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The future of Derby’s Grade II listed theatre, the Hippodrome was thrown into uncertainty again following an application to demolish part of the building to make way for a multi-storey car park, office and retail complex.
Owner Christopher Anthony plans to build the car park behind the existing frontage of the theatre, but promises that those parts of the building which have not been irretrievably lost, are structurally sound and contribute to the local street scene will be retained and internal decorative plaster work will be restored “as far as practicable.”
Parts of the venue were demolished by last March before the city council ordered a halt. However a council spokesman said that the council could not force the owner to use the building as a theatre. “We are, however, trying to facilitate a realistic and practical use for the building.”
Theatres Trust Director Mhora Samuel said, ‘How will a multi-storey car park bring Derby Hippodrome back to life as a theatre or provide any cultural benefit to the City? The Theatres Trust would object strongly to any application that proposes this. To lose the building in this way would be a total tragedy.’
Museum directors fear that Britain may fall behind as a venue for cultural tourism. Mark Jones, chair of the National Museum Directors Conference, has written to Culture Minister Barbara Follett and to Christopher Rodriques, Chair of VisitBritain, welcoming the Government’s renewed focus on tourism and recognition of the contribution that culture makes to UK tourism.
But he adds that recent figures suggest that in 2007, for the third year in a row, visits to London’s major exhibitions declined in relation to those in Paris, Tokyo, New York and Washington. NMDC has also raised concerns about the ageing visitor profile and Britain’s failure to attract visitors from emerging market.
The NMDC has asked for government action to attract visitors from these markets, and wants Visit Britain to use marketing initiatives to bring in new audiences for museums.
In their letter, NMDC also calls for improvements in public transport links, particularly to museums outside central London, and the completion of the Exhibition Road project to improve visitor access to the Natural History Museum, Science Museum and V&A.
Managers at the Sage in Gateshead have agreed a pay freeze on staff this year in the light of the economic recession.
But the move, which was outlined in a letter to the venue’s 335 staff, comes after a successful close to 2008 at the box office. Takings were up on the same period in 2007, said Sage executive director Anthony Sargent.
But he added that, although box office had been good in 2008, takings were beginning to level off. In a normal recessionary cycle, discretionary spending on the arts tends to lag behind.
“We have to be prudent. This has only happened after a long consultation process with the staff and we have not ruled out reinstating it later in the year depending on actual recessionary impact, and staff know that.”
He added that a number of other arts organisations nationally and regionally were considering similar moves and others were even contemplating laying people off.
• The future of Newcastle’s historic Journal Tyne Theatre has been assured with a £100,000 grant from English Heritage to carry out urgent repairs to the roof. The theatre, a Grade I-listed building which is on English Heritage’s At Risk register, has also been handed over to a new trust, the Tyne Theatre and Opera House Preservation Trust. The trust will oversee a fundraising campaign to raise £7m by 2015 to fully restore and revamp the theatre which first opened in 1867.
The Scottish Government has dropped plans to transfer responsibility for the creative industries from Scottish Enterprise, the country’s economic development agency to Creative Scotland.
The decision will mean that up to £300 million of funding will not be directly available to Creative Scotland, the new body formed by the merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. Instead all agencies involved in the creative industries, including Scottish Enterprise and local authorities, will be expected to work together on the basis of a framework laid down by ministers. Only the Scottish Cultural Enterprises office, with a budget of £100,000, has been transferred to operate under the Creative Scotland banner.
Launching the framework, Scottish culture minister Linda Fabiani said Creative Scotland would have “an advisory, advocacy and brokering role”, in developing the creative industries in Scotland, which are estimated to be worth £5.1 billion and which supports 60,000 jobs.
Ms Fabiani admitted that SNP controlled government had broken its 2007 manifesto pledge to transfer the budgets for the creative industries from Scottish Enterprise to Creative Scotland . “When you are in opposition you don’t get all the facts,” she told a press conference. “I am perfectly content to say we listened and we learnt from that listening. This agreement means everyone is clear about their role.”
