I genuinely admire the ambition and tenacity of councils that take on the challenge of developing cultural facilities for their communities. These are significant undertakings, often involving substantial public investment, and the desire to create lasting cultural assets is absolutely worth applauding.
But I think we need a more substantial conversation about how these projects are conceived, and the expertise informing the decisions.
Developing a theatre, museum, gallery or cultural centre is not simply an infrastructure project. It is also the development of a cultural enterprise, with all the complexity that entails.
Before designing buildings, we should be establishing the cultural proposition: what need are we addressing, who are we serving, what will the facility deliver, what scale and configuration are appropriate, and what organisational and operating model will sustain it?
This requires more than a capital business case. It requires specialist understanding of cultural operations, programming, audience development, sector economics, staffing, partnerships, revenue generation and the relationship between community demand and operating capacity.
It also requires genuine feasibility work that tests different possibilities, rather than simply establishing how to deliver a predetermined building project. Could an existing facility be adapted? Would a shared-use model be more effective? Could several smaller, flexible spaces deliver greater community value? What level of ongoing public subsidy is realistic, and what are the full lifecycle costs?
These questions should inform the physical infrastructure, not be resolved around it.
The consequences of getting this sequence wrong can be significant. A facility may be entirely feasible to construct, delivered on time and within budget, yet prove extremely difficult to operate sustainably. Ongoing deficits, constrained programming, underutilisation and pressure on staffing can undermine the very cultural outcomes the investment was intended to achieve.
There is also a cost to the professionals who inherit these projects. Too often, experienced cultural leaders are brought in once the major decisions have been made, expected to develop successful operations within physical and financial parameters they had little influence over. Their expertise is invaluable, but imagine the difference if it had helped shape the project from the beginning, rather than being called upon to make an already established model work.
And the cost extends beyond individual facilities. When significant public investment becomes tied up in sustaining underperforming or unsustainable operations, what else could that funding have achieved? What opportunities for cultural participation, development and infrastructure are lost elsewhere? Ultimately, communities and the wider arts and cultural sector bear the consequences.
I don't see this as a criticism of councils. Their ambition to invest in culture is important. But delivering infrastructure and developing viable cultural enterprises require different expertise. Councils don't need to hold all that expertise themselves; they need to bring it into the process early.
We should establish the cultural proposition and its feasibility first, then allow that to determine the infrastructure – not build the infrastructure and hope the cultural proposition will follow.
The measure of success isn't simply the building we deliver, but the cultural value it creates, the communities it serves and its ability to remain sustainable over time.
