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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Sue Hayton on Cultural Hubs
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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.
TV stars Rupert Penry-Jones (Spooks and Whitechapel), Sheridan Smith (Two Pints of Lager), James Purefoy (Rome) and Matt Di Angelo (Eastenders) were at the Donmar Warehouse theatre on Tuesday night to launch the Arts Council’s “A Night Less Ordinary” scheme to get free tickets to under 26-year-olds.
“Live theatre at its best is a magical experience – it sucks you in and makes you forget everything around you. So I’m all for a scheme that encourages more young people to share that magic” said Penry-Jones.
“A Night Less Ordinary is exactly what they need at the moment – with the recession making nights out more of a luxury, here’s something really different young people can enjoy for free.”
More than 200 venues across the country are taking part in the scheme, including Battersea Arts Centre, the Royal Court, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Met Arts Centre in Bury, Nottingham Playhouse, Watford Palace Theatre and Sunderland Empire.
Free tickets will be available to anyone under 26 years of age rom Monday, February 16, by logging on to www.anightlessordinary.org.uk. The website also gives details of special events at venues up and down England with opportunities to go on backstage tours, meet the cast or “make a play in a day”.
The scheme is managed by Arts Council England and supported by £2.5 million extra funding from the DCMS, following the recommendation in the McMaster Review of last year.
“A Night Less Ordinary is an extraordinary idea that has been made possible by the co-operation and hard work of theatre professionals all over the country and I’d like to thank them for their efforts” said Alan Davey, chief executive of ACE. “I am proud that the Arts Council is leading an initiative that will offer more than half a million opportunities in the next two years for young people to have their lives changed by ground breaking and inspirational theatre.”
Kids in Museums, the charity founded by journalist Dea Birkett after her two-year-old son was ejected from an exhibition for talking too loudly, has launched its third manifesto, based on the feedback of museum-going families.
The manifesto tells museums that kids can enjoy fine art as much as finger-painting, that they don’t want to be told to be quiet, that museums are places for discussion and chatter, that teenagers need to be catered for as well as toddlers, and that the state of toilets is very important to families.
The launch coincides with the announcement of new support from the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, which has given £40,000 to “support the work of museums to create enriching and positive experiences for families, young people and children”.
Birkett, now director of the charity which also organises a competition with the Guardian newspaper to find the most family friendly museum, said the grant would make a huge difference at a crucial time: “As well as enabling us to employ people for the first time and set up a working office, it will in particular allow us to develop projects such as Take Your Granny (a scheme to encouraged younger generations to enthuse older relatives with museum-going)”.
The 2009 manifesto is designed for museums, but, said Birkett, could be adapted for any public cultural institutions needing to make themselves more family friendly. “I don’t necessarily agree with all of the points raised, but it was a democratic process and these are what families wanted” she said.
Patron Mariella Frostrup, the radio and television presenter, said that museums had be frightening places for her as a child because warders would not tolerate talking. “They were always telling me to ‘shush’ crossly, and that put me off for years” she said. “Why couldn’t they just have told us something about the displays that would be interesting to us?”
The 20 points respondents called for were:
1. Be welcoming from café to curator.
2. Be accessible or prams and wheelchairs, with automatic doors, lifts and pushchair storage.
3. Give a hand to parents – don’t presume adults have been to a museum before, so help them to help their children enjoy the museum.
4. Be interactive and hands on so kids can touch objects.
5. Be height aware, with objects, art and signage low enough to children to see.
6. Have different things to do with art carts, picture trails, storytelling, and dressing up so parents don’t have to do all the work.
7. Produce guides and trails that children and adults can use together.
8. Provide healthy food and unlimited tap water.
9. Provide great toilets with baby changing facilities and room for pushchairs.
10. Teach kids respect for objects and other visitors, and explain why there are things they can’t touch.
11. Sell items in the shop that aren’t too expensive and not junk.
12. Give free entry wherever possible or family tickets allowing re-entry.
13. Don’t make assumptions about kids likes and dislikes, they can appreciate fine art as well as finger-painting.
14. Provide open space where kids can let off steam.
15. But also have some quiet space where kids and families can reflect together.
16. Don’t say “shush” – why shouldn’t families be able to discuss what the are seeing?
17. Don’t forget teenagers and make sure there’s somewhere for them to store their stuff.
18. Have dedicated family friendly days with extra activities.
19. Remember there’s no typical family, they can span generations.
20. Remember a visit doesn’t end when a family leaves. Many families ant the experience to last, so have follow-up activities and suggestions on the website.
Liverpool Council’s legacy Capital of Culture arts funding is over subscribed by more than twice.
More than 1500 applied for a share of the funding available in the four month bidding process, and city leaders are meeting today to decide how to share the cash among the 67 successful bidders.
Overall, the city is investing £2m more in culture than before it established the Liverpool Culture Company in 2005 to run the Capital of Culture year.
It is a mark of the different attitude to culture on Merseyside brought about by the 2008 European Capital of Culture designation.
It has already been recommended that 33 arts bodies should receive annual funding from the city, a 25% increase more the previous three-year programme, and 26 more than in 2001.
They will share a pot of £7.33m, with another £900,000 earmarked for a strategic development fund designed to enhance the business plans and strategic direction of 11 arts organisations. There is a further £200,000 has set aside for 27 community arts organisations across the city.
“I’m delighted that this city is looking to annually fund the greatest number of arts organisations in our history” said the council’s leader Warren Bradley. “To be able to say that after Capital of Culture should leave no one in any doubt of the council’s commitment to fostering a successful ‘08 legacy. This support will enable the city’s cultural sector to develop and grow, providing a richer and more diverse offer.”
The council’s culture investment strategy has three aims: to establish a vibrant cultural programme; to ensure the people and communities of Liverpool are best served by their cultural organisations; and to develop firm partnerships between the authority and cultural organisations.
