A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Southbank Centre is a big brutalist landmark in London. It now has protected status, but the reception has been mixed, as NPR's Lauren Frayer learned.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: I'm standing on a bridge over the River Thames, looking at the skyline - the baroque dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, the gleaming glass towers. Looming out of the fog on the southern bank of the river is a big brown complex of rectangles.
CATHERINE CROFT: It's concrete, kind of craggy, almost like more of a landscape than a single building.
FRAYER: Catherine Croft runs Twentieth Century Society, a group that fought 35 years to get this craggy complex Grade II listed status, which means any renovations face strict oversight. She says the Southbank Centre is Britain's best example of brutalism, a postwar style exuding honesty, no frills, clean lines. But for passerby Jeremy Ackland (ph), it's like that quintessentially British spread Marmite. You either love it or hate it.
JEREMY ACKLAND: I don't care for it.
FRAYER: Why?
ACKLAND: Well, I used to work in that redbrick building there years ago. And I used to have to stare at it all day, and I got fed up of it then. Mind you, that was 40 years ago.
FRAYER: When the Southbank Centre opened in 1967, the Daily Mail dubbed it Britain's ugliest building.
Has it grown on people?
BEV GILBERT: No. It's still fairly ugly, but...
(LAUGHTER)
FRAYER: Also walking by is Bev Gilbert (ph).
GILBERT: I have to say, when you look across the skyline, I mean, some of the new stuff was weird when it first went up. You know, like - oh, what's that one called? The Walkie Talkie or whatever.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah. All of them.
GILBERT: And the Shard and all of those. But actually, they look quite nice now, whereas that still looks brutalist.
FRAYER: But that 1960s public housing vibe is in now. Croft says there's nostalgia for a style that prioritized transparency and the public good.
CROFT: Wanting to have a sort of honesty about what something is made from, to see the bones and the structure of a building from the outside without having to buy a ticket or going to a performance.
FRAYER: The complex houses concert halls, galleries, a poetry library. And the skateboarders who've colonized the ramps underneath? Some of them campaigned to get this building protected, too.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ACROSS THE RIVER THAMES")
ELTON JOHN: (Singing) And the fog still rolled across the River Thames. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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