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New Gallery (London)


The New Gallery is a Crown Estate-owned Grade II Listed building at 121 Regent Street, London, which originally was an art gallery from 1888 to 1910, The New Gallery Restaurant from 1910 to 1913, The New Gallery Cinema from 1913 to 1953, and a Seventh-day Adventist Church from 1953 to 1992. After having been empty for more than ten years, the building was a Habitat furniture store from 2006 to 2011, and since September 2012 it is a flagship store for Burberry.

The New Gallery was founded in 1888 by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé. Carr and Hallé had been co-directors of Sir Coutts Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery, but resigned from that troubled gallery in 1887. The building was designed by Edward Robert Robson FSA, and constructed in little more than three months to ensure that it could open in the summer of 1888.

The gallery was built on the site of an old fruit market. Existing cast-iron columns supporting the roof were encased with marble to give the impression of "massive marble shafts" topped with gilded Greek capitals. The architrave, frieze, and cornices above the columns were covered with platinum leaf. At the opening, the West and North Galleries on the ground floor were devoted to oil paintings, and the first floor balcony around the Central Hall displayed smaller works in oils, watercolours, etchings and drawings. Sculpture was displayed in the Central Hall itself.


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