just how much drawing is going on among people of all ages, not just children. So many adults say they were told at school they couldn’t draw and have never done it since. That’s terrible.”
Glen believes that to make a mark is not only to respond to the world around you, but also to reflect your place in it. “And beyond that, you can also sometimes change that world. We want this to be a place from which people go away looking at the world differently. To notice the imagery around them, and to notice what it is trying to say and how it is saying it. Then be empowered to pick up a pencil, or a stick, or a piece of chalk, or their digital tablet, and express themselves through illustration.”
Learn more about the centre
In addition to art exhibitions, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, in line with its ethos, offers school workshops and teaching resources and is available for school visits.
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Nicholas Wroe is a freelance writer and former Assistant Editor of Guardian Review.
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