As we reported in ai 250, Newcastle’s new Waygood Gallery is five years overdue, and though it should open this summer, its budget has doubled and ACE and the city council are planning to withdraw funding. Pauline Menard reports on what happened
Few people outside the North East are likely to have noticed, but a major row over the future of Newcastle’s Waygood Gallery has been simmering busily for the last few months, with a massive capital overspend, a government minister accusing Newcastle City Council of “misleading” him over the affair, employment tribunals, and various leaked reports and resignations.
Waygood, a largely artist-run space in the centre of Newcastle, was originally due to re-open as a gallery with artists’ studios in 2005 at a cost of £4.7m – the first building in the UK designed by the esteemed Viennese practice Jabornegg and Palffy, who worked on Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz in Vienna. At the moment, the final cost looks likely to be around £10.5m, and the gallery may re-open this summer.
However, it now seems as if Newcastle City Council and the Arts Council are going to refuse to fund Waygood and try to get another operator to run the gallery. Newcastle City Council has already pulled the plug, saying “the city council has decided that it cannot move forward with Waygood as the operator”, while the Arts Council meets on March 31 to decide on the future of the gallery, having “formally notified Waygood that we are considering withdrawing funding from the organisation”. Oh, and the district auditor has been called in to investigate as well.
What on earth went wrong? There seem to have been a number of factors, and the city council cannot escape blame for the cost over-runs. Indeed Peter Allen, the city council’s executive member for resources, admitted that one of the questions the council needed to ask itself was, “how did we get ourselves into this mess”.
In November, the gallery was condemned in an employment tribunal. Artist Topsy Qur’et brought the case against Waygood on grounds of unfair dismissal. After an acrimonious case the tribunal found in Topsy Qur’et’s favour, saying he was “without blame”, the evidence given by Waygood’s chief executive Helen Smith was described as “lacking credibility”, and that she acted in a “not normal and unpredictable” way, had “inherently weak” judgement and was “prone to lose control”, and that one of the witnesses called by the management gave evidence that “bordered on the ridiculous”.
After the tribunal, the Arts Council and Newcastle City Council commissioned Susan Royce to write a report on the organisation’s viability.
Although initially refusing to make the report public, a Freedom of Information request extracted a heavily redacted version from the Arts Council. Nearly 50% of the report is a sea of black ink, sometimes inconsistently applied - for example, on one page the size of a loan from the city council to the gallery is redacted, while on another it is left in at £335,000. What was left in includes the statement that Waygood has “a worrying lack of strategic and management skills and experience”, a recommendation that the chair of Waygood, Esther Salamon, resign immediately, and a plan for the replacement of Helen Smith be implemented.
Very unusually for the part-time non-executive chair of a not-for-profit organisation, Ms Salamon was handsomely paid for her work - around £12,000 a year according to the latest accounts. Some weeks after the recommendations were made she resigned, and in the last couple of weeks has been followed off the board by a city councillor and a partner in Evershed’s, a local law firm.
Partly due to the chair’s initial refusal to go quietly, the Arts Council and the city council have clearly lost confidence in Waygood, and another organisation will be brought in to run the building. In the meantime, Waygood are being taken to a second employment tribunal by another member of staff who is claiming constructive dismissal, and in April have to attend the “remedies hearing” of the first tribunal,at which financial compensation to the unfairly dismissed Topsy Qur’et will be awarded.
Tony Durcan, head of arts and libraries at the city council, conceded: “It is not Waygood’s fault that the capital project has cost a lot more money than was originally thought” - begging the question of whose fault it was. And Newcastle’s arts and libraries department do have form in squandering public money - only last year they gave planning permission, under delegated officers’ powers, for an artist to construct a hotel bedroom around the statue of Earl Grey on top of Grey’s Monument – the Newcastle equivalent of Nelson’s Column. They then changed their minds and insisted the project apply for planning permission to the councillors in the normal way, where it was turned down - and between being granted planning permission and subsequently being turned down for it, some £250,000 of public money was spent.
What next? Waygood will limp on for a few months while it still has some funding before probably folding, and confidence in Newcastle’s arts bureaucrats has taken another bashing. But it remains a fact that a very splendid new gallery and artists’ studio complex has been constructed right in the heart of the city centre, so let’s hope that another organisation - the excellent Vane Gallery, currently housed in what can only be described as a dump behind Newcastle station, has been mentioned - will come in and successfully run the gallery that is now nearing completion.
