The work of a talented illustrator, whether Sir John Tenniel, creator of the sinister 19th-century Alice in Wonderland images, or Axel Scheffler and his scary Gruffalo, is as recognisable as the stories they have helped to tell. And while drawings once played second fiddle to the author’s words, the impact of the art of illustration, both in books and on wider public platforms, is now much better understood.
“llustration has benefited from a challenging of hierarchies,” said Olivia Ahmad, artistic director of the future Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. “For a long time it was dismissed as ‘low’ culture, but these boundaries are being shown to be false.”
Ahmad, who is on the team developing Britain’s new and only national centre for the art form, due to open in 2025, regards illustration as simply another language, she adds. “And like verbal language, it has distinct forms all over the world – illustrators with different heritages synthesise different cultural norms, humour, aesthetics and places, as well as their personal experiences.”
The recent British surge of interest, Ahmad suspects, is partly down to the expansion of commercial publishing in the last 50 years and the recent accessibility of digital culture. But it is also due, she thinks, to the advocacy of several leading illustrators. Among them are those former official children’s laureates who are acclaimed illustrators, among them Blake, Lauren Child, Anthony Browne, Cressida Cowell and Chris Riddell, who is also political cartoonist for this newspaper.
Riddell has watched public engagement rise and rise over the last decade. “I’ve experienced this boom in interest personally,” he said this weekend. “Just in this last year I have drawn live on stage for James O’Brien, live illustrated at shows by the National, Boygenius and Samia and illustrated poetry readings on stage at the National Theatre, as well as posting a daily political cartoon on social media.”
Greater appreciation has prompted an appetite for information about the artists behind the pictures. “The illustrators themselves, and the way they create, is often mysterious, even if their work is well known,” said Ahmad. “So we have this really compelling combination of the instantly recognisable and the unknown.”
When the House of Illustration first opened as a small gallery a decade ago behind King’s Cross station in London, high visitor numbers quickly made its mainstream appeal clear. Two years ago it closed its doors in search of a bigger permanent home.
When the museum opens again, on a spacious industrial heritage site in neighbouring Clerkenwell, it will become the only permanent place in Britain to learn about the history of illustration. It will also both bear the name of its celebrated founder, Sir Quentin Blake, and house his 40,000-strong archive of work.
Riddell, a long-term supporter of the planned centre, said he is “thrilled to see it coming to fruition”. “It embodies illustration in the widest sense,” he said, “from traditional book illustration through fashion, comics and reportage illustration to live drawing events and more.”
A sneak Observer preview of the site confirms it would be hard to find a place with as unusual a visual history. The derelict New River Head buildings off Amwell Street stand out as a steampunk testament to changing technologies. The once cutting-edge water facility, dating back 400 years, sits right next door to Islington’s working Thames Water Ring Main site. The £12m development and restoration project was initially bought with the help of a 2019 donation. The centre then raised half of the remaining funds and hired Tim Ronalds Architects to work on landscaping half an acre of new public gardens, as well as on preserving the character of the old buildings, which include an engine house, windmill base, and store rooms.
Back in 1700 the private water supply plant was one of the three richest companies in London, next to the Bank of England and the East India Company. Until it was built the population of the growing city had collected their water from rivers, wells and charitably-supported public conduits. Colonial businessman Edmund Colthurst brought in water from springs in Ware by building a ‘new river’. This artificial water course had to slope for 40 miles into London, but, before the bricklayers had finished, Colthurst ran out of money. In 1609 Hugh Myddelton, a rich London goldsmith took up the challenge and the New River Head site, with its established natural pond, was chosen as the terminus. From 1613 water travelled down to the city from Clerkenwell along wooden pipes into the homes of those who paid. After a period of public ownership, in 1989 the capital’s water supply was privatised again and the site was sold to a property company. The New River now ends at Stoke Newington Reservoirs and still supplies 8-12% of London’s water.
Ahmad is impatient for the doors of the centre to open next year so Britain can at last catch up with Europe. Illustration is much more culturally embedded in public arts in France, for example.
Meanwhile, there will be online exhibitions, in addition to touring shows of the collections. Among these is a new look at the 60-year career of the late Raymond Briggs, creator of The Snowman, Fungus the Bogeyman, Ethel and Ernest and the Father Christmas series. The exhibition Bloomin’ Brilliant: The Life and Work of Raymond Briggs opens in April at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in the author’s native East Sussex and it will join up with the centre’s already acclaimed retrospective show about the artist.
In February, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum hosts a display of Blake’s book covers, featuring his famous work for Roald Dahl titles.
And online, the centre has just published the work of draughtswoman Jo Brocklehurst, an artist who portrayed the lives of punks, actors and nightclubbers from the 1970s onwards, made in her London studio and in the tclubs and theatres of Berlin, London and New York.
“Illustration has been overlooked in comparison with other visual arts,” said Ahmad. “We often find ourselves working with private collections, scouring online auctions and meeting people who knew illustrators to piece together exhibitions.
“We have spent time with families who have inherited the archive of illustrators they were related to but didn’t know well, and sought out people who worked as printers and editors who saved original artwork from the bin after it had been reproduced.”
