122 ELLE.COM/UK Nove mbe r 2O19
ELLEFeatureA
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Culture is big business in the capital: it generates
£52 billion a year, and one in six jobs is a creative
one. In a City Hall poll, four out of five said they
came to London for its culture. So Simons’ job
is as crucial to the economy of the city, and the
country, as some of parliament’s big jobs. But
there’s another reason she’s fighting the good
fight: because culture literally changed her life.y her own admission, Simons was no academic when
she was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent in the early
198Os. She was no conformist either. ‘If I had to wear
grey socks, I’d wear then with diamonds on them,’
she laughs. ‘Or if I had to wear a grey skirt, I would
look for another one with different types of pleats or studs. I rebelled
just enough to get away with it, but enough to express myself.’
Today you can see that in the way she still dresses. When we meet
it is at City Hall for a gathering of local councils. The room is distinctly
corporate – a sea of navy suits and sensible shoes. Simons, however, takes
to the stage in a top she picked up in Buenos Aires, a sweeping forest-green
skirt and a giant pair of vintage glasses she got at Spitalfields Market. (‘At
various points in my career, people have said to me: “You need to start
dressing in a more serious way, Justine”... and I’ve totally ignored them!’)“ CULTURE
DOESN’T just
HAPPEN INSIDE
TR ADITIONAL
T HE AT RES
or GALLERIES”What Simons and her team of 35 want to do is mammoth,
by anyone’s standards. There’s the fun stuff, like overseeing
Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, the empty plinth on which
different artists’ work are commissioned and hoisted high
above the crowds of London. She also oversees the London
Borough of Culture award, an initiative she helped get off
the ground in order to help raise the awareness of London’s
individual boroughs. (Waltham Forest was crowned 2O19’s
and, as a consequence has gone from a non descript north-
east suburb of London, to one of the most exciting places to
watch amateur theatre.) She is also the brains, networking
brawn and chief cheerleader for London’s East Bank, one of
the biggest and most ambitious projects in the history of the
city. East Bank will transform Stratford in East London into a
cultural wonderland, making it home to a second Sadler’s
Wells theatre, two Victoria & Albert museums (V&A East),
the London College of Fashion as well as The Smithsonian,
the first time the museum has ever operated outside the US.nd then, of course, there’s the other stuff. The
stuff that knots London together and yet is
fraying at the edges. The shuttering pubs,
clubs and music venues. The artists being
driven out by rising rents. The skateparks
and theatres disappearing to make way for flashy residential
properties. In response, Simons set up the Culture at Risk
Office in 2O17, a sort of Samaritans for those in the culture
business. Within a few weeks, it was inundated with pleas for
help. Save my studio! Help my music venue keep its licence!
Don’t let them build million-pound flats on top of my nightclub!
Sometimes she’ll be tagged in petitions campaigning to
save a studio or a club. Or, as often happens, the
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will simply take a
screenshot of a tweet and send it her way to sort.
Simons recently helped save The Southbank
Undercroft, the skatepark beside the River Thames.
For years, it had been little more than a couple
of concrete ramps with graffitied walls next to
the rows of book stalls on London’s Southbank,
which have been there since the 196Os. As a
young woman, I used to watch the kids who had
gathered from all corners of the capital to skate.
Over the years, the book stalls started to thin out,
and by 2O13 it looked like The Undercroft might,
too. Step forward Simons and her team at City Hall, who were not only
able to save it but – thanks to a £7OO,OOO grant – were able to
restore a further three quarters of the site that had been closed since the
199Os. She says it is one of her proudest moments in the job.
‘This kind of informal culture is really important to the capital,’ she
says. ‘Culture doesn’t just happen inside traditional theatres or galleries.’
She calls something like The Undercroft ‘intangible heritage’. ‘It doesn’t
have the same kinds of protection as a listed building, for example
but that doesn’t make it any less important to Londoners.’
She’s currently in the process of trying to save Harper Studios
in Woolwich (she got wind of its fragile future by a Change.org
petition). It’s one of the last remaining scene-painting studios in
London, and, she tells me sadly, it’s where David Hockney used to
paint. She’ll need to be quick, though – one-bedroom apartments
in the same building are being sold for £3OO,OOO.