For months, rumours have trickled out of Somerset House suggesting the Courtauld was gearing up for something big—bigger than a refit, bigger than a gallery rehang. Now it’s official.
The Courtauld has announced plans for a sweeping new London campus, a once-in-a-generation overhaul that aims to carry the institution into its second century with a kind of quiet swagger. It’s the sort of news that makes people in the visual-arts world look up from their coffee, because when the Courtauld moves, the rest of the field tends to shuffle after it.
The headline version is simple enough: a complete transformation of the Courtauld’s remaining spaces at Somerset House, stitched together with a row of historic Strand townhouses. But the subtext tells a larger story—about who gets to study art history in this country, who gets to walk into those rooms, and whether the discipline can survive another decade of cuts, closures, and political meddling.
The new campus, slated to open in 2029, arrives courtesy of a masterplan drawn up by Witherford Watson Mann—yes, the same Stirling Prize-winning studio that recently refashioned the Courtauld Gallery into something lighter, sharper, more open. They’re back for another round, this time joined by Purcell and Lawson Ward Studio. Together they’re tasked with turning the Grade I-listed warren of Somerset House into a connected, flexible, thoroughly modern art-history machine. It’s a big brief. The plan includes new teaching spaces, a lecture theatre, a major library carved into the vaults beneath Somerset House, and—perhaps most significantly—an entrance that finally opens directly onto the Strand instead of forcing visitors to hunt around the courtyard like confused tourists.
It’s oddly touching, this wish to reunite the Courtauld Institute and its Gallery under one roof again. They drifted apart over time, both geographically and administratively, like siblings who moved to opposite sides of the river and never quite got around to dinner. Now they’ll be stitched back together—students, curators, conservators, historians, the whole sprawling family—sharing the same corridors and coffee queues. In a city where most cultural institutions feel like sealed compounds, that’s a small but meaningful shift.
But the building is only one piece of the story. The Courtauld also chose this moment to release a rather stark report by the Association for Art History on the state of art history teaching in UK secondary schools. It’s not exactly cheerful reading.
The number of schools offering History of Art A-level has collapsed by a third since 2016; only 19 state schools nationwide still teach it. In Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the subject barely exists. And in England, it clings on mostly in London and the Southeast, leaving vast swathes of the country without any structured way for teenagers to study visual culture in depth.
Yet—and here’s the twist—student numbers are up. A-level entries have climbed by 42% since 2019, even with fewer schools teaching the course. Universities have held steady, too, refusing to buckle the way other humanities departments have. There’s a demand brewing, quietly, despite everything.
You can see why the Courtauld is leaning into access now. It’s not a philanthropic garnish; it’s structural. They’ve committed to working with national partners to widen the pipeline, to push art history back into schools where it’s vanished. There’s talk of a new fund to expand scholarships and bursaries, the sort of serious financial intervention that could change the makeup of future cohorts. Professor Mark Hallett, the Courtauld’s Märit Rausing Director, insists this is about preserving the founding vision—Samuel Courtauld’s old dream of “art for all.” Lofty words that risk sounding quaint if left to wilt. But paired with a redesigned campus and a nationwide access programme, they start to feel like a strategy rather than nostalgia.
The Courtauld’s expansion also mirrors a shift in its academic bearings. The Institute is pushing harder into global art histories—Americas, African diaspora, the arts of Asia, Islamic and Iranian visual cultures—while shoring up its traditional European strengths. New MA programmes in Art and Business and Curating signal a pragmatic response to the market’s changing demands; the art world, for better or worse, is a place where the border between scholarship and commerce has thinned to a thread.
And behind all this, the quiet hum of philanthropy powers everything. The Reuben Foundation’s headline gift, support from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and a long list of other patrons—Deborah Loeb Brice, Garfield Weston, Oak, Wolfson, Georgia and David Winter, and more—have effectively given the Courtauld a century-long runway. It’s easy to be cynical about mega-donor culture, and easier still to ignore that without it, most ambitious cultural projects in Britain would evaporate overnight. For now, the Courtauld has what so many institutions lack: a plan, the means to carry it out, and enough confidence to announce it publicly.
Architecturally, Witherford Watson Mann has become something of a specialist in coaxing new forms out of old shells. They’re returning to Somerset House with Purcell—masters of heritage conservation—and Lawson Ward Studio, a younger practice that’s quickly become a quiet favourite among cultural institutions. The team feels unusually aligned. Purcell has spent decades defending historic fabric while finding clever ways to adapt it; Lawson Ward has already worked with the National Gallery, the Science Museum, and the Wallace Collection; and Witherford Watson Mann has a talent for making buildings feel both grounded and strangely liberated, as if they’d been waiting to breathe.
Somerset House itself is a beast—grand, brittle, layered with history, and always a challenge. The prospect of threading a unified campus through its rooms, vaults, and neighbouring Strand houses is ambitious, maybe even audacious. But if they pull it off, the Courtauld could emerge as something rare: a world-class teaching and research centre wrapped around a central public gallery, right in the middle of London, porous rather than fortified.
The Courtauld Gallery, meanwhile, continues carrying the weight of its own legends—Van Gogh’s bandaged ear, Manet’s cocktail-party melancholy, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist jewels that draw crowds even on rainy Tuesday mornings. It’s easy to forget, wandering through those rooms, that the Gallery and Institute were built on an old belief that anyone could learn to see. That close looking wasn’t a luxury but a kind of civic training. If this redevelopment delivers what it promises, that belief might have a new home.
By the time the Courtauld’s centenary arrives in 2032, the institution will look radically different from the one Samuel Courtauld founded in 1932. But maybe that’s the point. Art history has never stood still, though plenty of people keep wishing it would. The Courtauld’s new campus—vaults, townhouses, Strand entrance and all—feels like a bet on motion, on opening doors rather than closing ranks, and on the possibility that the next generation might see something the rest of us have missed.
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