The Ashmolean, Blist’s Hill and Herbert Museum and Art Gallery have all beaten by the rejuvenated Ulster Museum in Belfast to the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for the museum of the year

The Ulster Museum was one of a generation of Victorian patrician institutions based on the enthusiasms of local history and botanical societies whose collections were installed in large and forbidding neo-classical piles that tended to shout “Keep Out!” to anyone not of a certain scholarly standing.

That it has pipped populist displays like Ironbridge Gorge’s Blist’s Hill (the recreation of a 19th century town), the transformed academic faculty that is Oxford’s Ashmolean, and Coventry’s Herbert which is already the Guardian’s Family Friendly museum of the year, says everything about how the Belfast contender has shaken off its austere grandeur.

“We were moved and invigorated by our visit to the Ulster Museum” said Kirsty Young, the chair of the judges who were Kathy Gee, museums and heritage adviser; A C Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London; Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London; Sally Osman, former director of communications, at the BBC; Lars Tharp, director of the Foundling Museum; and the artist Jonathan Yeo.

“Here” said Young “is a museum that shows how much can be achieved, and one that is building a lasting legacy. We were impressed by the interactive learning spaces on each level that are filled with objects which visitors are encouraged to touch and explore, and by how the museum’s commitment to reaching all parts of its community is reflected in the number and diversity of its visitors. The transformed Ulster Museum is an emblem of the confidence and cultural rejuvenation of Northern Ireland.”

And Stephen Deuchar, director of the sponsor, the Art Fund, added: “Ulster Museum is a brilliant example of a museum that is passionate about its public. The redevelopment is stunning, capturing its visitors’ minds and hearts with exceptional creative flair.”

The Ulster Museum re-opened last October after a three year refurbishment costing £17.5m.

It was first founded in 1821 and opened 12 years later in a purpose-built neo-classical building in the Botanic Gardens as the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery. It was the traditional, general museum popular with the Victorians which sprang up in our major cities overt the century, with five sections devoted to antiquities, geology, botany, arts and local history.

It became the Ulster Museum with national recognition by Act of Parliament in 1962, with an extension opened in 1964, and in recent years it has been building up its contemporary art holdings.

In 1998 the museum merged with Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Ulster-American Museum to form the National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland.

But in 2006 it closed for its refurbishment, reopening three years later with a new 23-metre high entrance atrium with glass and steel walkways leading into a series of galleries visible at once at different levels, dominated by a Window on Our World giant display tower, scaling four levels and housing the most iconic objects from across the museum’s collections.

The Window on Our World includes the Chambers Car and Edmontosaurus dinosaur - the most complete real dinosaur fossil on display in Ireland – as well as smaller objects such as a Viking brooch, gold coins from the Armada treasures; exotic butterflies and bugs from the nature collection.

Using new technology, the display tower also projects 360 degree audio images onto the four walls of the gallery.



A new restaurant has been created with a terrace leading out into Botanic Gardens, integrating the museum and the gardens.

There are also three new interactive learning zones and a new high-level gallery for the display of glass, ceramics, silver and jewellery.



One of the museum’s most famous objects is the 7th century BC Egyptian mummy, Takabuti, newly conserved and brought back on display, as the centrepiece of a new display exploring life and death in ancient Egypt.

For the first time, The Art Fund Prize website hosted a poll asking the public to vote for their favourite nominated museum or gallery, and to received 73,000 votes and over 40,000 comments. In May, the Ulster Museum was also chosen as the best permanent exhibition at the annual UK Museums and Heritage Awards.

“This is the first time in Northern Ireland’s history that a prestigious cultural prize of this nature has been awarded to an institution in the region” said Tim Cooke, director of National Museums Northern Ireland. “This prize will encourage us as we endeavour to play a meaningful role at the heart of our changing
society.”

“Rejuvenating the Ulster Museum in Belfast has been a deeply rewarding and purposeful experience coinciding with a remarkable period of change in Northern Ireland’s history. The public appetite for the new space and for engagement with our collections has been huge – as evidenced by the record visitor numbers and the massive level of support for the public vote element of The Art Fund Prize.”

Response

In ai 259 we reported Arts Council of Wales’s decision to cut its funded organisations by half, including the Llangollen Musical Eisteddfod and Rhyl’s Pavilion Theatre. ACW chief executive Nick Capaldi explains the thinking, and what happens next.

In its last edition, AI reported on the first stage of our investment review, the most comprehensive examination of funding that we’ve ever undertaken. We’d set ourselves a straightforward task: to support a network of organisations across Wales, large and small, international and local, that are vibrant, dynamic and durable. Organisations whose work inspires, touches and engages us.

We invited 116 organisations to send us their business plans. We also looked more widely at how we use our funds, and what we’ve achieved. It’s been a reassuring process. What we’ve found is that more people than ever before are taking part in, or attending, the arts in Wales. Our lottery capital investment has created award winning arts buildings that are generating new jobs and contributing to economic renewal across Wales. Our country’s artists and arts organisations are increasingly enjoying acclaim on the world stage.

