Cultural venues in England to get funding to stay afloat

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February 22, 2025
3 min read

Cultural venues in England to get funding to stay afloat

England’s museums, theatres, and other cultural venues will be given £270 million in funding to help them remain afloat and fix buildings. The money the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) announced, will go towards those “in urgent need of financial support to keep them up and running, carry out vital infrastructure work and improve long term financial resilience.”

It comes following warnings that museums in Derby, Birmingham, and Hampshire, as well as other areas, “face a perilous financial position” and are threatened with an “imminent threat of sale of collections or closure.” Core funding for arts and cultural organisations fell by 18% between 2010 and 2023.

The money includes a pot worth £120 million. It will be available to 17 major organisations. These include British Museum, National Gallery, and National Museums Liverpool. All of them receive their funding from the DCMS. They will also be given a 5% increase in annual grants, worth over £15 million.

Unfortunately, that rise has not extended to hundreds of other cultural venues that receive grants through Arts Council England. Many of them have struggled with near-standstill funding over the last decade.

During the 2025/26 financial year, there will also be £85 million allocated “to support urgent capital works to keep venues across the country up and running.” The body that represents Britain’s theatres last year warned that four in ten faced a risk of closure over the next five years unless they receive significant capital investment.

In October, the English Civic Museums Network called for emergency injections to “rectify some of the damage inflicted by austerity.” Local museums will now be given a dedicated £20 million fund “to help keep cherished civic museums open.”

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy will announce the funding in Stratford-upon-Avon, marking the 60^th anniversary of the first arts White Paper. “270m today will shore up those institutions that are at risk of closure. It will help with infrastructure,” she told BBC Breakfast. “We’ve got very crumbling infrastructure. Anyone who’s visited a local theatre recently will have seen buckets on the floor catching drips, and stages closing at some of our national institutions because of those problems.

“It will make sure that libraries can remain open in parts of the country, and most of all will shore up our local museums, which are at risk of closure.”

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