National charity Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) has described the £1.6 million cut in its funding from Arts Council England as” very painful.”
But CCE chief executive Paul Collards added that the organisation had managed to make the cuts “ without impacting on the schools and children involved in the Creative Partnerships creative learning programme.”

Instead the reductions in spending have fallen on training schemes, community engagement and research, he said. But Collard warned that any future cuts “will not be able to be made without a dramatic impact on the children and young people in schools who currently benefit from Creative Partnerships.” He added that individual artists and frontline cultural organisations would also feel the impact.

“It is important that the government recognises the value of engaging children and young people with the arts through creative and cultural education – this is vital for life long involvement with the arts, and independent evidence has proven that our work helps to raise attainment levels, improve attendance and increase pupil motivation, ”said the CCE boss.

CCE was amongst the biggest loser in the £7million worth of cuts announced by the Arts Council. Other cuts will hit Arts and Business and regularly funded arts organisations will face a half per cent cut in funding this year.

The question as to why the Arts Council took such a large hit in Monday’s cuts – 4% or £19m when everyone else in DCMS only had 3% - has an answer: culture minister Ed Vaizey says it is because of the £18.4m reserves ACE has which it can dip into, and he thinks the hit can be ‘mitigated’ more when more lottery money starts coming on stream from next April. By then, though, the arts will almost certainly have much worse cuts to deal with. Talk is of 5% a year up to 2014 being docked, scorched earth.

ACE has tried several times to get access to the reserves – created by the merger between with the regional arts boards in 2002 and since prudently added to – but has been forbidden to each time by DCMS. That was the old regime, though, and ACE will smart from already havig had this year’s money cut by £4m and having added a further £6.5m from its own savings, but Alan Davey and Forgan will not want to get into a fight with the new DCMS team over that. ‘We have received confirmation from the department that the additional £5 million cut the Arts Council has been asked to make is to be mitigated - if possible - by the freeing up of our blocked historic reserves’ Davey says today. ‘We are now getting on with the task at hand and making sure we do our absolute best to minimise the impact on the art and the frontline organisations who enable it to happen’.

It seems likely that they will be able to manage it, with our without the reserve, with no serious hit on the RFOs. Nor are they going to tackle the red herring of lottery money yet, which will need legislation if it is to be used to plug holes in revenue funding.

But if tapping into reserves to maintain support of ‘front line services’ – Hunt’s phrase - is to be acceptable practice it goes against the very policy the new government is advancing, in calling on arts organisations to create endowment funds. That will undoubtedly be seized on by the opposition as the Conservatives reverting to type, and all the pre-election pro-arts speak perfidious lip service.

And while ACE gets down serious with Vaizey and Hunt there may be other awkwardness. Vaizey was speaking at the Arts & Business launch of its new Big Arts Give project, showing his approval of A&B and its new emphasis on philanthropic giving. But when asked if he would chop A&B, he invoked the arm’s length principle: ‘That up to the Arts Council’. So if ACE does decide it can do without handing over £4m a year to A&B, will DCMS feel obliged to take it over – after all, it was in the DCMS fold until 2001?

National museums, of course, are already directly funded from the department, and the Tate gets a cut this year by £2.1m, the British Museum will lose £1.8m, English Heritage £4.8m and the Science Museum £1.476m. The MLA gets a 3% cut, and Roy Clare, the chief executive, is almost enthusiastic about it, even though much paring has been done already and their regional offices have gone. He gives short shrift to the quangos that give their chairs limos and whose CEOs go first class (not the case at the Arts Council, it has to be said). ‘The game’s up’ he tells me ‘and this round of in-year cuts is a medicine we have to swallow like grown-ups’.

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.”

News focus
Last month Arts Council England published its blueprint for how it proposes to deal with its funding clients. Here ACE’s chief operating officer, Althea Efunshile, outlines what it will mean.

The publication of The relationship between Arts Council England and its regularly funded organisations marked a significant step in the development of the relationships between the Arts Council and the organisations we fund. The document sets out clearly what a regularly funded organisation can expect from the Arts Council and what we expect in return. It covers topics such as funding agreements, knowledge sharing, self-evaluation and artistic assessment.