At the end of June we announced the results of our examination. We’ve identified 71 organisations who will form our new portfolio of revenue funded organisations. 32 organisations will no longer be revenue funded after March 2011, and we’ll be exploring other ways of helping them to continue. We’ve put in place transition arrangements and we’ll do what we can to secure the best possible outcome for those facing an uncertain future.

In reality, however, nothing is guaranteed for anyone. We all know that the economic outlook is grim. But this isn’t why we originally undertook our investment review. It was never about cuts, it was about using existing funds to best effect. However, at this point in time, we’ve only been able to identify who we want to work with. We can’t say, yet, how much they’ll get. We should know in December, which is when we expect to know our future levels of funding from the Assembly Government.

In the meantime, we won’t be sitting idly by. We’ll continue to present the case for the arts with vigour. And we’ll also be looking to see how we can reduce our own costs, to re invest back into “front line” arts activity. The public rightly demands that the institutions they finance are efficient and effective. Like everyone else, we must do our bit and we’ll be saying more about this in December.

In the early autumn we’ll be providing more detail on some of the new ideas in our investment review. The focus, for entirely proper reasons, has been on our funded organisations, but we mustn’t lose sight of what ultimately we’re trying to achieve – high quality arts for the widest possible audience in English and in Welsh. Throughout our deliberations we’ve asked ourselves “what is this going to do to raise standards, or to develop new audiences?”

Not all of the answers will be provided by the new portfolio of organisations, so we’re proposing new funds to develop community generated arts activity. We’ve identified a country wide network of theatres, arts centres and galleries, encouraging them to act as creative entrepreneurs providing high quality activity and services to artists. There’ll be funds for commissioning, production and touring, and we’re going to take a new approach to funding festivals through the lottery. Wales’s international festivals are a vital part of our work, they’re ripe for development, but we need new, more imaginative ways of investing in their future growth.

The centrepiece of our new strategy will be a more emphatic commitment to arts and young people. The arts make an enormous difference to the lives of everyone, but especially young people, so we need to do whatever we can to broaden our approach, making sure that more children and young people in Wales, wherever they live, whatever their circumstances, can participate in and enjoy a wider range of arts activity.

So that’s where we are. The period between now and December is critical. We’ve acted today to keep the arts vibrant and strong for tomorrow, and we’ve got a strategy that we believe works. Our task now is to persuade the Welsh Assembly Government, who will challenge us and press us to get the best value out of public funds. That’s fine, but we hope, too, that they’ll recognise, as they have in the past, the tremendous benefits that the arts brings to the people of Wales.

We’ve set out our stall. We’ve been bold, and we’ve made choices. It’s time now to get behind the people who really matter – those leading, creating, and promoting the arts. In the end it’s to them that we look to build a stronger future for the arts in Wales.

AI Profile – Nica Burns, theatre producer and owner, director and producer, Edinburgh Comedy Awards

The West End is shark-infested waters stained crimson by the gore of plays, musicals, actors, directors and producers that have fallen victim to its predatory critics. Yet some, a handful perhaps, have found the way to navigate this hostile sea.

Many of them are women, the likes of Thelma Holt and Carole Winter, who trust to their eye and their instinct to create successful shows. One, Nica Burns, has found another quotient to add to those qualities: she owns five of the Square Mile’s most beautiful playhouses, as half of the Nimax Theatres and the partnership’s chief executive.

Nica Burns does not confine her enthusiasm to London, though. It is 30 years since she, barely out of her teens, made a deal with Perrier to bring the best of the Edinburgh Fringe comedy to a London showcase – the first winners of the “Perrier Pick of the Fringe” were the Cambridge Footlights with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson.

Perrier went the way of all sponsors, banks crashed, but Burns kept the Comedy Awards going, and in May announced a new and besotted partner who will ensure the awards continue for as long as men drink lager…

Nica Burns was not born to the theatre, but she discovered it in her DNA while she was doing a law degree at University College, London – where, incidentally, she met her lawyer husband, Marc Hutchinson – and on graduation she trained as an actress at the Webber Douglas. She adapted and starred in H E Bates’s Dulcima on the Fringe, and back in London ran a comedy club at the Finborough Arms in Earls Court, compering the show herself.

But serious theatre beckoned and in 1983 she became artistic director of the Donmar, and under her aegis it won 21 awards, presenting drama all week and late night comedy on Fridays and Saturdays. She left when the theatre closed for redevelopment in 1989.

Meanwhile, she was also associate director of the Assembly Rooms, one of the three nodes then of the Fringe, and programming for the Festival of Sydney. In 1993 she was drawn back into the West End by Janet Holmes à Court, owner of the Stoll Moss Theatres, as production director, and continued in the role when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful bought the group. It was Burns who lured Christian Slater, the Hollywood roustabout celeb, to London to star in the stage version of one Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

She also continued to produce independently, eventually leaving Really Useful in 2005 when Nimax was set up. She has made a trademark of marrying TV and movie gloss with serious drama, and you’ll know some of the shows she brought into London, if you don’t automatically associate her with them: My Brilliant Divorce with Dawn French; Deborah Warner’s production of Medea with Fiona Shaw (which won the Evening Standard Awards for best actress and best director in 2001); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Kathleen Turner; Some Girls with David Schwimmer; A Moon for the Mesbegotten with Kevin Spacey (which transferred to Broadway); and more recently James McAvoy in Three Days of Rain.

