Winchester’s Theatre Royal has been awarded £219,000 as part of the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) to help face the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and to ensure they have a sustainable future, the Culture Secretary has announced today.
Theatre Royal is part of Play to the Crowd, which is one of 1,385 cultural and creative organisations across the country receiving urgently needed support. £257 million of investment has been announced today as part of the very first round of the Culture Recovery Fund grants programme being administered by Arts Council England. Further rounds of funding in the cultural and heritage sector are due to be announced over the coming weeks.
Steve Brine MP said: “This is great news. As I said in the House last week, they deserve this extra help from the Government because they have done so much with local people to save themselves from this awful situation.”
“I’m so pleased for the theatre but also the wider Play to the Crowd family who do so much to nurture the creative spirit of Winchester.”
Chief executive Deryck Newland said: “We are extremely grateful to everyone who has donated to our Survival Appeal and to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for approving our application to the Culture Recovery Fund. Our Survival Appeal allowed us to survive beyond the end of September and the Culture Recovery Fund grant will help to mitigate some of the ongoing and increasing risks and uncertainties around Covid-19 across the next six months.”
He continued: “This has been, and continues to be, an extremely challenging time for the sector. As with many organisations we’ve had to take extreme measures to reduce our costs which heartbreakingly has meant restructuring our charity leading to staff redundancies, to build a more sustainable organisation for the future. We are grateful to the government for recognising the value of the arts, however the Culture Recovery Fund won’t save every venue or arts organisation and our thoughts are with those whose future remains uncertain, together with the thousands of freelancers who are the life blood of our industry and many of whom remain without any financial support since March.”
Pictured; Steve delivering the good news to Deryck Newland on the roof of the Theatre Royal, Jewry Street.
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