Our relationship with RFOs is a partnership which needs to be based on openness, clarity about one another’s different roles, mutual respect and trust. This publication is about making clear the framework we use to support, monitor and assess each of our funded organisations in a way that is consistent, but that also responds to individual needs and circumstances.

Self-evaluation and artistic assessment
One of the most significant new steps is the development of an online self-evaluation framework, which will be published on the Arts Council website in the coming weeks. Of course, many arts organisations already self-evaluate very effectively, but this new flexible development tool will be specially designed to support all our funded arts organisations to evaluate their own work.

We believe that in order to reach their full potential and to inform their future plans all arts organisations should undertake periodic self-evaluation. It’s up to each organisation to decide how best to do this, with our framework supporting organisations in their own evaluation.

The self-evaluation framework focuses on six key areas:

o Vision
o External environment
o Artistic aspirations and programme
o Participation and engagement
o Organisational capacity and capability
o Business model

It was developed after consulting with our funded organisations who also helped to “road test” the framework. We expect it to continue to develop and improve as we learn from the feedback organisations give us.

The self-assessment framework sits alongside the new artistic assessment scheme, which saw 150 artistic assessors appointed in January this year. These assessors, who have knowledge and expertise across the arts, experience the work of our funded organisations and report on its artistic quality. Over time, these assessments will create a broad and diverse evidence base to help inform the Arts Council’s investment decisions. We’ll share these reports with the organisations that are assessed, providing a helpful context for their own discussions about artistic quality.

The new relationship framework also introduces a new scheme of peer appraisal for the nine RFOs that receive more than £5m a year from the Arts Council. These appraisals will take place every five years, involving respected figures with expertise in particular areas. They will provide the Arts Council with a detailed picture of the organisation as a whole and will give the organisations themselves an opportunity to reflect on their work, providing expert insights to challenge organisations to be the best they can be.

Great art for everyone
The Arts Council is currently developing a new strategic framework, setting out our long term goals for the next ten years. We can only achieve our goals by working with our partners, and in particular through the creativity and talent of the artists and the arts organisations we fund. Our recently completed consultation, Achieving great art for everyone, gave the arts sector a real opportunity to share their views about the direction they would like to see us take over the next decade.

Our regularly funded organisations represent the majority of the public funding that we distribute. They have a responsibility to be as ambitious and effective as possible and we have a responsibility to ensure that we support them in a way that best enables them to be so. We hope The relationship between Arts Council England and its regularly funded organisations helps us all to achieve this, allowing our funded organisations across the country to thrive.

AI Profile

Alan Bishop, chief executive, Southbank Centre

He is a modest man, Alan Bishop, and his Who’s Who entry is a masterpiece of understatement. It tells us he was born on August 2nd 1953, who his parents were, that he got a BA Hons at Queen’s College, Oxford, and that his career was “With various advertising agencies”, listing two before the fact that he was chief executive of the Central Office of Information between 2003 and 2009. It tells us that he likes bridge and cricket, and that he’s a member of Soho House. And that’s it, a total of 58 words.

Softly spoken and, at the start of our conversation, nursing a mild stammer which gradually disappears, it is hard to see this man flying into tirades with his board, as his predecessor Michael Lynch is reported to have been inclined to do, or flinging public accusations at the private sector. Insiders say his senior management meetings tend to be lengthy, and usually end with his gently insistent points being carried.

Bishop’s appointment was a surprise: with no professional background in the arts, his entire career had been in advertising and latterly running the COI, the government’s cross-departmental information agency.

In trawling for Lynch’s successor he thinks Rick Haythornthwaite’s Southbank board was looking for somebody used to working in a creative environment while also managing a business properly (advertising), and somebody who knew about being in the public eye and spending public money (government information). “Art is not commercially driven here” he says, “but working with people who are passionate about the creative process and for whom you need to create a financial environment that works and allows as much freedom as possible - without allowing anarchy to ensue - is very similar indeed”.

He arrived at the start of 2009 with a three month handover, and although the major task of refurbishment of the concert hall had been accomplished, it as a time of fearful uncertainty.

