20th Anniversary of the Opening of the Lux Centre, Hoxton Square

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of our predecessor, the ill-fated Lux Centre in Hoxton Square in 1997. Planned as a permanent and custom-designed home for the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and London Electronic Arts, the Lux Centre marked the first major wave of gentrification of the Shoreditch area. The building incorporated a cinema, gallery, archives, production suites and education spaces and existed for almost exactly 3 years until it went into liquidation in October 2001. The project was led by the organisations’ then funder, the British Film Institute, who developed the project and took on the lease for the building. LFMC and LEA quickly ran into financial problems due to cost overruns on the development of the building and the increased costs of running the expanded space, this was then exacerbated by BFI funding withdrawn as it lost its funding role to the UK Film Council, with the final nail being spiralling rent costs due to the new desirability of the Shoreditch area. Despite cost saving exercises such as merging LFMC and LEA into the organisation also called The Lux Centre, and a period of time in the Arts Council of England’s ‘Recovery Programme’ (an emergency programme for organisations that had suffered boom and bust expansion because of the National Lottery capital programme), funding was withdrawn and the trustees took the company into liquidation and laid off the staff in October 2001. Benjamin Cook and Mike Sperlinger then set up the new LUX in 2002, originally to project and preserve the organisations’ collection of artists’ film and video and the rest is history…

During its time the Lux Centre produced an extraordinarily diverse range of programming across its gallery and cinema as well as producing two editions of its Pandaemonium Festival. You can explore the whole archive of Lux Centre programmes on issue

To mark the anniversary we are also presenting a recently discovered video of the opening of the Lux Gallery (then called the LEA Gallery) in October 1997. The gallery opened with the exhibition Stasi City by Jane and Louise Wilson and a series of commissions (all of which can be seen in the video) including an LED light installation on the staircase by Darryl Viner, a sculpture of an oversized pizza delivery scooter by Elizabeth Wright, a videotheque to view works from the LEA collection by Angela Bulloch, window projections by Graham Wood/ Tomato and outdoor projection structure by Housewatch in Hoxton Square. You can also see opening speeches by Mick Flood, who was chairman of LEA (and had been Director of the ICA) and Christopher Frayling as well as Gilbert and George as the celebrity ribbon cutters.