The Roden Centre for Creative Learning marks National Gallery’s commitment to art for all

The National Gallery today announces the programme and spaces on offer to all as part of the brand new Roden Centre for Creative Learning. The Centre, which is free to enter, is one of the largest dedicated gallery learning spaces in the UK. It opens to the public on Friday 28 February, and will be the first part of the Gallery’s Bicentenary suite of capital projects to welcome visitors, programming free activities for children, families, schools and young people and both free and ticketed events and courses for adults.  

As the National Gallery looks to its third century, the Centre spearheads the Gallery’s commitment to opening up access to paintings and art for everyone, to learning through creativity, play and discovery, and enriching lives. The Roden Centre for Creative Learning has been named in thanks for an extremely generous gift from Stuart and Bianca Roden. The National Gallery is profoundly grateful for their support of the Centre, which has formed a key part of the NG200 campaign. 

The transformed Centre will enable the National Gallery to engage with an additional 50,000 learners annually, resulting in 246,000 learners benefiting from the learning programme in total each year. The schools programme alone expects to grow to 32,000 pupils a year taking part in booked visits (an increase of over 13,500 from the last academic year) and will impact areas including learners’ creativity, confidence and skills development including important oracy skills, and 26,000 new family visitors will benefit from a brand new dedicated Welcome Space, free to drop in to.

London-based architects Lawson Ward Studio have turned the previously small, cellular rooms into much more open, inviting spaces across three floors. These start with The Welcome Space, a vibrant new creative drop in area for families with engaging new activities and resources made by artists and children, for children. Outreach to those with the least access to arts and culture will focus on this space.

The new state-of-the-art, double-height Clore Art Studio, generously supported by the Clore Duffield Foundation, encourages learners of all ages to explore some of the creative processes used by artists in the collection, with hybrid facilities for participation both onsite and across the nation. Pupils and learners will have the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be an artist, and 5,000 pupils and teachers who aren’t able to visit the Gallery in person will take part in high quality live-streamed art classes. The Clore Art Studio and its facilities will also benefit many of the 70,000 adult learners involved in National Gallery courses and programmes.

On the upper floor The Creative Space enables sensory learning for everyone, with a particular focus on special needs schools, made possible with support from the Julia Rausing Trust. The adjacent Social Space will provide an attractive and flexible environment, accommodating school lunches and transforming into a large creative studio for family activities. The Social Space will also host events for the growing Friday Lates, for visitors of all ages to explore paintings through music, dance, poetry and making in a way which has never been possible before. 

Learning opportunities have been woven into the fabric of the building, for example waste from the Gallery’s framing department has been used to create new seating, the colours and grain of a variety of different woods still visible to visitors in the new surfaces. A Fragment Wall in the Welcome Space includes ‘fragments’ of paintings, created in wood, which inspire curiosity and connect learners to the paintings they can find in the Gallery.

At the entrance, dark smoked glass has been replaced with new clear glazing that makes creativity visible from the street, and a new large window greatly increases natural light to both the foyer and The Clore Art Studio. New acoustic treatment vastly improves conditions for learning throughout. 

Lawson Ward Studio worked with the National Gallery’s Learning team to engage not only Gallery staff, but also children, young people and teachers in the process. Children from Soho Parish Primary School, for example, helped to consider what the transformed spaces could be, creating their own architectural models. Their desire for quieter, calmer ‘nooks’ inspired the architects to design a series of ‘Fragment Houses’ directly related to paintings in the collection, for children to read, draw or play inside. 

Architect Hannah Lawson spoke of the process of designing seating in the foyer: ‘The theatre steps, in particular, were inspired by our conversations with the younger audiences and school groups. We had great fun exploring the Gallery with them, rediscovering spaces we are so familiar with and seeing these through their perspectives. They were especially drawn to the mosaic steps outside Central Hall and it was here, on the steps, where they enjoyed sketching, chatting and reflecting on the works they had seen. We were struck by how they occupied these steps as their own collective space. Some sat in groups, others lay back looking up, the steps invited new ways of engaging with the collection and architecture around them.’

