The beautiful and architecturally important building of Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early 18th century, reopened this autumn after major restoration to a fanfare of praise. It had been in a parlous state since the 1950s, and decades of campaigning and fundraising had achieved little more than holding up the roof. It took a £2.4m grant from the still fledgling Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in 1996 before a proper programme of restoration could be embarked upon, and a further award of £3.5m in 2002 to complete the project.
The Christ Church project exemplifies the HLF's remit: to safeguard buildings, objects and environments which have been integral to the formation of the character of Britain. The church had failed to qualify for funds elsewhere, the cost was substantial but not outrageous, and there was a carefully monitored programme over a number of years. This was an HLF success story.
But there is another kind of HLF story. Daniel Libeskind's abortive spiral at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example. The Millennium Commission - the obvious funding body for such a project - turned down the bid in 1998, and five years on, after due modification, the £70m scheme was submitted to the HLF, with a grant of £15m requested. At the HLF's most recent major grant meeting (held biannually, for sums over £5m), the vote went against the spiral, thus scuppering the scheme. When the HLF says no, a project is usually doomed. Brighton's West pier is being left to rot after the HLF's decision in January not to award the £14.2m it had put aside for restoration six years ago.
So what has HLF achieved in the past ten years? Has it been too conservative? Or too politically correct? Is it right that a non-governmental body, funded by our gambling appetite, should be the last refuge for Britain's most important distressed buildings, artworks and natural environments? And has the HLF's change of direction since Labour came to office meant support for too many "inclusive" projects at the expense of the more traditional kind?
The HLF has presided over a decade of unrivalled munificence towards the heritage world - £3.33bn awarded to 1,680 projects throughout Britain. The magnificent buildings of Somerset House have been reborn as a complex of museums (£40m), the glorious glass domes of Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool have been rescued from dilapidation (£2.4m) and the whole 135km length of Hadrian's Wall has been restored and made accessible to the public (£3.1m). For such good things we have reason to be grateful.
But the HLF story is also one of ambiguous origins and mixed outcomes. It came into being in 1994 as one of the five good causes to benefit from the national lottery; John Major later claimed the HLF would be one of his greatest legacies. The other good causes were sport, charities, the arts and the Millennium Commission (which will be wound up in early 2005). Each initially received 20 per cent of 28 pence of every pound spent on the lottery, which for the HLF, sports and arts went down in 1997 to 16.67 per cent - 4.66 pence per lottery ticket sold. Since then the funding structure has changed slightly, with the introduction of the new Big Lottery Fund (charities, health, education and environment, combining the previous New Opportunities Fund and the Community Fund). But the arts, sports and heritage are continuing to receive a decent share: each benefited from around £200m of the £1.2bn given to good causes in 2003/04.
When the good causes were announced, there were complaints over the proportion of money going to "elitist" heritage and the arts, supposedly far removed from the interests of the average lottery ticket-buyer. The attempt to answer these concerns now determines the way HLF funds are distributed.
To the surprise of many, distribution of HLF grants was not given to English Heritage - Britain's pre-eminent government heritage body - but to the trustees of the smaller National Heritage Memorial Fund. (Responsibility for arts spending went to the Arts Council.) The NHMF was set up in 1980 as a "fund of last resort" to protect items of outstanding importance to the nation's heritage "in memory of those who gave their lives to the United Kingdom." At its helm was that most cultured of mandarins, Lord Jacob Rothschild.
When the lottery began, money had to be used on capital projects and not to fund core government activities. Labour in opposition was emphatic about this and in the early years it was rigidly enforced. Unlike the Millennium Commission, which funded new architecture - the financially disastrous Dome, the Sheffield pop museum and the Doncaster Earth Centre, as well as successes such as the Eden Project - the HLF was able only to award grants to existing buildings and places; it has consequently had far fewer failures. It got off to a shaky start, however. One of its first batch of awards early in 1995 was £12.5m towards the acquisition of Winston Churchill's papers - or rather for a degree of access to them at Churchill College, Cambridge. There was an outcry. Why was the purchase necessary when the documents were already at the college? No subsequent decision has incurred such ire, but the negative impression was not lost on Labour in opposition.
As large sums of money began to pour in from the lottery, a flurry of ambitious capital building projects got under way thanks to HLF grants, along with the purchase of works of art and tracts of land. (The HLF boasts that over the past decade, "Land nearly three times the size of the Isle of Wight has been bought and restored.") It was a time of big grants: £25m for the Kennet and Avon canal in 1996; £20m to the Royal Albert Hall; £15.5m towards the British Museum's Great Court. The aim was to support "mint" (meaning national) rather than "local" heritage.
