The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the organisation that distributes money from the National Lottery to heritage projects around the UK, has published a report on the largest completed initiatives it has funded since it was first set up in 1994.
The fund has awarded grants of more than £5m to 173 projects over the past 21 years, of which 100 have now been finished. Altogether, these 100 grants add up to just over £1bn in funding. The fund provides only part of the cost of a project; its involvement has helped applicants to raise a further £2bn in partnership funding. Of the £1bn spent on these initiatives, £850m was used to conserve or upgrade historic buildings. Just over half the projects were museums.
The Art Newspaper’s analysis of the data in the report, HLF Major Grants—the First 100, emphasises how much more difficult it has become to get major lottery grants. Of the 100 projects listed, 53 were approved in the first five years, 34 between 2001 and 2005, and 13 since then, although this last period is not directly comparable, since the study covers only completed projects. In geographical terms, 31 projects were in Greater London, 53 in the rest of England, 13 in Scotland and three in Wales, with none in Northern Ireland.
Honest assessment
The report also includes descriptions of every project, with details about what was achieved and, in a few cases, what went wrong. An overwhelming majority of the major projects funded by the HLF were successful, most of them highly successful—but a few encountered serious problems. The Gilbert Collection’s gallery at Somerset House, London, which received £30.8m from the fund, did not attract enough visitors, and the decorative art was moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008. The Royal Artillery Museum: Firepower! in Woolwich, London, which received £5m, also failed to achieve its projected visitor numbers and is likely to downsize its premises at the end of 2016.
The restoration of the Cutty Sark, a 19th-century British clipper ship moored on the River Thames at Greenwich, almost failed, although in the end the vessel was saved. An initial request for lottery funding in 1999 was rejected, but six years later, an award was approved. Costs then escalated and a fire in 2007 exacerbated the problems. The lottery fund became “increasingly concerned about delivery”, halting its grant payments in 2008. The organisers managed to raise alternative funds, with the conserved ship opening to the public four years later.
Rescuing major museums
The report also highlights how lottery funding helped to rescue major museums. For example, Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow would probably have closed without the fund’s support. Mark O’Neill, the former head of Glasgow Museums, said that, without the £13.2m lottery grant it received in 2001, “Kelvingrove would have closed within two years”. He says that “the electrics would have failed the insurance tests”, since the wiring dated back to the early 20th century. The museum reopened after a major renovation in 2006 and attracted 1.1 million visitors last year.
One of the positive results of the lottery has been a change in approach to heritage management, as the HLF report explains. “Physical transformation must be accompanied by innovations within organisations: rethinking the nature and quality of the visitor experience, and widening access,” it says. “Organisations themselves need to change—culturally, structurally or philosophically. However, we have found it is this kind of change that organisations can sometimes be less enthusiastic about.”
Lottery win: the biggest awards
• £30.9m National Museums Liverpool (building developments)
• £30.8m Gilbert Collection, London (building upgrade and endowment)
• £25m Cutty Sark, Greenwich (conservation)
• £25m Kennet and Avon Canal (conservation)
• £23m Science Museum, London (building development)
• £22.2m Royal Festival Hall, London (building development)
• £21.7m Riverside Museum and Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (building development)
• £20.5m Natural History Museum, London (building development)
• £20.2m Royal Albert Hall, London (building development)
• £20m Tyntesfield, National Trust (restoration) Fund might have devoted £3bn to acquisitions
Among the surprises in the report is the fact that, in 1994, the Heritage Lottery Fund planned to “use half its resources towards acquisitions” for museums and similar institutions. Altogether, the fund has so far given grants worth more than £6bn, so this would have amounted to £3bn. In the 1990s, there was the prospect of enormous largesse. When the lottery helped London’s National Gallery to buy a work by Seurat, the institution hoped to get further funding to buy six other works owned by Heinz Berggruen, which had been on loan. The pictures—another by Seurat and five by Cézanne—were then worth around £100m. However, the fund quickly decided to put more money into buildings, not acquisitions, and the works went abroad.
The HLF has provided just under £50m in major grants for paintings. The National Gallery has had four grants of more than £5m: £8m in 1995 for Seurat’s The Channel of Gravelines (1890), £5m in 1996 for Dürer’s St Jerome (around 1496), £8.3m in 1997 for Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (around 1762) and £11.5m in 2003 for Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks (1506-07). The National Gallery of Scotland has received two grants: £7.7m in 1999 for Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child (around 1490) and £7.6m in 2003 for Titian’s Venus Rising from the Sea (around 1520).