At 93 Quentin Blake Has Finally Opened The Illustration Centre Hes Spent 25 Years Fighting For

Creative Boom: News Illustration At 93, Quentin Blake is finally getting illustrators the public recognition they deserve Twenty-five years in the making, the Quentin Blake Illustration Centre will open this June. And it makes a powerful case for a discipline that's lacked attention and prestige for far too long. Written By: Tom May 5 May 2026 If you've spent any time in the creative industries, you'll have noticed that illustration occupies a strange, slightly insecure position in the cultural hierarchy.

It's everywhere, it shapes how we understand everything from medicine to politics to childhood, and yet it rarely gets the institutional respect afforded to fine art, design or even typography. Quentin Blake, the 93-year-old artist responsible for the BFG, Matilda, Mrs Armitage and around 500 other books, has spent the best part of three decades doing practical to solve that. And on Friday 5 June, he'll finally get to see the result. The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opens its doors in Clerkenwell this summer.

Housed in a beautifully restored 18th-century waterworks at New River Head, it's the world's largest permanent public space dedicated to illustration, and it has been a very long time coming. Quentin first pushed for a national centre during his tenure as Britain's inaugural children's laureate, from 1999 to 2001. A smaller version, the House of Illustration, operated in King's Cross from 2014 to 2020, but rented premises limited the ambition. Now, with a £12.5 million project behind it, including £3.75 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the charity finally has a permanent home.

It's worth pausing on what all that actually means. Illustration is, as Quentin puts it, both art and entertainment—and that's precisely why it's been so easy to dismiss. "At one time, painters told stories," he recently told The Telegraph, citing Tintoretto's ceiling at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice as, essentially, a very prestigious illustration job. His point is that the line between high art and applied image-making has always been blurry, and the instinct to police it says more about institutional snobbery than it does about the work itself.

The new centre is, among other things, a very large, very well-funded argument in favour of that position; one that's been 25 years in the making. Drawing as performance Its opening exhibitions are a good indication of what the Centre wants to stand for: they're broad, surprising and committed to illustration in the widest possible sense. The flagship show is Quentin Blake: Performance, running from 5 June until May 2027, and it's the first to explore how theatrical traditions have shaped Quentin's almost 80-year career.

There are more than 100 original works on paper, many never publicly displayed, including preparatory sketches, rarely seen magazine illustrations, and nearly 40 new depictions of Macbeth characters as birds. The theatre connection runs deep. Quentin has described drawing as being "like acting, but you don't have to learn the words". When he draws an arm in motion, he says, it's not anatomy he's thinking about, it's gesture: "If it's a very strong gesture, you might make the arm a bit longer.

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The establishment of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration is significant for the brand/design industry as it elevates the status of illustration, which can influence brand strategies, though the concept of dedicated art centers is not entirely new.