A
small queue, mainly families
with children, snakes into a
bus in Scotswood in Newcas-
tle upon Tyne. There’s a sign
on the front for its des-
tination that instead reads
“Travelling Gallery”. Inside is a small
exhibition called What’s for Tea?, with
pieces by established artists themed
around food.
This mobile art gallery is part of the
mission of the Baltic Centre for Contem-
porary Art in Gateshead to take culture
to “left behind” places like Scotswood.
Once a thriving industrial area on the
edge of Newcastle, it feels overlooked
and lacking in the services most city
dwellers take for granted. When the gov-
ernment talks about levelling up, it
means places such as Scotswood and
initiatives like the mobile gallery that
takes art to the people who can’t afford
to travel to galleries.
“Most of the people who’ve been
coming would never choose to engage
with contemporary art,” says Andy
Menzies, a cheerful Scotsman who’s
both the art bus driver and an educa-
tor. “But if we pitch up at their local
school or community centre they will
come. We’re spending time and money
visiting their community, which they
appreciate, and it emboldens people to
come inside and look.”
Three months ago the government
announced its “levelling up for cul-
ture” plan. About £75 million of invest-
ment has been promised in a move that
the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries,
ambitiously claims will help to end
the north/south divide and be “one of
the biggest ever redistributions of
arts funding in our history”. Of this,
£43 million is new money and a genu-
ine uplift from the Treasury, the rest of
the cash will be taken away from Lon-
don, where arts spending averages
about £20 a head, and redistributed to
areas where it is as low as £9 a head.
More than 100 places have been
identified as recipients for this new arts
investment, although there is some
controversy about exactly how they
were chosen, with suspicions of anunderlying political agenda. Half of the
locations — including Barnsley, Wolver-
hampton, Rotherham, Luton, Peterbor-
ough and Somerset — were identified
by the Arts Council England in 2021 as
“priority places” based on surveys
measuring how often people visited
museums and galleries.REPORT
Ministers are
spending millions
to boost the arts in
deprived places —
but is it for our
museums to help
the poor survive the
cost of living crisis?
Kirsty Lang and
Liam Kelly report
The other 55 priority areas were
selected by the culture department and
include interesting choices such as Soli-
hull, a leafy, affluent suburb of Bir-
mingham, and Whitley Bay, the home
town of the arts minister Lord Parkin-
son and one of the wealthiest neigh-
bourhoods in the northeast.
When the Sunday Times data team
crunched the numbers, they found that
73 of the 109 local authorities picked to
get the extra arts cash have Conserva-
tive MPs. In addition, 13 Conservative
local authorities earmarked for more
cultural investment do not have any
areas within them from the 10 per cent
most socially deprived nationally.
These include the constituencies of the
foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and the
business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng.Despite these concerns, a lot of peo-
ple working in the arts outside London
have welcomed the move. The sense of
local pride and wellbeing — and the
economic uplift — brought by invest-
ment in the arts has been demon-
strated in places such as Margate. One
recent study estimated that the build-
ing of the Turner Contemporary gallery
in the once neglected seaside town had
generated more than £70 million for
the local economy. Hull recorded an
even bigger economic uplift after
becoming a City of Culture.
“This shift is positive. People in the
regions want to feel they’re getting a
fair crack of the whip when it comes to
money for the arts and it’s not all going
to the big institutions in London,” says
Skinder Hundal, who ran the New ArtSome fear the arts are
being used as a sticking
plaster for social issues
All aboard Visitors to the What’s for
Tea exhibition on the Baltic Centre’s
mobile art gallery, centreKEEP WARM AND CAR
12 29 May 2022