British-Indian minister launches new fund to fix crumbling cultural infrastructure

London, Feb 21 (PTI) Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, has unveiled a GBP 270 million investment backed 'Arts Everywhere' Fund to revitalise the UK’s "crumbling" arts and culture infrastructure suffering in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

In a lecture at 16th-century playwright William Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon on Thursday, the British-Indian minister said the new fund was needed to meet the vision of making the arts accessible to all and referenced British Indian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 box-office hit ‘Bend Like Beckham’ in that context.

The minister, born to an Indian father and English mother, said her investment plans for the arts would include targeted support through GBP 85 million towards a 'Creative Foundations Fund' with the Arts Council to ensure 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,” said Nandy.

“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,” said Nandy.

“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,” she said.

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 GBP 270 million 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,” said Nandy.

“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,” she added.

The lecture, hosted by the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), brought together over 100 representatives from across the arts industry.

“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 and Tamara Harvey and Chief Executive Andrew Leveson.

The RSC, based at Stratford-Upon-Avon in the West Midlands Region of England, said it will work with the government and other stakeholders to ensure that theatre buildings are effectively maintained and put to the most effective use in creating impactful artistic programmes. PTI AK PY PY

Source: PTI