London’s Riverside Studios has begun to enter administration, citing “eye-watering” energy bills and the debt incurred by its recent redevelopment.
The arts centre, situated on the Thames in west London, is marking its 45th anniversary of operating in Hammersmith but the board of the Riverside Trust charity said that it has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators.
Riverside Studios was turned into an arts centre in the mid-1970s. Its building, a former Victorian engineering works, had been used as a film studio since the early 1930s and by the BBC from 1954 to 1974, when programmes including Dr Who and Dixon of Dock Green were made there.
It closed in 2014 for redevelopment and opened again in November 2019, shortly before the Covid-19 outbreak which led to the temporary closures of venues. The Riverside Trust received three grants, totalling £1,875,000, from the government’s culture recovery fund. It had an additional £927,000 in funding labelled “emergency resource support” for culturally significant organisations that Arts Council England deemed “at imminent risk of failure” having “exhausted all other options for increasing their resilience”.
The trust said that a difficult operating environment caused by the pandemic had made it harder to rebuild revenue streams. Riverside Studios has also seen a 300% increase in energy costs at the new complex which includes three theatres, TV studios, a cinema, bars and a restaurant.
Since reopening its eclectic programme of performances has included a stage version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a show about Ava Gardner written by and starring Elizabeth McGovern, the political drama Bloody Difficult Women and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh musical.
Greg Parston, chair of the board, said: “Launching the new Riverside Studios with such a huge burden of inherited debt from the building development was never going to be easy. With the fantastic team that we have built over the last three years, it was our fervent hope that careful business planning – coupled with the support we received from the government’s culture recovery fund and Triodos Bank during the darkest days of the pandemic – would put us in a healthier cashflow position.”
Riverside Studios will be trading as usual while it enters the administration process. The trustees have stated a preference for continued charitable ownership in order to serve its role as a community arts venue.
Tony Lankester and Rachel Tackley, joint chief executives, said: “To avoid administration and to give us time to re-engineer the legacy debt, we need cash amounting to a relatively small portion of the overall debt: an immediate cash injection of £500,000 with a commitment of a further £750,000 over the next few months. We’ve explored several avenues to try and raise that amount to no avail, and only have around another week to do so.”