But in 2005 Lord Lloyd-Webber, as he had become, decided to sell five of his West End theatres, and Burns went into partnership with a 65-year-old oil heir, Max Weitzenhoffer, who had fallen in love with theatre and been one of the original bidders for Stoll Moss when Lloyd Webber bought the group in 2001. He is also an Anglophile, having forsaken Oklahoma for Winchelsea.

They now have a fill the Apollo and the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Duchess in St Martin’s Lane, the Garrick in Charing Cross Road and the Vaudeville in The Strand. With the extraordinary timing of fate, the deal was sealed in the week London won the Olympics and the bombers struck on the Underground.

The partnership came as a surprise to West End watchers, who were aware of Weitzenhoffer’s interest but not Burns’s. “It just sort of came up” Burns said. “There was a conversation some time when Max said ‘We could do this’ and then we both went quiet for a hell of a long time, then we both said ‘OK’ and hung up”. And they are equal partners, “Just me, Nic and the bank” Weitzenhoffer said. “And my husband” she added. “I’m deeply fond of Marc, he’s deeply fond of our house, and we intend to stay living in it.”

The partnership (with Weitzenhoffer) has prospered and consolidated. A couple of months after Nimax was set up she was named 40th most important in the arts in the United Kingdom by The Times, and in January 2006 The Stage identified her as “the fifth most important person in British theatre”, and Burns is the current president of the Society of West End Theatre.

But Fringe comedy is her abiding passion, and Burns has fought to keep the comedy awards going. In 2006 Perrier gave up their support, and Burns found a new sponsor in a banking concern called Intelligent Finance – so the Perrier became the IF awards.

The recession struck, and IF, a subsidiary of HBOS, was a casualty which struggled to the end of its three years deal and the comedy awards cold have ended there, in the ash and rubble of the recession. Instead, Burns decided to sponsor the awards herself, pro tem. “When IF went I said that the right sponsor was a rare and precious thing – I didn’t expect that right sponsor to be me!”

She was, and is, undeterred - “I will never let it go!” she texted - and set about finding a new sponsor for 2010, without toning down her conditions on who might be considered potential sponsors: “A sense of humour, a long term commitment to comedy, owned by a company with an ethical track record, a history of long term sponsorships, a stable company, unlikely to be taken over and with a great product that continues to grow and grow in popularity. Not a lot to ask for, is it?”

Surprisingly, perhaps, she didn’t have to look far, because Heineken UK is now based in Edinburgh since acquiring Scottish and Newcastle Breweries. And one of Heineken’s leading brands is Foster’s, which has a track record in comedy while other beer brands go for sport.

“It seems so right” said Heineken’s PR manager, Dave Jones. “Comedy has been in Foster’s bloodstream since we did the famous ads with Barry Humphries, and then Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame.

“We thought, ‘What do lager drinkers like most alongside football?’, and the answer was comedy”. The deal is for three years with an assumption, said the Heineken brands director Mark Given, of developing the awards thereafter. “We know comedy plays an important role in the lives of our target market:” he said. “It’s our major marketing platform for Foster’s for 2010 – ‘Foster’s is serious about comedy’.”

And Nica Burns? “I’m a theatre person, that’s just who I am, but it’s comedy that makes me more than that. It makes me smile.”

Response
Alison McGovern is the new MP for her home town constituency of Wirral South. A former borough councillor, the arts have always been part of both her public and private life. Here she looks at how the new government appears to have failed to learn the lessons of arts and economics.

In the first annual report of the Arts Council in 1945, the chair, John Maynard Keynes, said: “The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied… by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation”. As an economist, Keynes’s work has been dismissed and rediscovered many times. His argument: that when markets fail, the role of government is to act against the economic cycle to reignite confidence, is once again under the spotlight.

In the election in May, I spent more time talking about the economy than any other subject. And we now know the immediate impact that the result of the election will have on the cultural sector: difficult cuts in this year, with more to come.

But politician of all parties say they value culture. They would be mad not to. From the striking figures of Gormley to the beautiful Brits waltzing up the red carpet to receive their Ivors and their Oscars, the evidence of success is all around us.

So is the relationship between culture and politics good? Sadly not, I fear. The Conservative-Lib Dem alliance in government has been quick to set an emergency budget requiring government departments to cut spending with speed. The contribution that the public purse makes to arts and culture is going to decline; the question is how fast, and what will get left behind, but I don’t think we should give up and accept that there is no way to justify public support for arts and culture now.

To argue in favour of public funding for culture, three things are required: first, for the money to be spent in the most efficient way possible; secondly, for the quality of the work to be nothing less than the best, and finally to explain the true “value for money” of culture.

