Lifeline grants worth a total of £18m have been allocated to eight arts and cultural organisations from the latest round of the UK’s £1.57bn recovery fund.
Historic sites and leading cultural organisations, including iconic venues like The Lowry in Salford, will receive help to meet ongoing costs and support to restart activity when it is possible to do so safely.
In this round, one of the oldest jazz clubs in the world, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, will receive £1.2m to explore streamed performance opportunities for emerging and established British musicians.
The Lowry chief executive, Julia Fawcett, said: “We’ll use it to make our galleries, theatre auditoria, workshop studios and employee areas socially distant, COVID-19 secure spaces. We’ll programme work of the widest possible range of genres and commission artists to create new work for the new normal.
“We’ll also extend our work in the local community in Salford, ensuring some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens are supported through this crisis.”
Grants of between £1m and £3m have been awarded by Arts Council England on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), with the Academy Music Group, which includes 20 live music venues across the country, including O2 Academy venues in London, Leeds and Liverpool, to receive £3m to help meet its core operating costs, and London Venue Group will be granted £2.4m to maintain Omeara, The Social and Lafayette and explore streaming options.
The funding builds on £75m in grants over £1m for iconic venues like Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sheffield Crucible last month.
Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, said: “These grants will help the places that have shaped our skylines for hundreds of years and that continue to define culture in our towns and cities.
“From St Paul’s and Ronnie Scott’s to The Lowry and Durham Cathedral, we’re protecting heritage and culture in every corner of the country to save jobs and ensure it can bounce back strongly.”
In addition, more than £9m has been allocated by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England on behalf of the DCMS, which builds on £103m awarded to places such as Highclere Castle last month. In addition, £5m will go to construction and maintenance projects that have been paused due to the pandemic.
Historic England has allocated £4m in awards from the Heritage Stimulus Fund, part of a £120m capital investment from the Culture Recovery Fund, to restart construction and maintenance projects facing delays or increased costs as a result of the pandemic and save specialist livelihoods in the sector.
The support will help to protect a further 162 heritage sites to ensure that jobs and access to arts, culture and heritage in local communities are protected in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, London music venue The Social has teamed up with fellow grassroots music venues Omeara and Lafayette to form a new partnership.
The new Venue Group umbrella, which received more than £2.3m in the latest funding round, provides The Social with further support following its successful spring 2019 Crowdfunder campaign, which raised over £145,000 to stop the venue’s enforced sale.
Image: The Lowry / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Edited for size
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