The move has come under fire from critics who point out that the rationale for the merger was to create a body with overall responsibility for creativity in Scotland. Opposition MSPs have questioned whether Scottish Enterprise or Creative Scotland will take the lead in funding artists. And a petition signed by more than 400 artists and writers last month attacked the merger plan, saying the rumoured £7 million costs attached to setting up the new body will lead to cuts in grants.
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has hit back at critics who accuse it of backing ‘middle class’ interests.
ACNI chief executive Roisín McDonough said that analysis of the organisation’s grantmaking showed that more than half of the Arts Council’s main funding goes directly to the most deprived areas of Northern Ireland
Launching ACNI’s annual review, McDonough said, “This research on Arts Council funding refutes two commonly held beliefs about where and how arts funding is spent - key findings show that arts funding is neither ‘a middle income, middle class interest’ nor is it ‘centred on Belfast’. In fact the arts engage fully across all areas of society; 56% of main Arts Council funding has gone directly to the most deprived areas in Northern Ireland and there is a wide geographical spread of other funding streams outside Belfast .”
She added that last year the Arts Council also achieved its ambition to provide a dedicated arts facility within 20 miles of every person living in Northern Ireland .
Figures contained in the review show that 85% (£2.03m) of Art of Regeneration Programme, 73% (£24.4m) of Capital Building Awards (since 1995) and 58% (£1.4m) of Re-imaging Communities Programme was awarded outside Belfast.
But ACNI continues to press for more government funding. Despite an uplift of £7.55 million over the next three-years ‘funding remains far short of the increase needed to deliver a per capita funding figure that matches that of our neighbours on these islands, “ she added.
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Today we kick off our association with CultureLabel, the people championing commercial opportunities for culture organisations at IntelligentNaivety.com
It’s one thing to sit back and watch as leading culture institutions tear up the rule books to better grab consumer attention. It’s another thing to be ahead of the curve, to know who and what the next major consumer innovation will involve or, better still, to be commercially dextrous enough to come up with your own big idea.
We doubt there’s a single person working in culture, marketing or cultural branding who doesn’t wish they were ad agency The Partners, who thought up HP Labs and the National Gallery’s ground breaking, knee trembling project of 2008 - the Grand Tour.
What’s more, the imperative just got greater. As the recession begins to bite, we’re all going to need to be slicker in the way we work. It won’t be enough just to name check another cool collaboration in a meeting. We all need to stay ahead of the competition by coming up with ideas for consumer touchpoints that break the mould time and time again.
With this in mind, we thought we’d give you an insight into CultureLabel’s little black book, the places we go to when we want something to inspire a little magical thinking, or when we want to make sure we know what’s happening across the globe in cultural consumption, cultural branding and subculture.
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By Simon Tait
The Prime Minister’s dream of a Museum of Britishness seems to be over, with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council reporting to the DCMS – and through them to Number Ten – that it isn’t a runner.
But the dream has lived and died before, at least twice, and the MLA hasn’t put a final word on the notion. It could come again, and they have their own suggestion of a focussed website run by a small team who would establish dialogued with every relevant collection in the country to create modules, online and actual exhibitions and events. It was rather cavalierly dismissed but some of the principals involved.
Lord Baker, the former Home Secretary who persuaded Gordon Brown to support the idea just over a year ago, was particularly unhappy. He told me he had been close to establishing the museum in 1997 when the plan was high on the list for funding by the Millennium Fund lottery tranch, but it had been vetoed by Tony Blair, but he had revived it with Gordon Brown. “The report is a great disappointment, and what they’ve put forward instead is a damp squib” he said.
“There are lots of webs sites and they’re not very exciting; children need a day out they can remember. Nowhere tells the whole story. My idea was a building that would do it on four floors and there would be five floors for the University of the Arts, near to King’s Cross so it would be easy to get to. It’s a great opportunity missed.”
It hadn’t washed with the MLA because, quite apart from the estimated £150m to £200m cost of a new building, “We found no evidence that a single building in London – or anywhere else in the country – devoted to British history would attract and engage people” said Roy Clare, the MLA’s chief executive.
