It was Jacob Rees-Mogg who christened it a festival of Brexit – a moniker that might well have cursed it from the beginning.
Announced by Theresa May in the aftermath of Britain’s referendum on EU membership, and supposedly inspired by the 1851 Great Exhibition and 1951’s Festival of Britain, the then prime minister heralded a programme of events to be held this year to “showcase what makes our country great today”.
But four years on – and after two re-brandings – the public spending watchdog is to investigate what became known as Unboxed: Creativity in the UK, amid concern that visitor numbers have been less than 1% of early targets.
The National Audit Office (NAO) will examine how the £120m project was managed. About 240,000 visitors are reported to have visited events, in contrast to an early target of 66 million.
The Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee called for the investigation last month after previously finding the festival to be an “irresponsible use of public money” and criticising its planning as a “recipe for failure”.
“That such an exorbitant amount of public cash has been spent on a so-called celebration of creativity that has barely failed to register in the public consciousness raises serious red flags about how the project has been managed from conception through to delivery,” said the Conservative MP Julian Knight, who is chairman of the cross-party committee.
Martin Green, who was one of the masterminds behind the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics and took on the role of heading what he had initially feared might be “a jingoistic jamboree”, has said that it was dogged by being nicknamed the “festival of Brexit”, after it attracted a fraction of the target visitor numbers.
“Rule one of major events: don’t politicise them. And unfortunately a few chose to politicise it from the beginning,” he told the political journal the House in August.
On Monday, a spokesperson for the festival said that reported figures, particularly the 240,000 figure for visitor numbers, misrepresented public engagement and reflected attendance at only eight of the 107 physical locations within the programme.
“Unboxed’s art, science and tech commissions have been presented in over 100 towns, cities and villages, engaged millions across live and digital and employed thousands of creatives around the UK,” the spokesperson added.
A DCMS spokesperson said the government did not agree with the select committee’s views on the festival, adding that it had “helped open access to arts and culture across the country”. He claimed that more than 4 million people had “engaged” with its programming so far.
But while those involved in Unboxed feel confident they will have a better story to tell the NAO than the paltry figures attributed to the event, what is not in doubt is that it has been tough going at times.
Some artists ran a mile from the project, including the remain-supporting comedian Josie Long, who pulled out in 2020 after learning that the event was a rebranding of what had earlier been widely ridiculed as a “festival of Brexit”.
At the same time, unimpressed Brexiter Tory MPs complained that the B-word was missing from the title, while officials at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport were said to have fretted that the project had strayed so far from the original idea that it had lost a connection to a sense of “Britishness”.
When it got under way – albeit into the headwinds of a society distracted by Covid-19, Ukraine, the death of the Queen and a new age of austerity – some artists involved appeared to have taken it upon themselves to use funding to subvert the original idea.
What followed – after 10 projects were selected from nearly 300 submitted ideas – was what Green has described as a “once-in-a-lifetime” extravaganza that draws on arts, science, engineering, technology and maths.
The last scheduled live event is on 6 November and involves one of the festival’s more successful projects: Our Place in Space, a touring, scale model of the solar system that combines 5 miles of sculpture trails with an interactive augmented reality app. Having already been in Northern Ireland and Cambridge, it is to go to Liverpool.