On efficiency, I believe most organisations understand this. It might mean making tough choices in the short term, but more importantly I would support more co-operative working between organisations where services or staff can be shared and better prices negotiated.

On quality, the public will not understand if, while they are facing cuts in public services all around them, they perceive public money to be spent on culture that is repetitive or uninspiring. Of course, this is a matter of taste, but it’s a challenge to the arts in Britain to show us yet again the force of their contribution to our country, and I know it’s a challenge that the arts will relish. We are the country that gave the world Shakespeare and The Beatles, Simon Armitage and Yinka Shonibare. The British public will understand why tax payers pay for art, but only if it is world class.

Finally, I think that we need to make the following argument in favour of sustaining public funding for culture:

We absolutely need to reduce the budget deficit. This should be a priority. But the deficit was not caused by overspending on the arts and it will not be solved by cutting the cultural sector in half. It was caused by a speculative bubble in the financial services sector, which burst, removing credit from many. A liquidity crisis in the banking sector, in addition to bank failure, removed confidence and put people out of work. This increased benefits claims and reduced tax receipts. Hence the deficit.

If we stopped every penny of public spending on the arts immediately it would make little difference to the scale of the deficit, but every child currently inspired by seeing a beautiful Turner in the National Gallery would only be able to look at it in a book instead, for the sake of savings that will have very little effect on the scale of the deficit in the long term.

The deficit must be addressed by getting people back to work. This must be the priority.

Also, if organisations face drastic cuts in funding, it harms the possibility for development. The government can reprioritise lottery funding towards arts and cultural organisations, but if you are suddenly required to lose members of staff it’s going to be ever harder to find the time to make that application to the lottery. It’s unrealistic to expect that these welcome capital funds will address the difficult times ahead, managing budgets year on year.

The great Keynesian insight that the government should work against the economic cycle is understood by many in politics. My hope, as a new Member of Parliament, is to persuade them of Keynes’s other great perception: the public value of art.

A new report on craft and the economic and social contribution of its makers is one of the most significant pieces of research by the Crafts Council for a decade, says Karen Yair, the council’s research and information manager

The report, Making Value, puts craft squarely within the creative knowledge economy and provides fresh, vibrant evidence of the entrepreneurship, energy and integrity that makers bring to their work. And it gives us the message – loud and clear – that craft has a unique role to play in a changing economy and society.

We have found makers engaging in a far greater range of places, and with more different types of people, than has previously been realised or recorded.

The research comes at a crucial time. The past 15 years have been incredibly productive for the UK’s creativity and innovation, and craft has been a part of that success. The craft sector now makes a £3 billion contribution to the UK economy, and represents 13% of those employed in the UK’s creative industries. And however the world has changed, we believe that craft has a substantial part to play in the future. Making Value helps us to show the great contribution of makers in many different contexts and in sometimes unexpected ways. While many craft businesses are small-scale, they display great creativity, innovation and resilience.

We commissioned it to explore the characteristics of portfolio working makers and appraise their contributions to a range of industry sectors and community and education settings. Portfolio working is prevalent in the contemporary craft sector: other quantitative studies show 65 – 70% of makers creating their careers in this way. Making Value investigates the nature and impact of these makers who are working “beyond the making, exhibition and sale of a craft object”.

Of the portfolio working makers we interviewed, over three quarters work in other industry sectors; over half in community contexts; and just over a third work in education settings. And nearly a third of them are making across at least two of these three areas. We have found makers engaging in a far greater range of places, and with more different types of people than has previously been realised or recorded. From fashion to film, hospitals to heritage, manufacturing to mental health projects and from retailing to residential courses, these makers are highly motivated in applying their practice to make a difference. Their stories provide a rich and nuanced picture.

Makers with a portfolio practice take on multiple roles, consciously presenting themselves in different ways for different audiences, markets and areas of work. They have a deep sense of integrity about their creative identity and move with agility between different projects, finding creative impetus in their engagement with other sectors and settings.

They have developed their craft knowledges and craft thinking into valuable consultancy services, applying their understanding of the emotive qualities of materials to design which enhances narrative and characterisation in film, television, the performing arts and digital media. They contribute to economic growth in sectors such as manufacturing, driving innovation in products and processes through their materials knowledge. Their particular understanding of how people relate to material qualities and objects, in both a functional and emotional sense, informs distinctive contributions in fields as diverse as healthcare and cultural tourism.

In terms of craft and the social contribution of makers, through making, participants attain a sense of achievement and ownership; experience the enjoyment of the immediacy and concreteness of materials; and build confidence, self esteem and a sense of value.

Monica Ferguson, chief executive of The Stables and Festival Director of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival – this year running between July 16 and 25 - reflects on the challenge of staging a new festival from scratch within 18 months.

When I was asked by Sally Abbott of Arts Council England, South East, to rendezvous in central Milton Keynes with representatives from Milton Keynes Theatre & Gallery Company, little did I know what I was about to get us into. That was back in February 2009, with thick snow underfoot.

