Europe’s largest hub of the performing arts, which great musicians the world over once called home, is now a grim laboratory, obsessed with a ‘diversity’ that taints everything it touches.

We hate, thought Keats, things that have ‘a palpable design upon us’. Under the direction of Misan Harriman, chairman of trustees, the Southbank Centre increasingly resembles a political boot camp, where slackers are herded for re-education.

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The Royal Festival Hall, its centre-piece, is a dump. Where there used to be a well-stocked bookshop and a place to buy records, there are now battalions of laptop-tapping students and scruffs of all ages, some plainly up to no good. And the transformation has been deliberate. ‘No snobs here’ is the message. Snobbery, in this case, meaning those odd folk who want to hear the finest music ever composed in pleasant surroundings.

To mark the hall’s 75th anniversary earlier this month, the Southbank invited Danny Boyle to shake things up. His response was You Are Here, a celebration of British ‘youth culture’ which the film director described as ‘curated chaos’. For Richard Morrison, writing in the Times, the all-day show represented ‘a new low in pointlessness’.

Morrison has subsequently damned Harriman’s five years at the helm as........

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