Six weeks have passed since Nottingham Castle Trust went into liquidation — the most dramatic thing to happen at the site since Edward III arrested the traitorous Roger Mortimer there in 1330. Yet still there’s not a whisper of an apology from any of the various public bodies that squandered £33 million of public and lottery money on the castle’s three-year restoration.
That restoration was intended to “re-vision” the castle by adding, among other things, a new “family friendly” attraction devoted to Robin Hood — an entirely mythical figure with scant connection to present-day Nottingham Castle, which is basically a Victorian rebuild of a Restoration mansion. Clearly, the idea was to make the castle so amusing that thousands of families would swarm round its grounds every weekend.
Well, that idea flopped. The trust’s frankly fantastical business plan was based on attracting 300,000 visitors a year. To put that in context, in 2021 — the year the castle reopened — even Westminster Abbey attracted only 163,000 visitors. Nottingham’s wildly optimistic target was soon exposed for the nonsense it was, especially with a £13 entry fee pitched, according to locals, much too high for a far-from-affluent city.
In the first eight months after reopening just 100,000 people visited, and disaster clearly loomed. Sure enough, on November 21 last year the people running the trust (or at least those that hadn’t already fled) shut the gates, declared the place bankrupt and made 50 staff members instantly redundant.
So who poured millions of public money into this doomed enterprise on the basis of its bonkers business plan? It will come as no surprise to connoisseurs of cultural disasters that the Heritage Lottery Fund is involved. This is the organisation, you may recall, that allocated £13 million of lottery money for the restoration of Hastings Pier only for the pier to go bust shortly after its reopening. It was subsequently sold to a local businessman for just £60,000.
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Once bitten, twice shy? Not a bit of it. For the restoration of Nottingham Castle the Heritage Fund again allocated nearly £13 million only to find that this huge handout had again produced a dud that closed after a few months.
Its response to this disastrous news? A statement containing the surreal assertion that “our funding for the highly successful redevelopment of the castle has secured it as a world-class visitor attraction” followed by a pledge to “work closely with Nottingham City Council over the coming months to re-establish public access and secure a viable future” for the castle.
Surely, you are thinking, that doesn’t mean yet more lottery money could be thrown at the place? Yes, it means exactly that.
The Heritage Fund isn’t the only quango to have poured in sackfuls of public subsidy. The castle also got £7 million from something called D2N2, a local enterprise partnership funded entirely by taxpayers. It also received substantial backing and loans from Nottingham City Council. In fact, the trust went into liquidation, owing the council £2.7 million. Not great news for a local authority trying to make savings of £28 million to balance its budget.
The most intriguing source of public funding for the castle, however, came from the Culture Recovery Fund. That’s the £1.57 billion fund set aside by the government to rescue arts and heritage organisations devastated by the effects of the pandemic. Was Nottingham Castle badly affected by Covid, then? In its statement announcing its liquidation, the castle trust took care to talk about “the immense challenges posed by the pandemic”. The fact is, however, that its management chose to reopen the castle in June 2021 when the pandemic was already 16 months old in this country and its “immense challenges” well known.
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What’s more (and this is the most curious thing about the whole business), the trust had by then received a £1 million loan, followed by an additional £202,000 of “emergency support”, from the Culture Recovery Fund. In other words, taxpayers were already rescuing this doomed project before it had even opened its doors for business.
Three things occur to me about this sorry saga. The first is that Nottingham’s castle was never going to be turned into a tourist attraction to rival, say, Warwick’s or Edinburgh’s. It’s a pleasant regional museum in picturesque grounds that the public was once able to wander round without charge. Nottingham’s councillors were crazy to have put their faith in a scheme that promised such an improbable transformation and such unachievable box-office takings.
Second, you only have to read local newspaper reports of the rows behind the scenes at the castle to realise that this organisation was far from being the ideal recipient of £33 million of public funding. Consider the exit of two chief executives in quick succession (one of whom has taken the trust to an employment tribunal, claiming unfair dismissal); the accusations from former employees of “an environment of fear”; a long-festering argument about an alleged racist incident in the castle’s grounds; and claims that the trustees lacked experience and expertise.
So it’s evasive, to put it mildly, to claim that the trust failed primarily because of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. That, however, does make you wonder how many other arts and heritage organisations have been bailed out by the Culture Recovery Fund when their business plans were failing even before Covid appeared.
And third, it’s noticeable that two of the funding bodies involved — the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (which controls the Culture Recovery Fund) and Arts Council England (which administers it) — are the very ones pushing the government’s levelling-up agenda on the arts world. That will involve transferring millions of pounds of funding to dozens of regional arts organisations, all of which doubtless flaunt business plans every bit as persuasive as Nottingham Castle’s apparently seemed. I just hope those plans are being scrutinised more sceptically than Nottingham’s were.