Of utmost importance in the development of the Centre is accessibility, both in terms of physical barriers to the space and a route into the Gallery for those who might perceive it’s not for them. Karen Eslea, Head of Learning at the National Gallery, said, ‘The National Gallery Collection is for everyone, everywhere. This Centre is such an inspiring environment and will enable us to welcome new learners of all ages and from all backgrounds. The transformed spaces will support fun and creative ways to explore National Gallery paintings, and will also enable children, young people and adults to develop new skills and have new experiences, and to inspire other people.

‘Many other organisations helped us to consider what the Centre, and the activities within it, could be. These include the Marjorie McClure School, which caters for pupils with a wide range of complex needs and disabilities, and the Cardinal Hume Centre which helps people facing poverty and the threat of homelessness in Westminster, enabling children and young people to turn their lives around. The feedback and experience of these and many other schools and community groups, together with the brilliant team at Lawson Ward Studio have made this space so much more than a building. The Roden Centre for Creative Learning is somewhere where everyone can start a lifelong journey with creativity through finding ways to connect with great paintings from the past .'

To launch the opening to the public, a special Friday Late (Friday 28 February) will include dance performances and DJ sets in the space, while drop-in programmes will include a drawing activity and a colour mixing lab, where people can create their own pigments based on historical methods. In The Creative Space, students from Wimbledon College of Art will showcase films about costumes designed and made from inspirations from the collection; and throughout the Gallery spaces alumni from Articulation, our national secondary schools programme, will be delivering spotlight talks on individual paintings. Compositions inspired by paintings in the Gallery’s collection, written by students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, will be premiered by a string quartet during the evening in Room 32, The Julia and Hans Rausing Gallery. 

The weekend will continue with free colour mixing labs, hat making workshops, and performances, while an array of drop-in family talks and tours will be taking place in the Gallery.

Materials for drawing in the centre including colouring pencils, pastels and Woody crayons   have been generously supplied by STABILO and pigments provided by Daler Rowney.

Sir Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, said: ‘We have understood the importance of an arts education for all for a very long time. What better time to be opening the doors to a creative learning centre, that prioritises inclusion and making our world class collection accessible to everyone, than when it is being given rightful prominence in the national conversation? We look forward to many people discovering the Gallery through The Roden Centre for Creative Learning for generations to come, and to being a part of many dialogues around the delights and benefits of an arts-enriched life. We express our deepest thanks to Stuart and Bianca Roden and the other funders for their support of our vision for this Centre.’

Notes to editors

The National Gallery

The National Gallery is one of the greatest art galleries in the world. Founded by Parliament in 1824, the Gallery houses the nation’s collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the late 13th to the early 20th century. The collection includes works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Bellini, Cezanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Van Gogh and Velázquez. The Gallery’s key objectives are to care for and enhance the collection and provide the best possible access to visitors. Admission free.

On 10 May 2024 the National Gallery was 200 years old, and we started our Bicentenary celebrations, a year-long festival of art, creativity and imagination, marking two centuries of bringing people and paintings together.

Later in the spring the Gallery will open a new entrance to the Sainsbury Wing, and a new Supporters’ House, as part of NG200: Welcome, a suite of capital projects celebrating the Bicentenary.

More information and book tickets at nationalgallery.org.uk

X (formerly Twitter) @NationalGallery  
Facebook @NationalGallery  
Instagram @NationalGallery  
YouTube @NationalGallery 
TikTok @NationalGalleryLondon  
Threads @NationalGallery 

Features and film are at nationalgallery.org.uk/stories

Press enquiries

Imogen Sebba, Press Manager NG200, imogen.sebba@nationalgallery.org.uk
National Gallery Press Office on 020 7747 2865 or email press.external@nationalgallery.org.uk
Publicity images can be obtained from ttps://press.nationalgallery.org.uk/