MILLENNIUM MONEY GROWS ON TREES The year 2003 dawns, and millennium funding blunders on. Large cultural institutions, flexing their new-found fundraising muscles, keep pumping lottery lolly into Britain’s museum and gallery-building boom. Following the success of its revamped British Galleries (?31m, half lottery-funded), the V&A is embarking on a scheme to reorganise its whole 12.5 acre site, starring Daniel Libeskind’s notorious spiral. This will cost ?150m, more than the entire Tate Modern (a mere ?134m) or the British Museum’s Great Court (?100m). Who wangles these deals? The V&A poached Ian Blatchford, the Royal Academy’s much admired finance director, and its new director of development John McCaffrey is known for the nifty job he did at Cambridge, getting Bill Gates to part with ?130m for new scholarships. English Heritage has also declared its largest ever project: ?57m for a crucial overhaul of the “visitor’s experience” at Stonehenge, ?26m of it coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The South Bank has just got the go-ahead for the ?54m revamp of the Royal Festival Hall (?15m promised from the HLF; ?20m from the Arts Council), and the Hayward Gallery is closing till autumn for a few million pounds of improvements. And don’t forget the Royal Academy’s ?50m plan for the old Museum of Mankind, plus a slew of other wee projects like the ?25.5m redevelopment of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum. Indeed, Glasgow City Council has acquired the services of the man who advised Manchester during the largest expansion of a regional museum in recent decades, the ?35m Manchester Art Gallery which re-opened to muted praise in May, along with the more headline-hitting ?46m Baltic art centre in Gateshead and the ?30m Imperial War Museum North. Millennium schemes have produced some spectacular failures (the swiftly shut ?15m National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield; the unloved ?50m Doncaster Earth Centre; the ?10m sinking tower at the Glasgow Science Centre) but the money keeps sloshing about. 2003 sees the Royal Albert Hall completing its ?66.3m redevelopment; the ?22m Laban Centre will open to the dance-mad of Deptford; and the Barbican Centre is remoulding its foyers and refurbishing at a cost of ?30m. What’s sad about this cash being spent on capital projects is that it isn’t nearly matched by the sums given to museums to run them. Most haven’t been so badly-off for 20 years, and their acquisition budgets are pathetic: ?100,000 for the British Museum,…

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