National Portrait Gallery buys Victorian toilet block for £3m

By Jacob Phillips, Local Democracy Reporter

The National Portrait Gallery plans to open a new exhibition space in a block of old Central London toilets as part of a £10m expansion.

The landmark is set to undergo the biggest development since 1896, thanks to the record-breaking donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, an American investment group.

Strangely included in the new plans is a new exhibition space beneath Leicester Square – in an old Victorian toilet block.

The toilets were closed in the 1970s and the gallery hopes that the below-ground space will provide it with the opportunity to expand its public footprint and programme.

The toilets, in Irving Street just off Leicester Square, were replaced by a theatre ticket kiosk but it was shut and put on the market as an “iconic island” in 2021.

The National Portrait Gallery said it had bought the ticket kiosk for about £3m and the space beneath it could display a world-class exhibition.

The 1,700sqft area will sit next to a new open space by the gallery. The remaining money from the enormous donation, the biggest in the gallery’s history, will transform the first floor of the renowned building.

The gallery has not yet confirmed its final plans for the site, and it is expected to go to Westminster City council for planning permission in the coming months

The new Blavatnik Wing will have nine galleries and will show paintings from British history between 1840 and 1945.

The galleries within The Blavatnik Wing will display the portraits of a wide range of historic figures, such as Charles Darwin, Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli, Mary Seacole, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Emmeline Pankhurst and Oscar Wilde.

The rooms will also showcase works by the finest portrait painters of the period, including Sir John Everett Millais, George Frederic Watts, John Singer Sargent, Laura Knight, Gwen John and Lucian Freud.

Pictured top: The £3m toilet block in Irving Street (Picture: Google Street View)