Illustration by Chris Riddell for The Observer
In 2002 Quentin Blake launched a campaign for a dedicated centre to champion illustration in all its forms. This found a home for a number of years in King’s Cross, as the House of Illustration. Unfortunately, Covid came and forced it to close its doors. But Blake and his many supporters refused to give up. Now, more than 20 years after his visionary idea, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration has opened its doors to the public, with great squawks of delight from his illustrated mascots: a flock of brightly coloured cockatoos.
I went along, sketchbook in hand, to celebrate the opening. I came to a discreet pair of gates. Stepping through this wardrobe-like entrance, I found myself in a perfectly renovated Narnia-like museum. Winter and the witch have been banished and the long derelict 18th-century waterworks at New River Head in London’s Clerkenwell have blossomed into three spacious galleries, a stunning cafe and garden, a studio space and a library stocked with hundreds of books, comics, graphic novels, picture books and zines. This is a truly magical space and deserves to become a place of pilgrimage not just for old illustrators like myself, but generations of new creators in search of inspiration. “We hope to inspire them to look at the world afresh,” says Lindsey Glen, the centre’s director, “and empower them with new creative skills and tools of their own.”
Like many illustrators, I think on paper, and it seemed fitting to record my impressions of this permanent national centre of illustration in illustrative form. In these uncertain times we need places like the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration more than ever. As rich CEOs of g lobal tech companies lecture graduating arts students about the need to accept AI, this museum at the end of a quiet lane in Islington promotes the opposite view. As vast data centres pollute water to produce AI slop, how fitting that a renovated waterworks celebrates human creativity. To find out for yourself, follow the cockatoos.
Chris Riddell is The Observer’s cartoonist and a former children’s laureate. The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, London EC1, is open Wednesdays to Sundays; qbcentre.org.uk