The exterior as you approach from King’s Cross Station is a little austere, its horizontal cladding perhaps having a link back to the former Daily Express Building in Fleet Street, which would be appropriate as this is the headquarters of the Guardian and Observer newspapers.   The street façade could, however, be considered to be the back, presenting a hard impenetrable face onto the streets outside, normally busy with traffic with cranes busy on more construction around King’s Cross, London’s new destination, though all now much quieter due to the current the pandemic.  Inside is a different world, a world of art, leading through to the softer edge of the building facing onto Regent’s Canal and Battlebridge Basin.

When opened in 2008 to designs by the architects Dixon Jones, Kings Place was the first major multi-use new arts venue since the Barbican was built in the 1980′s. with two concert halls, space for events and art, and a partner art gallery, Pangolin London, with its expansive windows looking out over the changing urban scene outside.

An excellent partnership which means that Kings Place has its own Sculpture Trail organised by Pangolin London, which also has a bronze foundry in Gloucestershire, changing exhibitions in the lower level public spaces – the most recent being ‘Nature Unwrapped’ with artists such as David Mach, Charlotte Mayer, George Taylor and Bryan Kneale illustrating their different views of the beauty of the natural world, linked to a programme of concerts and other events following the same theme, and the Pangolin Gallery itself which, on a wet grey February day, was showing the versatility and variety of work by the British sculptor Jeff Lowe including prints, sculptures and jewellery, with his fresh new work different in form and colour to that shown here in 2018.

Reminding us of one of the many stars of the London cultural scene which are temporarily closed due to coronavirus.