The arrival of Labour in 1997 and the departure of Rothschild in 1998 heralded a new set of priorities. As the processes of grant-giving changed at the HLF, there was a tortuous debate about what "heritage" meant. Regional boards were set up to monitor accountability, access and social inclusion. A cumbersome system of assigning funding in two stages, dependent on progress, was also introduced. And new trustee rules led to the appointment of people who knew how to run quangos but had less knowledge of art or heritage. Fewer big projects are now funded, and there has been an increase in smaller, less traditional projects under such schemes as "Your Heritage" and "Young Roots."
There are many in the heritage world who feel that the government is unsympathetic to their work - after all the department for heritage was renamed the department for culture, media and sport (DCMS) in 1997. No matter how many more people go to heritage attractions (150m visits each year, according to HLF figures) than to sporting activities, politicians tend to see arts and heritage as elitist and sport as popular.
There is, in fact, a contradiction at the heart of the HLF: a desire to fund the most historically and culturally important projects is pitted against the need to ensure that funding is distributed equally across the regions and cultural traditions of the Britain. This is tricky, as London and the south of England have such a high concentration of top cultural institutions. The conflicting objectives that this creates were underlined two years ago when each region was asked to compile lists of "cold spots" that have missed out on heritage grants. The original requirement for an official benchmark of quality, such as listed building status or sites of scientific interest, was scrapped.
Where do the smaller awards go? On 13th May 2004, for example, Rotherham library was awarded £49,800 to develop a programme of "reminiscence sessions" for people who live in fear of crime; alternatively, on 10th December 2002, £67,600 was given to an oral history project on Mencap societies in the east of England. Without downplaying the importance of such projects, neither would have qualified as "heritage" in the days when Rothschild was in charge (the HLF has increasingly been drawn into projects that were once the preserve of local government).Whether he and his fellow trustees would have approved of the multi-million-pound prizes from the HLF (£3m and £2.5m per series) to the building project that won BBC2's Restoration, voted by the public, is also debatable, though the programme did demonstrate how precious the built heritage is to local communities, often for reasons other than architectural distinction.
While the cost of preserving buildings, landscapes and works of art continues to rise, the amount of national lottery money is down on the early years. Although the HLF distributes an approximate £300m annually, it can support only a limited percentage of those looking for grants over £1m. Within its annual budget, the aim is to allocate no more than 25 per cent (£75m) on projects over £5m and around 50 per cent (£150m) on grants of less than £1m (through budgets managed by regional and country teams). The remaining 25 per cent (£75m) is used for grants of between £1m and £5m and is managed by the trustees.
Liz Forgan, chair of the HLF, made the discomfort of the funds position clear when she announced the £11.5m grant to purchase Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks in July 2003. "It is difficult to weigh up the public benefit of an old master picture against a wildflower meadow or a vintage steam engine," she said. "But the national lottery is the only real source of funding for much of Britain's heritage."
That year the HLF was so overwhelmed with deserving causes that it ignored its own targets and gave £90m-worth of awards (£55m of those over £5m) at just one meeting. These included transport, childhood museums, steam engines, parks, churches of international stature, the Royal Observatory, a Roman villa, a castle, a palace and a historic park. This summer, the meeting at which Libeskind's spiral was turned down also saw the deferral of two other major bids: the £20m set aside for the National Trust to restore the Victorian time capsule of Tyntesfield, and the £22m sought by the National Library of Scotland for the archives of Byron's publishers, John Murray. Had the three schemes gone ahead, they alone would have tied up £57m.
Complaints about the HLF inevitably come from those whose applications have been turned down after bearing the sometimes crippling cost and complexity of making an application. And the mantra of access can distort other considerations. For example, earlier this year, when turning down the bid for the Macclesfield Psalter, the HLF stated that, though it "recognised the value of this wonderful manuscript," it was unable to support an application from the Fitzwilliam Museum "as it failed to meet two of our key requirements for access and education." It can also give contradictory messages, claiming that it never funds new memorials when a Battle of Britain memorial (cost £1.5m) was being discussed, yet pledging £1m to a Women at War memorial because it is an "exceptional national monument."
The biggest worry of all is that budgets of other heritage bodies are being affected as a result of HLF provisions, and that the presence of the HLF disguises the underfunding of national museums and other cultural institutions. It is nominally independent but inevitably closely attached to the DCMS's apron-strings.
At the end of the HLF's 10th anniversary factsheet is a list of current heritage requirements: £1.2bn needed to conserve species at risk; £400m to repair Grade I and II buildings at risk; £800m to improve museums and galleries; £1bn to restore the rest of our historic parks; £480m in the next ten years to rescue our most important historic archives. The fund will distribute heritage lottery money until 2009, while the government considers what should happen then. The HLF is far from perfect, but as the list above suggests, it will never be short of work.
