Any regular visitor to London’s contemporary art galleries will likely be familiar with New Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Neca), a foldout listing and map of exhibitions. It has, since it was founded in 1978, been an indispensable guide for those seeking out galleries, from national museums to the most obscure small spaces down hidden alleyways. Its founder was Kay Roberts, who worked at the now defunct Coracle Gallery and later went on to run Actualities Gallery.
She remembers discussing the need to draw in visitors to contemporary galleries with Nicholas Logsdail, the director of the Lisson Gallery, in a London pub. “At the time—the mid-1970s—Cork Street was dominant,” she recalls. “Those of us running small contemporary galleries, like Coracle, were showing great work but frustrated at getting little notice and therefore few visitors. The idea for Neca was that it could be picked up free from any of the galleries listed and then used to visit others on the list. Each gallery would have a location on a map to help widen the focus of the public in what was happening outside central London. The first issue in May 1978 had 24 galleries listed.”
That figure has risen to 197 in London alone, including 135 commercial galleries. Roberts says she could not have envisaged such a dramatic rise in interest. “However, I had been to work in other cities in Europe in the early 1980s, where I saw the creative power of imaginative gallerists and the economic potential of small collectors,” she says. “That London should take its rightful place in this creative scene has been great to witness.”
New Exhibitions merged with Pluk, an index and magazine to the photography scene in the UK, in 2001 and Daniel Newburg took over from Roberts a few years later. Newburg describes Neca as “a measure of the respiration of the art world in London, the UK and Ireland… It is the record of practically all the meaningful contemporary art exhibitions held on these islands going back nearly 40 years.”
He notes that it is not just the galleries arriving from overseas, such as Gagosian (from 2000) and David Zwirner (from 2012) that have fuelled London’s art-world energy. “Native galleries have also increased their programme and spaces.” And he doesn’t expect a decline in the number of galleries listed in Neca. “We did anticipate greater fallout from economic and political shifts over the last decade, especially funding cuts among public galleries, and newer galleries finding they couldn’t make it,” he says. “But for the few that cut back, others have appeared—both in and outside of London—and because we drive audiences to the galleries, which is their bread and butter, they want to be included.”
The resurgence of the West End: London’s gallery growth as seen by Neca
We chose three editions of New Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Neca) to plot the map of London’s changing commercial scene. The first was published in September/October 1988, the month that Nicholas Serota took over at the Tate Gallery, and the second part of Freeze, Damien Hirst’s seminal exhibition of Goldsmiths students’ work, was on view in London’s Docklands. The next was May/June 2000, the moment that Tate Modern opened. And then we took the current issue.
We compiled lists of the galleries from those publications and worked out the boroughs in which they were based. Though not 100% comprehensive (some pop-ups and small-scale galleries inevitably don’t feature), no other publication has documented commercial galleries’ presence in London as thoroughly over as long a period as Neca. The results show huge overall growth in commercial galleries, the rise of the East around the millennium, a small bounce in Tate Modern’s borough, Southwark—and the spectacular return to power of the West End, with its galleries in Mayfair, St James’s and Fitzrovia.
No longer with us: some defunct London galleries • Actualities
• Albion
• ASB Gallery
• Backroom
• BCA Boukamel Contemporary Art
• Edward Totah Gallery
• Fabian Carlsson Gallery
• Fischer Fine Art Ltd
• Five Princelet Street
• Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery
• Fuse Gallery
• Gallery K
• Hotel
• JPL Gallery
• Knoedler
• Lefevre Fine Art
• Mafuji Gallery
• Marlene Eleini Gallery
• Nicola Jacobs Gallery
• Nigel Greenwood Gallery
• Odette Gilbert Gallery
• One in the Other
• Robert Sandelson Gallery
• Smith's Galleries
• Yvon Lambert