Milton Keynes is set to become the tenth largest city in the UK by 2031, and having recently celebrated its 40th birthday it is turning out to be a great place to live, work and visit. Whether you are into extreme sports, beautiful parks, shopping or large-scale theatre, contemporary arts and music, you will find it in Milton Keynes. But compare it to Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton or any of the other major cities, and you would be forgiven for thinking it lacked a certain cultural vibrancy.

Our challenge that snowy day in February was to devise a project to attract the best artists and producers to Milton Keynes, and to create a vehicle for developing the arts infrastructure that would be appropriate for the burgeoning city.

We agreed on a festival format to be staged every two years. With 2010 marking the 40th anniversary of The Stables, my board had the courage and vision to see this as a great opportunity, and before long I found myself with my hand in the air offering to drive it forward as director. From that moment on my life was to change dramatically.

Every weekend spent standing in muddy fields at festivals around the UK, days spent in transit to international festivals and events, and finally Bill Gee walked into my world. As one of the UK’s leading producers of outdoor events and chair of the independent street arts network, I hadn’t envisaged we could have tempted him to Milton Keynes, but we did and our horizons shifted to another stratosphere.

With initial an investment of £462,000 from ACE, SE we established a steering group of stakeholders from across the city, set an artistic vision of engaging people with music and sound in surprising ways and decided to let the city be the stage by using temporary spaces and found places to stage and make work.

Bill got very excited by Midsummer Boulevard, the ancient ley line on which Milton Keynes is orientated, and on which the sun rises and sets on Midsummer’s Day. The city centre from Station Square to Campbell Park is a two-mile stretch, so much shoe leather was shed pounding the streets to find the right locations. Putting together the rest of the team, establishing the brand values, name and design without having programmed a thing. IF only we had more time…

AI Profile, Julia Fawcett OBE, chief executive of The Lowry

There’s a sweet symmetry to Julia Fawcett’s success at The Lowry as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. She grew up at the Quays and a few hundred yards from the dock gates in a Coronation Street terrace – the soap is set in Salford, not Manchester.

“I went to school on Trafford Road and grew up there in the late 70s when the docks closed down” she says. “At the end of the street the fence was the beginning of the Quays and docklands, so every day I could look through and see increasingly derelict wastelands. The docks were major employers in the region, so when the gates closed the effect was profound.”

The Salford L S Lowry knew and painted rapidly disappeared during Fawcett’s childhood, and the family was moved to nearby Eccles when her home was demolished.

“Salford had a massive influence on me when I was growing up, and there weren’t many chances to develop aspirations” she says. Her dad is a manual labourer, her mum works on the Tesco’s check-out, and most of the boys in her peer group looked towards Old Trafford as the only way out with the examples of Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs fuelling their impossible dreams.

Early on Julia decided her way out was acting, and her hopes took her away from Salford and its seemingly inexorable decline. But in the 90s the city council, inspired by the promise of the National Lottery, was planning the Quays’ revival, with a gleaming stainless steel £106m arts venue designed by Michael Wilford that opened in 2000. It was supposed to be the heart of a revival for one of the most depressed post-industrial estates in the country and the Millennium Commission adopted it as one of the landmark projects for the new century.

By the time Fawcett arrived back in 2002, however, the Lowry, as it had been named after Salford’s most famous son, was in financial trouble, its future seriously in doubt, “a white elephant that scars the landscape” as Fawcett describes the way it was being perceived, and the Millennium Commission stepping in to see what could be salvaged.

Under her guidance, the white elephant was to become the catalyst for the Renaissance the city council had lost hope for, luring the Imperial War Museum to Trafford Park for Daniel Libeskind to create its northern branch, building a footbridge across the Ship Canal, and inspiring the BBC to start developing what will be Media City.

The 18-year-old Julia Fawcett went to Bristol University to study drama, film and TV, intending to start an acting career on graduation. But she needed to pay the rent and came back to Manchester to conduct tours of the Coronation Street studios and “taking the opportunity to move into the leisure industry” with the Granada giant. As well as making staple TV series, Granada was the third largest leisure group after Madam Tussauds and Pearsons, involved in theme parks, hotels, cinemas and bingo halls.

“I was developing my own skills set, though I had no career plan and was still looking at what I thought was going to be a long term acting career. It never happened, and you take the opportunities as they arrive” Fawcett philosophises.

She moved through the ranks of company as Granada was watching the arrival of the National Lottery with some scepticism, and at the often beautiful architecture and bad business plans of the Millennium projects racing for the 21st century. Fawcett saw with incredulity the banner ads on Manchester buses for the forthcoming Lowry.

Before it opened, however, she had gone north, drawn by another lottery project, Edinburgh’s Our Dynamic Earth science museum, as chief executive. She found an assumption that because it was in the city centre it was bound to be a success, despite the fact that science centres around the world had never generated more than half of turnover, and there was no revenue subsidy for this one. “The thing that sold it for me was the ability to take the rigours of the Granada process and apply them to a public facility to really make an asset work and generate a return. I had the opportunity to influence some of design elements, the revenue generating areas, the freedom to build up a team. it was a real experiment, quite bold, and of course very risky on the basis that there hadn’t been a great predecessor, Earth Centre in Doncaster”. The £60m Earth Centre opened in 1999, went bankrupt and closed in 2004.

