Arts Council celebrates a Decade of Lottery Funding
Building for the Arts: Celebrating 10 years of Lottery Funding at the PLACE Centre, Fountain Street, Belfast on Tuesday 9th November 2004 Building for the Arts has been published by the Arts Council to mark the National Lottery’s 10th anniversary and to celebrate the remarkable theatres and arts centres that have been built in Northern Ireland thanks to Arts Council Lottery funds. The greatest impact of Arts Council Lottery funding has been with the building of new facilities for the arts across Northern Ireland. The Arts Council has allocated £27.4 million of its Lottery funds towards the building and refurbishment of arts venues and is responsible for buildings as radical and striking as the Marketplace Theatre in Armagh City, the Burnavon Arts and Cultural Centre in Cookstown, the Millennium Forum and the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry City, the Island Arts Centre in Lisburn City, the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, and the Flowerfield Arts Centre in Portstewart. Building for the Arts features descriptions, photographs and architectural drawings of these seven landmark buildings, and casts an eye to future arts facilities planned for Omagh, Ballymena and Strabane. In his introduction, Mervyn Black, President of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects, praises the contribution that Lottery-funded buildings have made to the built environment as well as to enhancing accessibility to the arts, and acknowledges the major role that the Arts Council has played in promoting design quality in Northern Ireland over the past decade. In his keynote speech at the launch of Building for the Arts, Mr Martin Bradley, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, will outline the main achievements of Arts Council Lottery funding over the past ten years. Referring to the vital importance of this funding in relation to the development of the arts infrastructure in Northern Ireland, Mr Bradley comments, “This crucial injection of funds has allowed the Arts Council to take the lead role in providing the people of Northern Ireland with top-of-the-range arts facilities and to pursue our goal of providing an arts centre within 20 miles of every person in the region. A decade of Arts Council Lottery funding has created facilities that will provide an invaluable legacy for the arts in Northern Ireland for decades to come. Building for the Arts celebrates these milestone achievements”. Notes 1. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland is the prime distributor of public funding for the arts in Northern Ireland. This year it allocated an Architecture and Built Environment Special Initiative fund of £190,000 from its National Lottery resources for architecture and design projects, to support and encourage development in the sector. This initiative is intended to complement current Arts Council funding structures and will be mainstreamed into existing Lottery schemes following distribution of this fund. 2. The Arts Council’s Architecture and the Built Environment policy document, published in January 2003 following extensive consultation, is available in hard copy from the Arts Council or via the website, www.artscouncil-ni.org 3. Since 1994, the National Lottery has raised £16 billion for good causes, and provided funding for more than 175,000 projects across the UK. It has helped to transform thousands of lives. 4. Building for the Arts is a 40-page colour book published by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and designed by Circle Creative Communications. Copies are available free of charge from the Arts Council, or by downloading from www.artscouncil-ni.org 5. An exhibition of photographic display panels highlighting key Arts Council Lottery-funded building projects will accompany the book launch. The exhibition will tour over the next six months to Derry City, Cookstown, Portstewart, Lisburn, Portadown and Omagh. Details available from the Arts Council. 6. The choice of the PLACE centre as venue for the launch of Building for the Arts is particularly appropriate as the aim of the centre is to raise public awareness about Northern Ireland’s built environment. PLACE is an acronym for Planning Landscape Architecture Community Environment. The PLACE centre receives substantial funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. 7. Lottery funding has made a huge contribution to developing and increasing access to the arts throughout Northern Ireland. Since the advent of Lottery funding in 1994, it has been possible for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to support a wide range of arts activities that would otherwise have been beyond its scope. Right across the region and crossing all social barriers, the public has benefited from these funds, from involvement in small-scale community projects to utilising the major building developments and refurbishments. Public sculptures such as the Big Fish in Belfast and the sculpture trail at Lough MacNean in Fermanagh have enlivened the urban and rural environments, just as public art has helped to brighten the mood in our hospitals. The Lottery gave a vital boost to the Northern Ireland film industry and brought with it skills, training and employment. The Lottery resource has also enabled the Arts Council to develop a number of special initiatives for the arts, which address specific areas of underdevelopment in the sector. These have included an audience development programme for the arts and the introduction of on-line ticketing for organisations across the region; a Creative Youth Partnerships programme which increases opportunities for participation and access to the arts for young people in schools and theEducation and Library Boards; and an Art of Regeneration programme, which encourages the arts to work within communities not usually associated with them. |
