CULTURE secretary Lisa Nandy has unveiled a £270 million investment backed ‘Arts Everywhere’ Fund to revitalise the UK’s “crumbling” arts and culture infrastructure after the Covid pandemic.
In a lecture last Thursday (20) at Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, Nandy said the new fund was needed to meet the vision of making the arts accessible to all and mentioned British Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 boxoffice hit Bend Like Beckham to illustrate the point.
Nandy said her investment plans for the arts would include targeted support through £85m towards a ‘Creative Foundations Fund’ with the Arts Council to ensure that art is not seen as a luxury.
“I know it’s been a tough decade. Funding for the arts has been slashed.
Buildings are crumbling, and the pandemic hit the arts and heritage world hard,” she said.
“This is personal for me. I still remember how ground-breaking it was to watch Bend It Like Beckham – the first time I had seen a family like ours depicted on screen not for being Asian (or in my case mixed race) but because of a young girl’s love of football.”
The culture secretary was born to an Indian father and English mother.
Nandy said, “This country must always resist the temptation to see the arts as a luxury. The visual arts, music, film, theatre, opera, spoken word, poetry, literature and dance are the building blocks of our cultural life, indispensable to the life of a nation, always, but especially now.”
The minister was addressing the inaugural Jennie Lee Lecture in memory of Scottish Labour MP and the UK’s first arts minister behind the country’s only white paper on the accessibility of the arts in the mid-1960s.
“I am delighted to announce the ‘Arts Everywhere’ fund as a fitting legacy for Jennie Lee’s vision – over £270m investment that will begin to fix the foundations of our arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage sector in communities across the country. We believe in them and we will back them,” Nandy added.
“So much has been taken from us in this dark divisive decade, but above all our sense of self-confidence as a nation. But we are good at the arts.
“We export music, film and literature all over the world. We attract investment to every part of the UK from every part of the globe. We are the interpreters and the storytellers, with so many stories to tell that must be heard.”
More than 100 representatives from the arts industry attended the lecture, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
“Ageing capital infrastructure remains a tremendous drag on the arts sector’s ability to create the work for which it is globally celebrated and maximise its economic and social contribution,” said Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) co-artistic directors Daniel Evans, Tamara Harvey and chief executive Andrew Leveson.
Jess Phillips