Five years later she was back in Manchester, lured by an anxious Millennium Commission who wanted to know if she could turn the Lowry around. She was still only 37.

“They didn’t know I was from Salford. One of the Millennium Commission people said ‘It really is in a bad way financially, a tough one to crack, lots to be done, been massively successful in getting itself out of the ground, but glue holding it together missing’” Fawcett recalls. “Millions of visitors had come in its first year but the number dwindled quickly, and behind the scenes was incredible financial instability and escalating revenue loses, a failure of confidence from key stakeholder, the Arts Council and Millennium Commission pressing for significant change in organization”. The staff were exhausted, and regulatory monitors had been put in to oversee practically every department. It was inward-looking and had lost confidence in itself.

In two years she turned the institution around. “So much of what they’d done was absolutely right: the artistic programme was very ambition, the art director Robert Robson was here right from the start and is still doing a fantastic job. But the board needed to be open in terms of the challenges, the stakeholders up front in terms of issues, and the whole thing had to be wrapped round an optimism that if we could crack the things that weren’t working what was here could make it extremely successful” Fawcett says.

She took catering franchises back to optimise profits going back in the running, built an office block to lease out space, made co-production partnerships, and used publicity to bring the community in for the Lowry to “keep its feet in Salford Docks”. The art galleries are now free, the three auditoriums are ticketed, and the footfall is now 800,000 a year. Fawcett gets a subsidy of £1m from Salford and £1m from ACE, but earns 85% of her turnover.

“It looked very ropey in 2002 in terms of whether we could pull it off, but we emerged out of the crisis and made good our commitments to the community, which wouldn’t have been possible eight years ago” she says.

It was hard but rewarding, financially as well as spiritually, yet the financial recognition of what she had achieved also brought her lowest point when the Manchester Evening News revealed that in 2007 she was paid £310,000, with her salary of £125,000 augmented by a £185,000 bonus.

“I don’t think anyone should justify their own salary, it’s not for me to do, but it was a difficult period for organisation and for the board, and certainly difficult time for me personally” she says. “But it was a long time ago, rather I’d rather focus on what has been achieved, the sustainability of the organization. I’m very confident about the future for the Lowry, and that story is bigger than any about remuneration.”

The Lowry offers drama, opera, ballet, dance, musicals, children’s shows, popular music, jazz, folk and comedy and gallery spaces in its three auditoriums and 1,600 square metres of gallery space showing Lowry’s work alongside contemporary art.

A couple of years later Fawcett had to wade into a public row over the sudden announcement of the Royal Opera House’s plan to establish a northern branch in Manchester’s Palace Theatre, a direct challenge the Lowry’s growing reputation for offering touring opera and ballet.

“We had been talking to the Royal Opera House for more than three years about partnership, but what happened was that another conversation was taking place elsewhere and a proposal was developing at a rate of knots. It took a year for us to publicly come out and say we were not for this Palace plan. We had to try to influence the way it was shaping, because this way the cultural ecology of the region would be shaped differently”. She and her board campaigned, got the support of local MPs and eventually the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, so that a new partnership has been forged involving the Lowry, the Palace, Covent Garden and other companies including Leeds-based Opera North.

The result is a harmonious relationship with the Royal Opera House which has resulted in the first chance to see an exhibition from the Covent Garden archive about he Royal Ballet with previously unseen images and untold backstage stories. Another exhibition resulting from the association reveals L S Lowry’s involvement in ballet and hoi music and dance influenced his work. To coincide with the opening of the exhibitions in the autumn, the Royal Ballet’s director Dame Monica Mason has created a piece which will be performed by the Royal Ballet, and a new piece by Will Tuckett is to be performed in the Lowry’s studio theatre.

Even most satisfying for Fawcett has been the scheme whereby 50 young school leavers from Salford have been given internships in every department of the Lowry, to give them “opportunity lines” and a way out of the bind she had to go to Bristol to find.

The Lowry is part of the North West’s 21st success story, but much of the success is owed to the mournful a little girls had as she peered through a fence at the wasteland that had been an early 20h century success story for the region. “It’s so important to me” she says. “It’s central to everything that drives the vision and the work I do here, and the future for Salford Quays is exciting thanks to the Lowry.”

In an old school annexe in South London, a dance studio has become a hotbed of cross-arts creativity. Simon Tait explored

The building at 85 St George’s Road behind the Imperial War Museum in Southwark looks like a Dr Who transformation of a much loved old pile into a whimsical monster, with its ribbed sky blue roof emerging from the familiar dirty yellow London brick.

In a way it is. In 2005 the Charlotte Sharman school annexe was transformed in an award-winning piece of architectural sleight of hand by Sarah Wigglesworth to become the Siobhan Davies Studios, less a building than a crucible in which dance and other artforms are made alongside, and influencing, eachother.

