National Lottery at 30: Unacknowledged legacy

Brass bands, craft workshops, independent cinemas, regional theatre, galleries and public art stood alongside the Royal Opera House as early beneficiaries of the largesse provided by the National Lottery – unrelated arts activities linked by a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

It is now thirty years since a colleague and I became the fourth and fifth lottery officers to join the recently formed and dryly titled National Lottery Department at the Arts Council of England. Ahead of us were the director, his PA and an internal member of the Arts Council team who’d simply transferred across from the Combined Arts Department. In subsequent weeks we were joined by a director of operations and five more lottery officers to bring our team up to eight. Administrators were to follow in the new year when the doors opened to applications. No one really knew what to expect.

We were a relatively young, diverse team – the director was just 40 and I was ten years younger. Our backgrounds were varied, one of us had worked in the City, a few were from arts organisations of various sizes, and I’d moved across from the British Film Institute. 

Simply swamped

All of us were fresh faced. Our first two months on the third floor of the Arts Council’s Great Peter Street HQ were effectively a boot camp in how to run a capital project. Experts provided guidance on financial management and a bespoke course saw us gain a thorough understanding of the trials and tribulations involved in building major arts venues. A new grant management system was created, tested and retested.  Consultants and advisors came and went. The nuts and bolts of an infrastructure were established as the National Lottery launched to the playing public in November 1994.

Some two months later, in January 1995, our doors opened and the weight of expectation across the arts became clear.  We were simply swamped with applications.  The fledgling National Lottery was rightly seen as a unique moment for the arts to secure the resources needed to rectify years of underinvestment; no one was going to miss out. National organisations vied with local and community-based entities, and a sense of entitlement hung in the air.

All major proposals were independently assessed by consultants. And I recall sitting at a briefing session for independent assessors in the large hall at Church House across the road from Arts Council. During the presentation, one loud voice behind me said “we’re just going to make a lot of money out of this” and I turned round to see one of the UK’s most prominent arts management consultants sitting with his colleague. He wasn’t wrong.

By the summer of 1995, the original team had grown to occupy the entire the third floor of Great Peter Street and there was talk of moving to a bigger space where the volume of work could be managed more easily. Some months later, a large group of us decanted our working lives into a tower block near Victoria Station.

Ferreting out the charlatans

Funding from the National Lottery did make a genuine difference. I’d studied in Sheffield and was proud to be the official responsible for the investment in the Showroom Cinema; it has since gone on to make a huge contribution to the city and is the home to an established international film festival. Cinema was my area, and independent cinemas were supported across the country – FACT in Liverpool, Broadway in Nottingham as well those built in partnership with City Screen.

Many cities and regions benefitted from lottery support. Small organisations outside the mainstream secured money needed to keep going; film and video workshops across the country bought new kit and so many brass bands applied that it was virtually impossible to distinguish one application from the next.

The smell of money obviously attracted charlatans and a key part of our role as lottery officers was to ferret them out. There was the Literary Magazine whose owners, early to the working-from-home game, tried to use lottery money to buy a lease to their own living room; the public school which claimed that the 25% match funding needed to build a theatre was provided by the value of the playing field that it was about to be built on; and the extremely posh venue manager who screamed petulantly at me that 25% of £500,000 was £100,000 rather than £125,000. All were rejected.

Huge achievement

In 2002, the Arts Council of England published Pride of Place – How the Lottery Contributed £1 Billion to the Arts in England. With the Baltic Flour Mills on the cover, this book showcases some 50 case studies and highlights the quality, range and amount of work which took place over an extraordinary six-year period. It stretched across the country and included contributions to places that are now taken for granted; the regeneration of Salford Quays and the refurbishment of Bristol’s waterfront offer two examples.

Anniversaries come and go; many are justifiably unacknowledged. This thirty-year moment seems to offer something to pause and reflect on. Even if we accept that mistakes were made, a huge amount was achieved.

The arts and the infrastructure that surrounds and supports them have changed radically yet, once again, the sector is back in crisis. Funds are short so organisations and venues are struggling badly. Losing access to EU schemes has limited opportunity and, as predicted, lottery funding has been sucked into the mainstream support programmes for the arts. 

It is difficult to see where this will end, and arts funding is one of the many huge challenges the recently elected government faces. In the mid-1990s, the National Lottery offered a way through a comparable moment, but it is hard to see a similar saviour on the horizon now.