The future is yellow: revisiting Adam Ant's Corbusian stairwell

So what does that Southbank stairwell look like now? Er, the stairwell in the photo of Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni in the 1980 CBS Catalogue booklet I blogged about the other day. This one: 

Yes, because after finishing my must-read post on A&TA I thought I'd quickly visit the Southbank Centre and check out the stairwell all these (46) years later. Did the stairwell even exist after nearly half a century? And also, how would I find it in the sprawling Southbank area, with all its multi-level ramps, walkways and skatepark chaos? Easy. I found what looked like the exact spot on Google Street View in about two minutes. Going down there last Thursday, dodging all the tourists and commuters (including former Tory MP, Dominic Grieve, entering Temple tube as I was exiting), I then found it straight away. And here it is, resplendent (is that the word?) in banana-ish yellow.

Er, yeah, yellow. Very yellow. And here's my imperfect recreation of the actual Ant-Pirroni shot:

Yellowness apart, not much has changed. In the 1980 pic there seems to be a double panel of concrete above the window (of the Queen Elizabeth Hall) on the upper-left, whereas now there's just one. Could they have removed one row of panels to enlarge the window? Seems slightly unlikely with a building like this. Or perhaps the concrete panels themselves have been changed, so that they now look like one row of panels? Hmm, dunno, man. Anyway, the big change is the yellow slapped all over the exterior of the stairwell, as well as numerous other yellow signs and staircases now dotted about the Southbank estate. Apparently, this bright yellow is considered to be the core identity of the present-day Southbank, part of a now well-established 21st-century trend where predominantly grey concrete urban environments are "updated" with a palette of bright colours. I gather - after exhaustive architectural research (ie a few minutes spent online, including reading this) - that the yellowing of the Southbank took place in 2003, and was retained in a later refurbishment in 2017. The Twentieth Century Society's Catherine Croft says that the yellow of the "Corbusian access stairs" was kept in place partly for cost reasons and partly because the Southbank felt that raw concrete has "negative connotations for some potential visitors, and still needs to be tamed". Oh dear, worried that your own building is too scary? Too (ahem) brutal? Though there's now a rather facile counterview that fetishises Brutalism (Brutalist tea towels anyone?), the supposedly forbidding nature of an urban environment comprising huge slabs of concrete (and steel and glass) was, of course, exactly what the PR people at CBS were almost certainly tapping into with their Ant-Pirroni publicity photo. A dollop of architecture as alienation. Think The Clash and the Westway (not least Jon Savage's famous January 1977 graffiti photo), or - staying with roads - the equally famous Kevin Cummins Joy Division shot (whiteness, space, verticals, medium-rise tower blocks). My own favourite of this punk/post-punk genre is the photo on (I think) the inner sleeve to Athletico Spizz 80's Do A Runner album. This one: 

Clock are big/Machines are heavy: Athletico Spizz 80 about to move into their new flat

What is that lovely concrete building behind them? Answers on a postcard, please. There was obviously a lot of this around in the late-70s. Chris Petit's Bowie and Kraftwerk-suffused Radio On showed us the cold beauty of late-70s inner-city London, and Charles E Salem's No City Fun Joy Division film showcased the urban delights of late-70s Manchester. Buildings and roadscapes looming large, the music downbeat, gloomy, ominous. The same - or something similar - could probably be said for drum and bass, grime and dubstep (perhaps dubstep especially), and I guess it's no surprise that music responds to the built environment in ways like this. In the post-punk period, the sense of urban "decay" or of some kind of urban "threat" was probably being used as an aesthetic shorthand for the unease of a lot of post-punk music. As the Municipal Dreams blog and book shows, a lot of the public housing and civic buildings constructed in the twentieth-century was well-intentioned. Decent housing for the people; improved public spaces for all; confidence in the future and a general sense that things could be built better. If by the late-70s this was (literally) starting to fall apart, not least because buildings weren't being properly maintained, then it's understandable that punk/post-punk appropriated some of this in its music and design. But yeah, what about that yellow stairwell? On balance, I think the Southbank should probably have stuck with the original all-shades-of-grey vision rather than go slightly crazy with this custard-isation. That said, I think it's also the case that a canvas of concrete - and various forms of "industrial" aesthetic - can work quite well with dashes of added colour. The Southbank yellow is quite similar to the yellow of Ben Kelly's Haçienda, a building which cleverly balanced neutrality and statement colour. It's also true that punk itself was far more colourful than we tend to remember, not least because so many photos of the era are in black and white making it all seem misleadingly monochrome (Lavinia Greenlaw is quite good on the "colours of punk", and also Simon Barker's photos showed the lively coloufulness of some early punk). So, anyway, here we are, in supercolourful 2026, looking back at that 46-year-old photo of Ant and Pirroni and admiring its bleached urban chic. But look closely and doesn't it appear that there's a wash of paint on the rim of that curving stairwell and even the signs of paint having run in large rivulets down the insides? Blimey Adam, you might be getting paint all over your lovely biker's jacket.