And it turns out that there is no support from the museum profession for Baker’s idea.
When Christopher Frayling’s brother Nick became Dean of Chichester Cathedral seven years ago he found that the often heated meetings chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace always began with “a moment of prayer”, to put those present in the right frame of mind before going into verbal battle over homosexual priests, women bishops or other vexatious issues.
So when he became chairman for the Arts Council five years ago in succession to Gerry Robinson, the younger Frayling decided to borrow the idea. “I ask every single member to tell us about the most exciting event they’ve been to since the last meeting” he says. “Then we start squabbling – well, no, we don’t but it reminds you what the hell we’re here for, not to talk about structure structure structure, we‘re here to talk about the arts”.
That was his mission: to bring the arts back into the Arts Council. Restructuring had been the business of his predecessors; as Rector of the Royal College of Art he was the first chairman to actually work in the arts since Kenneth Clark in the 1950s.
“The restructure was quite a shock to the system, and it rejigged the relationship between the centre and the regions, and I think it had created a structure that is a more efficient way of distributing public money than in any time in the Arts Council’s history” he says. “But the cost was that there was a big emphasis on council, not enough emphasis on the arts.”
And it is better, he says. Five years ago Frayling famously described ACE as “not just an ATM machine with a rather complicated pin number”, and now he says it has become the “national development agency for the arts which actually makes decisions about the national picture, and even in good times makes decisions between arts organisations”.
If he is right, that is a long step away from the 1980s equal misery for all approach to dealing with funding cuts, which demoralised everyone. Although until now there haven’t been funding cuts for a decade, the principle of being more closely involved in the judgement is what was behind the investment review which gave rise to the “awful” outcome a year ago, when Equity members passed a vote of no confidence in the ACE after its attempt to be fair to everyone just made it look incompetent.
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Karen Napier, director of development for the Southbank Centre, put it succinctly: “We’re friend raising at the moment, not fund raising”. She spoke for all seasoned arts development managers as we stare into what seems to be an economic abyss.
Arts & Business picked its moment well on Tuesday to launch its new pro-arts “offer”, and rebranding. Gone is the whimsical rococo “A&B” monogram in favour of a down-to-earth “Arts & Business” full out, in a no-nonsense Courier typeface; gone is the banker’s aloofness many in the arts found hard to penetrate, for a shopkeeper’s eagerness to serve; and in comes, for the first time in living memory almost, an A&B arts director fashioned from a fund raiser of 20 years’ experience in Verity Haines.
The message is that if there is an abyss, it can be bridged. What’s required is the right advice and the right tools to, if not find new sources of funding, to ensure that existing supporters are kept as friends while they cope with their own financial changes; and for creators not to flinch but to keep making, because, as the arts minister Barbara Follett said, arts flourishes in bad times and prepares us foer the better times to follow – movies in the 30s, fashion after the second world war, BritArt after 1990.
There was not a spare seat in the historic lecture theatre of the Royal Institution – showing how seriously cultural managers are taking the recession - where the latest A&B figures were revealed, followed by the new A&B model with a responsive website and a network of advisers. Colin Tweedy, A&B’s perennially beaming CEO, reminded all there that they were facing challenging times, as if they needed telling; but that business prognostications were that 2010 is likely to be bad, but things will be on the rise again from 2011 onwards. The message, enunciated by Ms Follett, was simple: “Keep calm, keep going”.
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A year ago Kenneth Baker, the former Home Secretary, put forward his idea for a museum of British history which would “show the position of Britain as a world power and as a European power”. The PM supported the idea, the DCMS were told to look into it, the MLA did and reported in October, Now, after Baker invoked the Freedom of Information Act, the report has emerged recommending against the building costing £150-£200m in favour of a new dedicated network linking collections around the country in a focus on the British. But the original point, of a museum of the British looking at how this nation came about, what influences – language, dress, food, architecture and so on - there have been on its development and how ordinary people can have as much impact as the already celebrated panjandrams has been lost. The first conceivers of the idea were not interested so much in what we have done as who we are.