“That’s when the credit crunch absolutely exploded, and I suppose I found it particularly nerve-racking being so highly aware of the anxiety that there was in government at that time” he recalls. “We simply didn’t know what the effects would be, and every day you found that another bank had to be rescued. Anything could happen, and I was extremely tense. There was a lot of talk about possible mass unemployment, great uncertainty, and maybe people hunkering down and not going out, and watching DVDs was the best they could hope for.”

If the Southbank Centre was bracing itself for the worst, it didn’t come and the programming of the new RFH did not falter. “This is an intrinsically optimistic place, and I think that the basic attitude is a very good one – if we get it right the people will come” Bishop says. “We needed to position ourselves to say ‘You need something to distract you, interest you, entertain you in these tough times’, and we needed to make the whole arts programme as exciting as possible, so rather than cut back on programming to make sure that we were providing those opportunities for people. In detail that’s not what turned out, but in general it did. People haven’t stopped coming.”

Not only has there not been the slump in visitors to the Southbank Centre, Bishop has seen a 10% increase in footfall on the site – 3m ticket buyers a year, 20m passing by.

For Lynch had not only left a renewed concert hall, but the shops and restaurants under and beside the Royal Festival Hall which had drawn a lot of criticism when the plans were originally announced with the Rick Mather masterplan for the site. Those extra amenities have proved phenomenally successful, in fact, contributing £6m a year, three times what was budgeted for and Bishop’s best earner after box office and the Arts Council £25m grant.

A renewed concert hall with significant add-ons was not all Bishop’s predecessor left behind, however. He had to deal with what he saw as Lynch’s alienation of the private sector through his “bankers are bastards” interview for AI, castigating corporates for not contributing enough to the £111m bill for putting the Royal Festival Hall to rights.

“I took Michael task over that” he says. “I told him clearly they’re not bastards, you’ve insulted a wide range of people”. It was seen as an attack on the City, “and pretty insulting to those who had contributed”.

If it was a problem, he soon solved it. HSBC have just signed up as the major sponsor of this summer’s Brazil Festival, and Shell have renewed for their Classics season for another three years.

And if he was peeved with Lynch for that potentially dangerous remark, the legacy was many times more significant. “He was totally focused and passionate about the refurbishment of the hall.

“But he also understood that once done, you have to make the whole site more attractive, you need to have the kind of programming which will make sure people take up old habits again and return to site” he says, and it worked.

The challenge of recession has not, of course, gone away. “We need to make sure we’re sensible without making any rash commitments, at the same time continuing to build and expand the breadth of the programme so that we go on attracting audiences and new people to the site. It’s not a balancing act because that suggests you come out somewhere average, it was showing and building commitment to an ever expanding programme but presenting that in a way which you could justify making business sense as well as artistic sense. Getting that right is the challenge.”

So there are more events around the halls as well as the same quality within it, and all of it depends on a high degree of harmony with the management of the retail outlets as well as the residents and associates – there are six classical ensembles, the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London Sinfonietta, The Sixteen and the Takács Quartet.

Bishop wants them not only to programme sympathetically, in close association with his music director Marshall Marcus, but to work together as much as possible, and he sees more symbiosis possible with the arrival of the BFI who are to build their new headquarters on the Southbank site – live musical accompaniment to film shows are becoming increasingly popular.

The Mather Masterplan did not end with the Festival Hall, and Bishop is slowly developing the rest of the site with Mather’s consultation. There will be no major shifting around of buildings as had once been envisaged, and the enduring qualities of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, for instance, will not be compromised. The Hayward Gallery is due for a major remake, but in the mean time it has been closed for essential work since January, reopening in June with a major retrospective of the work of abstract minimalist Brazilian Ernesto Neto as a herald to the Brazil Festival.

One thing is still missing from the Royal Festival Hall, Bishop says, and his aim is to have it accomplished by the time his first five years contract ends in 2013.

“It’s funny how, when a newcomer arrives, certain things stand out, and this was on fro me” he says. “It was a shame that time and money ran out before it could be done, but I am I determined that by 2013 we will have a magnificent fully working organ, my one particular passion. It’ going to cost over £2m over £2m, but it has to happen.”

Create10, running from June 19 to August 1, will hit the streets, parks, office blocks, warehouses and even theatres and concert halls of London’s East End purveying some of the wackiest festival programming so far devised as the core of what the East End will offer London 2012.

