The opera house will receive a £17m grant from Arts Council England (ACE) to develop a new business model in its new home after its general funding was cut to zero in grants announced on Friday. ENO said its move marked “the start of a new chapter” and would create “new audiences and reach beyond London”. Its new base is expected to be Manchester, although ENO will continue to manage and perform at its London home, the Coliseum, while “maximizing it as a commercial asset”. As well as the specific grant to ENO, 24 arts organizations have received money from ACE to relocate outside the capital by October 2024. The government instructed ACE earlier this year to spend more money on arts organizations outside London as part of the upgrade of the program. “We just had to make some very aggressive choices,” said Nicholas Serota, ACE’s president. Among those whose funding has been cut is the Donmar Warehouse theater in central London. Sam Mendes, the theatre’s founding artistic director, said it was a “short-sighted decision that will cause long-lasting damage to the wider industry”. He added: “The Donmar has been at the heart of British theater for three decades and has a hard-earned heritage of punching well above its weight in both ambition and scope. It is a world-renowned theater of enormous influence and the UK cannot afford to jeopardize it.” The Barbican Center also lost all ACE funding. A spokesman said they were “very grateful for the funding” and “fully appreciated the changing landscape” – but the City of London Corporation would continue to be the venue’s main funder. In total, ACE has committed £446 million a year over the next three years to 990 arts organizations in what Darren Henley, its chief executive, said was the “biggest spread of investment across the country”. The money comes from the government and the National Lottery. Recipients included 276 organizations that had not previously received Arts Council funding. ACE declined to say how many organizations had been removed from its “portfolio”. The National Football Museum in Manchester, Touretteshero, which celebrates the “humor and creativity of Tourette’s Syndrome”, the Postal Museum in London and Blackpool Illuminations were among the newcomers. Ballet Black, which gives a platform to historically underrepresented dancers of color, saw its donation almost double to £424,000 and Bamboozle, a Leicester-based touring theater company for children on the autistic spectrum or with learning disabilities, received a 50% increase of financing. Henley said: “We wanted to make sure the portfolio reflected the way England looks and feels in the 21st century.” Over £43m of the total was spent on ‘Levelling Up for Culture Places’ – towns and cities identified as historically under-served by government spending on the arts. They included Mansfield, Gloucester, Stoke and Slough. London saw the biggest investment yet, with £152 million a year being made available, a third of the total. The South West region got the least funding, with £37m going to 33 organisations. Theaters were the biggest recipients, with a total of £111 million in grants. Libraries got the smallest chunk of cash, with £4 million. Some of the capital’s biggest names have seen their grants frozen or reduced at a time when they are facing exponentially rising costs and falling coffers. The National Theater said a 5% cut in its funding to £16.1m a year would “present challenges” but was “grateful for the financial support… especially given the difficult times many people are facing”. Royal Opera House grant cut by 9%. There was no increase in funds for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English National Ballet grant fell by 5% from just over £6.3m to just over £6m. Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, said the £50m cuts to London’s arts funding “couldn’t have come at a worse time as arts organizations are already facing a triple whammy of rising running costs, rising energy bills and the impact of both the pandemic and the pandemic. the cost of living crisis in the public’s numbers.” Serota said ENO had “long wanted to do more outside of London. And the possibilities of working from a base in the north is quite exciting.” He acknowledged that removing regular funding for opera would be challenging, but “the scale of the money we had to get out of London required us to look at a number of the bigger organisations”. ACE has been clear for several years that it wanted to “do more outside of London for communities that have not previously had public funding for the arts”. It received 1,700 applications for funding this year, compared to 1,100 in the previous round five years ago. “It’s only right that we respond to the energy, imagination and opportunity across the country. I don’t think we should apologize for that.”
