Culture has been “erased” from communities and curriculums, according to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy who vowed to make the arts more accessible by announcing new funding for England’s “crumbling” cultural infrastructure.
The £270m fund will support attractions “in urgent need of financial support to keep them up and running, helping to carry out vital infrastructure work and improve long-term financial resilience”, according to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Nandy said: “For too many young people in this country, culture hasn’t just been erased from the curriculum, it’s been erased from our communities as well.
“The Arts Everywhere Fund is designed specifically to address that, to make sure that communities who value their heritage and the contribution that they’ve made to this country can still continue to open those institutions to communities and tell that story as part of our national story.”
The money includes £120m, which will be available to 17 leading institutions such as the British Museum, National Gallery and National Museums Liverpool, which all get money directly from the DCMS.
Those venues will also receive a 5% increase in their annual grants, but that increase will not be given to institutions that get their money from Arts Council England. Nandy said that the money would “shore up those institutions that are at risk of closure” and support our “crumbling infrastructure”.
The cost of capital projects can easily run into millions. The Octagon theatre in Bolton underwent a programme of works with an estimated cost of £10m, while some theatres built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) have been quoted similar amounts to have it removed and repaired.
When asked if the money will go far enough, Nandy said the government investment should lead to more philanthropic funds flowing away from London and into the regions.
She said: “Small amounts of government money can unlock much larger sums. Over the last decade and a half, we’ve seen philanthropy step in to fill the gap that’s been lost from some government funding. But the problem is so much of that has been targeted towards a handful of major institutions, mostly in London.”
The announcement was timed to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of Jennie Lee’s white paper on the arts. When Lee became the first arts minister in 1964 she tripled the Arts Council grant over a six-year period, and pumped resources into regional arts institutions.
Nandy said that today not enough children felt comfortable in the country’s cultural institutions.
“I come from a family that is heavily steeped in the theatre,” said Nandy, whose father sat on the board of the National Theatre and whose sister worked at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
“I’m very comfortable in those spaces … I’m welcome, where I belong. But too many kids growing up today just don’t have that feeling. They don’t have that belief. One of the things I’m going to ask the arts world to do more of today is to open their doors to the communities to make sure that they are properly community spaces.”
Earlier this week, the government confirmed a £10m investment into the British Library North in Leeds, while a further £5m went to the National Poetry Centre in the same city as part of a £47m fund for culture projects.
The £10m for the British Library North will be spent revamping the Egyptian-style Temple Works building, which is a derelict Grade I-listed building that will be converted into a northern outpost for the library. The £5m for the National Poetry Centre will renovate a Grade II-listed building to create a national headquarters for poetry.