It is, says its executive producer Hadrian Garrett, a “festival of doing, because doing is what East End people is all about. It’s new ways of them interacting with their creative neighbours”.

Create10 is the Cultural Olympiad project of the five East End boroughs – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Newham and Waltham Forest – and is the core of what will become the main Festival 2012.

There was a Create9, there will be a Create 11 and Create12 – and a Create13.

The idea came out of a sentence in the original bid, which announced baldly that there would be a “big East London festival”. Early in 2008 representatives of the five boroughs got round a table – “probably out of fear as much as anything, knowing what had to be done” – with Garrard, and Culture9 the following summer ad the result.

Hadrian Garrard was a session musician before becoming involved with the project of reopening the Hackney Empire theatre, and then the cultural life of Hackney, then Hackney’s contribution to the Olympic programme. Since 2007 he has been one of the 12 creative programmers appointed by the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games across the UK to create an inspiring Cultural Olympiad.

For Culture10, it is by East Enders, for East Enders – and the rest of the world as it passes through, as more and more tourists are in the run up to 2012.

“It is designed to evolve up to 2012 when it will be an unforgettable experience, and then 2013, because there has to be a legacy that will bring the Olympic Park to life long after the games themselves are over” he says.

Last year 822,000 turned up, for the six week vent, 220,00 of them participated in some way, and £13.15 million (more than half of it from non-East Enders) was injected into the local economy for an outlay of just over half a million. The funding comes from the Arts Council, the London Development Agency, the five boroughs, the Bank of America, and artistic partners Station House Opera and the Central School of Speech and Drama.

One aim of the Create series was to get major companies to take the East End seriously, looking that direct for artists and collaborators, and it’s working.

Punchdrunk, the theatre company whose USP is involvement with audiences, is producing its first every opera in collaboration with ENO, and they will do a version The Duchess of Malfi in a disused warehouse in the Royal Albert Docks.

And what Garrard is even more excited about is a thing called You Me Bum Bum Train, winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, created by the Town Hamlets based Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who have been taking the show to different venues since 2004 and changing its nature for each environment. “It is an amazing thing, a cast of 200 for an audience of one, in which you the audience are the focal point of the production so you have to participate” Garrard says. Each single person is taken through a series of vignettes which h they feel have each been created especially for them.

It will be performed in an empty electricity board office block in Bethnal Green, and the real triumph is that it is a co-production with the Barbican for which it fits into the Bite 10 programme as an off-site presentation.

“The important thing is” says Garrard “that we’re not trying to fly something in here from outside, we’re growing something in an organic process that will build up to 2012 and then leave a legacy. It’s a logical thing to do in the East End.”

The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, was inspired by the revival of the classic event at the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock in 1850 by a local GP, “to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the Town and neighbourhood of Wenlock”.

“Coubertin’s main influence from Much Wenlock was the force of life, not sporting excellence” said Jonathan Edwards, the Olympic gold medallist. “It’s not about who can be the fastest, it’s about whole of life and at the heart of it is a belief in human potential”.

Which is why the cultural element, not part of the annual Much Wenlock event but at the core of Coubertin’s thinking, is so important, he said, as he inaugurated Creative Campus Projects, part of the Cultural Olympiad.

This is the initiative of 13 university campuses around he South East of England, led by Seymour Roworth-Stokes, pro-vice chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham.

“The Olympics can be an expression of artistic creativity, and that’s what we’ve come together to do in this corner of the country” he said. “It will open up the cultural resources and assets of our campuses, providing greater access to world-leading, practice-based research in the creative and performing arts.”

There are over 100 events running through the four summer months, and more than half a million are expected to see something of them.

A number of them will involve disabled artists, including the ensemble Sign Dance Collective, who performed at the Creative Campus launch at the Southbank Centre. The two dancers were Isolte Avila, Cuban-born who has been crippled with arthritis since childhood, and David Bowers, the deaf creator of the group and also a singer who came to fame as the brother of the Hugh Grant character at whose wedding he sings in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

“We are making a new piece for Creative Campus, New Gold” said Avila. “Singing is part of the performance, part of the choreography, and the arts for me is to dance so that I make use of my disability rather than a problem.”

