Andrew Mellor says an orchestral imbalance is part of the regional funding divide; might a choked London orchestra find new life in Bristol?
Shock horror: there’s 15 times as much arts funding per capita inside London as there is outside it, according to an independent report published last month. Cue the necessary furore and the handy narrative of an unjust battle between the ‘David’ of the UK regions and the ‘Goliath’ of the capital. London may receive more than its fair share of Arts Council cash, but in the general picture of arts provision there are less obvious but similarly stark inequalities – especially when the bourgeois do the unthinkable and factor-out London altogether.
What a difference you see, for example, when you pit the north west of England’s funded arts scene against the south west’s. You don’t have to look at the figures so much as the listings pages: three professional symphony orchestras in the greater Liverpool and Manchester areas versus none in the whole of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Where I’m from in Plymouth – the biggest city in the fourth biggest county in England – you’re lucky if there’s one concert performance from a professional symphony orchestra in a year. I had to move to Manchester to get the pick of two a week.
When it comes to our subsidised orchestras the argument of London weighting isn’t so much a recurring theme as an elephant in the room. There are seven full-time symphony orchestras in the capital if you include those resident at the two opera houses and there’s always been debate about whether that’s too many. Even if it isn’t, perhaps the funding report should show that it’s about time the capital gave one of them up – and gifted it to a regional city that has none at all.
Shock horror: there’s 15 times as much arts funding per capita inside London as there is outside it, according to an independent report published last month. Cue the necessary furore and the handy narrative of an unjust battle between the ‘David’ of the UK regions and the ‘Goliath’ of the capital. London may receive more than its fair share of Arts Council cash, but in the general picture of arts provision there are less obvious but similarly stark inequalities – especially when the bourgeois do the unthinkable and factor-out London altogether.
What a difference you see, for example, when you pit the north west of England’s funded arts scene against the south west’s. You don’t have to look at the figures so much as the listings pages: three professional symphony orchestras in the greater Liverpool and Manchester areas versus none in the whole of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Where I’m from in Plymouth – the biggest city in the fourth biggest county in England – you’re lucky if there’s one concert performance from a professional symphony orchestra in a year. I had to move to Manchester to get the pick of two a week.
When it comes to our subsidised orchestras the argument of London weighting isn’t so much a recurring theme as an elephant in the room. There are seven full-time symphony orchestras in the capital if you include those resident at the two opera houses and there’s always been debate about whether that’s too many. Even if it isn’t, perhaps the funding report should show that it’s about time the capital gave one of them up – and gifted it to a regional city that has none at all.