Siobhan Davies – Sue – is our leading contemporary choreographer who for almost 40 years and to international acclaim has been exploring dance and choreography and how they are experienced, particularly at Sadler’s Wells and through site orientated work (most recently at the Victoria Miro Gallery). She was awarded the CBE in 2002.

She is still exploring, and now based her own studios. “Initially we wanted a place where contemporary dancers should feel honoured, a place that fitted their purpose, and then from that security they can build up other energies, and the strength to feel valued as an independent artist” she says.

“But my second thought was that I don’t want just a home, I want far more – a secure place from which to become brave and rattle its walls with new ideas and information, testing the work that takes place in this building.”

And that requires getting information from other artforms, which for Sue began with Sarah Wigglesworth in devising the building within a building. That conversation lasted at least four years before the concept they contrived together was finished at Christmas 2005. Sue became absorbed in every aspect of the making of the building, she learnt about structural engineering and the craft the plasterer who use danimal hair as a binding agent in the traditional way.

The first feature of the building is the light which seems to fill every corner. Dotted through the three floors are pieces of ceramic and glass art by students from the Royal College of Art as part of its current contemporary exhibition. On the top floor, the theatre company Punchdrunk are in raucous rehearsal whose noise somehow doesn’t pervade downwards.

Sue Davies is perched in her tiny office pecking at Melba toast with a spread which she calls a sandwich: at nearly 60 she is impossibly lithe. On this ground floor is a curiously silent flurry of activity because Siobhan Davies, to distinguish the company from its leader, has a lot on.

The company has created a dance, Differences, for the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July, a collaboration that came after Sue had rediscovered poetry a year ago, and subsequent conversations with leading poets like David Harsent, Alice Oswald and Don Paterson. They confirmed that the art forms have much more in common than differences. Paterson told her “Each of the arts is tempered by its sister arts”, and that became a key. “If we don’t recognise eachother’s work and learn from it we’re losing out, and the audience is losing out and may forget to take information from one artform to another. We can ask the audience to make the horizontal leap”.

The glass and ceramics, Out of Practice, is an assignment for MA students who, after Sue had made the link with the tutors, were told to go to the building where their work would be seen and be inspired by either it or the activities within it. “These artists have brought such a wit, as well as beautifully made objects” she says.

It will be followed next month by 60/40, in which a textiles maker, a furniture maker and a potter will produce work also inspired by the studios’ ecology, and in which they will explore the blurred line between craft and art – Sue says the right word for both kinds of exponents is “maker”.

Then there is Big Dance, the London-wide festival devised to encourage children to, if not go perform them, to find interest in dance. The studios have become the south London hub, and Davies’s team is working with 270 schoolchildren. “Not everybody wants to dance, and if we trigger the right response there are other ways of intriguing them – they could be writing about dance, photographing it, filming it, and you begin to open up doorways not only to what dance is about but how we all learn and explore the world through movement”.

And they are working on a project, called Rotor, which will be performed in the autumn. Sue has created “a tightly structured compact dance” and invited a composer, a ceramicist, a playwright, a poet, a visual artist and a filmmaker to see it and accept a challenge to work from it.

“The whole project is complex. Each of he artists has rotated their work out of the dance using their particular mediums. The building will have eight artists’ responses placed throughout, each brought into being by observing the dance”. What it will not be is a jumble of different artforms somehow trying to interlace with eachother: each will be a separate event with the audience taking their own path through each one.”

Sue Davies isn’t currently making dance for theatre. In 2001 she made a piece which contained theatrical elements which was performed in Victoria Miro’s art gallery, and last year when she was given the opportunity to be in that space again, she made the work differently and specifically choreographed for an art gallery.

“With theatre, there’s a chasm between the audience and the performance” she says. “I am incredibly intrigued by the detail of observing an audience’s response to a live dancer close up.”

Buildings have a way of creating a their own impression which can influence the perception of the art, which is not fair on the art or the audience.

Dance, she says, can be so much more than it is recognised to be, both on its own terms and alongside other artforms. “The combination of thinking and physically doing is what makes this is a distinct artform. Choreography can exist just as well without a dancer, and the glorious thing is that when a choreographic practice on its own terms joins up with an articulate and knowledgeable dancer, you get two engines working together to make something with which an audience can connect.”

A unique, fun, digital-dance event created by teenagers for themselves, their families and the general public is to open on 23 June in an empty shop in Coventry’s City Arcade. Cathy Connan reports

The Bubble Chamber, being produced by Mercurial Dance, is a three year project exploring the artistic dialogue between technological spaces, visual imagery, live performance and non-conventional performance spaces.

The first “installation” is being created by pupils from Coventry’s Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School and Language College ,and over time more and more young people will be engaged on further installations taking place in cities throughout the West Midlands.

Each will build on the previous one, and the whole project will culminate in a major event to celebrate all that will be achieved throughout the period.