Sign dance Collective is being presented by Buckinghamshire New University whose head of research, Paul Springer, is being the commission. “The Olympics and Paralympics is a celebration of self-expression and a lot of research is being done by universities, so what will be presented will be very surprising and fascinating” he said.

Artists are collaborating with students, academics and communities to create new work which has been inspired by the Olympic spirit.

Other offerings are the University of Kent’s Spectators, a film project involving a cinematographer, an artist and an equestrian. Degrees of Difficulty from Thames Valley University is a musical celebration of Olympic diving.

Creative Campus has been given the Olympic Inspire mark, said Jonathan Edwards. “These performers are inspired by the Olympic ideal, and we will be inspired by their performances” he said. “That’s why sport and education sit alongside eachother, both about human potential, both about making the most out of life. This will make a difference to lots of younger people, and older people who haven’lt been able to realise their potential” he said.

The participating institutions in six parts of the region are Buckinghamshire New University and Oxford Brookes University; the University of Portsmouth, the University of Southampton and Southampton Solent University; the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham and the University of Winchester; the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex; Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Kent; Royal Holloway University of London and Thames Valley University.

Simon Tait gets a preview of some of the features of Brighton’s citywide

The Regency Town House is a magnificent gentleman’s house of 1829 in one of Brighton’s most beautiful squares, and for a quarter for a century it has been the obsession of Nick Tyson to restore it as closely as possible to the way it looked in its mid-19th century heyday. It is in entering the final stages, but as the process continues, in the ground floor reception room is the work of 21 artists – picked from 80 submitted - who have taken the theme of regeneration. There is a particular complication for hanger Woodrow Kernohan – “because of the delicacy of the restoration, we aren’t able to hang on the walls, so we are having to invent new ways of exhibiting that show the art and don’t conceal the rooms wonderful detail, quite a challenge” he says.

Unravelling the Manor House is an exploration of the fascinating Preston Manor, home of the Thomas-Stanford family for 130 years, furnished to the family’s Edwardian taste, and said to be the most haunted house in Britain. Twelve artists and designer-makers have been commissioned to research the family and their home, and make interventions reflecting what they have discovered and also contemporary 21st century life. Mrs Ellen Thomas-Stanford, who came to live here in 1905, was an intriguing personality who met her second husband at the funeral of her first, and between then and her marriage had a child by her butler. She collected white Chinese porcelain figures, and in a show cabinet where they are displayed row-on-row ceramicist Matt Smith has interposed bright red china British bulldogs - made in the United States. Louise Batchelor has taken Charles Thomas-Stanford’s pipe case and made two glass pipes for it. Caitlin Heffernan has created a cloak for Ellen made entirely from peacock feathers. Laura Splan has made her a pair of gloves from gel that appear to be of human skin, complete with buttons.

House-Garden. Last year, the pilot year, Stevens and Lord created a seven-seat cinema in their front room. “We were told there were far too many seats” Stevens says “so this time the home cinema is in a garden shed, setting four at a squeeze”. At the bottom of the garden at 46 Buller Road four films are being shown over the month, and perhaps the most intriguing is Alice in Wonderland, made by Percy Stow in 1903 and the first ever film version of Carroll’s story. The actors are unknown, there were no film stars then, and it would have been seen in music halls and horse-drawn travelling cinemas. Twelve minutes long, it is complete and has been restored by the BFI, with the original colour tints recreated.

The Handmade House was a run down shambles of a farm building, built in 1939 in the delightful village of Ditchling when designer Ralph Levy saw it eight years ago, and moved in. The garden was a jungle, the house itself was a health trap with no facilities. “The only thing to do was to strip everything out to the basics and start again” he says. The original fittings and fixtures remaking as far as he could rescue them, everything else he has made himself, from the stove in the tiny lounge, to the kitchen fittings and even crockery. The garden is now reclaimed and neatly planted with vegetables by Levy and his neighbour Lucy Greenaway – an artist who is also director of Phoenix, the artists’ studio co-operative in Brighton – and where he has built a pizza oven (“I had a commission to design one, and the only way to do it is to build one”). He also has 60 acres beyond the house, and through part of this he has made a sculpture trail, because for House he is showing and selling the work of artist friends in the house.