Southampton’s long-awaited flagship cultural complex (AP164) has been given a firm push forward, following tough negotiations between Southampton City Council and Arts Council England (ACE). There is, however, a major caveat: Art Asia and Nuffield Theatre, two of the four Southampton arts organisations involved with the project over the past decade and named as key partners on Southampton’s New Arts Complex (SNAC), have been cut from new proposals put forward by ACE.
In what ACE has described as “ongoing discussions… [identifying] a number of areas in relation to the long-term viability of the project”, it appears to have been decided that Art Asia and Nuffield Theatre, both of whom were supposed to be relocating to have headquarters in the new complex, are no longer part of the development. Dahlia Jamil, chair of Art Asia, told AP “Everyone at Art Asia is completely shocked by the news. Over the past decade Art Asia has invested a huge amount of time and resources into this project, as well as £0.75m of its Lottery funding which was specifically allocated for culturally diverse organisations.”
An ACE spokesman responded, “We appreciate the considerable time and effort that all of our partners have invested in the project to date, but at this stage it would be inappropriate for us to go into detail until we have concluded discussions with all those involved.” A Southampton City Council spokesman said that although the local authority had invested £11.7m, the process of securing £7.2m in funding from ACE had been fraught, due largely to the recession, and only agreed with “a number of conditions and processes”.
SNAC has been mired with problems since its inception at the turn of the millennium and it was considered doomed when its original developers, City Lofts, went into administration in 2008. Work should now start on the city centre site in 2011, with the build complete by 2014 – some eight years behind schedule.