The Bubble Chamber is the brainchild of Oliver Scott. Artistic director and choreographer, Oliver set up Mercurial Dance in 2003 to explore the integration of dance and technology. Young people are at the core of his work as an artist: creating work with them, for them to perform to their families and friends; and creating work for them to immerse themselves in, to experience and to enjoy. His artistic foundation is dance and his work embraces a style that is physical, fluid and immediate. His technique explores the integration of new dance & release-based traditions with contact improvisation and martial arts forms.

While utterly original, the Bubble Chamber is typical of his work. Explaining the project, Oliver said that he is exploring a number of fascinating questions with the pupils. “How can we create a space within which the audience will want to dance and move? How does the interaction between the body, the projected image and the tracking across a screen affect choreography? How do people respond to space and engage with it and how can we exploit the potential of technology in this context?

“So far the students from Cardinal Wiseman are relishing the challenge and are using dance, live images and video to turn an empty room into a space with eyes and ears, responding and changing as viewers move through it.

“They are also getting the chance to develop their skills in dance and technology, using the professional software application ISADORA, which is rarely if ever taught to young people.”

The students began by creating mind maps of their ideas for the project and fixing them all over the walls of the space so they can look back at their ideas throughout the creative process.

They then tested their choreography in front of the digital sensors, using ISADORA to turn their work into a matrix-style display. They used cameras and projections to duplicate their movements across the space and used the projections to critique and improve their own movement as they created it.

“Everything is beginning to come together now,” said Oliver. “We are incredibly excited about the launch on June 23.”

A wooden finger on Peckham’s creative pulse

The memories of the last moments of Damilola Taylor caught on CCTV a few months after the opening of Peckham Library that is seen behind him are only just beginning to fade.

The award-winning Will Alsop library which opened ten years ago, a few months before Damilola’s death, is now firmly at the heart of the community, and with the Peckham Pulse leisure centre now next door, Peckham Square with its regular farmers’ markets has become a healing focus.

But in Alsop’s plan there had been another building that he called the Peckham Pier, a reference to when the Grand Surrey Canal came here, and it was to be an all-purpose community centre. Funding wouldn’t run to it, and though the space was prepared the idea was abandoned.

Until three years ago, however, and next month the Peckham Pier is realised under the new name of Peckham Space, to bring art into one of the most troubled communities in the country, and to bring art out in that community as well.

The initiative for Peckham Space was originally that of the Camberwell College of Art, part of the University of the Arts and a few yards along Peckham Road, which has gone into partnership with Southwark Council to create somewhere to connect art, the people and the place through commissions, exhibitions and events.

“Camberwell has students coming from all over England, and they were aware that very few were coming from the Peckham communities, so they wanted to find a way of encouraging young people here to discover an interest in art, apply for the college and maybe even follow a career as an artist” says Emily Druiff, Peckham Space’s director.

The opening on June 11 will be something of a tribute to her. Trained at Camberwell and Goldsmiths Colleges, she had been a freelance curator when she was given the task of reviving the Alsop idea three years ago, and with only a single assistant she has pushed the project through with activities and events, often in collaboration with Peckham schools.

In particular she has worked with the Harris Academy, a secondary school serving the North Peckham Estate where Damilola and the school where he would have gone. “We’re pretty pleased with ourselves – not only have we got students from the academy to apply to Camberwell, three of them have been accepted for the foundation course, the first time” she says.

Peckham Space is jointly funded by the college, by Southwark Council and ACE, and is costing a very modest £300,000. Designed by Penson, the vivid green of the angular structure might disguise the fact that it is being built entirely from treated wood – less expensive than other materials, but hardy and easily maintained.

“It’s here for people to discover art and to live with it” Druiff says “and we know that there will be a positive response because of how people have taken to the work we’ve already been doing”.

Because Peckham Space has been operating without its building since Druiff launched it in 2008 with a series of commissions, Peckham’s communities are already familiar with it, and it will get more so with what might seem quirky public events, “with a whole new approach to commissioning, making and exhibiting art”.

Peckham Peacocks is the launching event for Saturday shoppers on June 12, devised by local artist Rachel House, and will involve a rally of mobility scooters, and the Red Wheelies scooter formation team.

Peckham Space opens with a group exhibition by Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Clegg and Guttman, FREEE and Southwark TV, a community media venture for which the artists have worked with public organisations to produce public art.

Lopez de la Torre has made two films exploring the notion of neighbourhood, and helping secondary school children make their own film about their neighbourhoods and the young people that live there.

Inspired by William Blake’s vision of Peckham Rye of two centuries ago, FREEE, a Peckham-based collective of three artists, have asked nearby shopkeepers to imagine their businesses in a Peckham of the future.

Clegg and Guttmann have made a five-sided column with five sections which each revolve, and he public are being asked to chalk a human shape on each of the surface, which then swivel to make surreal figures.

Southwark TV are showing films in Peckham Space they have made with year ten students from the Harris Academy.

“It’s whole ethos we want to engage people in by using artists” says Druiff. “I’m passionate about art placed in the community context, and seeing what it can do.”