We had all been there before. Lines of journalists in the corridor, corresponding wellington boots and hard hats in the boardroom, everyone in shapeless yellow tabards, being solemnly led out to the building
site. We could have been at Tate Modern, or Walsall, or the Royal Opera House. There was a year, somewhere back in Blair's first term, when the Lottery was uncapped and when every arts institution had a story beginning with hard hats and ending with champagne. This in fact was at the National Gallery, which is catching up with its own £21m project to revamp its East Wing.
The National applied for Lottery funding for the project last year, but unfortunately the application came at the same time as its successful appeal to "save" Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks. Two big Camelot pay days at once would have seemed excessive. So the Lottery rejected the application, at which point the family of that nice Mr Getty stepped in with ten million one-ers. Some £7m has been raised in addition. That just leaves the Lottery to cough up an extra £4m, which doesn't seem very arduous.
After all, the country needs lavatories in its national institutions. Have you seen the loos at the new extension to Tate Britain? Magnificent. There are no plans under the East Wing project to extend or refurbish any galleries within the National, but it is all about public amenities for the gallery's 4.5 million visitors annually. As the National Gallery's sanguine director, Charles Saumarez Smith, plaintively explained: "All the national collections inherited largely Victorian institutions designed only for the experience of looking at paintings, and nothing else." A gallery is so much more these days - it is also about shopping, watching movies and eating at a "destination restaurant", which must be spectacular, either balancing on the roof of the gallery (Baltic), or at the crest of the nation's longest escalator (National Portrait Gallery), or boasting the best possible views (Tate Modern).
At which point one arts hack raised his hand. "What visitors want in terms of refreshment at the National Gallery is merely to have a cup of tea and a buttered bun. Nothing more." Saumarez Smith approached this with the smooth ease that the driver of the No 77A Routemaster bus might use when turning into Trafalgar Square. "I can assure you that buttered buns will be available at the new gallery cafe." Indeed, he has already contracted the catering to Digby Trout, which, we learned, is a master in "daytime heritage catering". As opposed to night-time, non-heritage catering, or what you might call running a restaurant.
But even this is not beyond Saumarez Smith. "In the long term, we aspire to opening the restaurant in the evenings. The pattern of museum visits is changing throughout Europe." From the Prado and the Louvre, across to the Hermitage and up to the National Galleries of Scotland, people are baying for art after sundown, and a buttered bun simply will not suffice.
During the walkabout, Saumarez Smith intrigued us with visions of outdoor eating, of new cloakrooms, of putting in air-conditioning and taking away columns. "Are you an academic, or an impresario?" asked someone. The director laughed. Just call him an expert in daytime heritage catering, for now.
