Plymouth

Project Facts 

Location: Plymouth

Funding: 

• £81.3m total Arts Council England investment in Plymouth since 2010, (of which £4.84m from DCMS and HM Treasury), including £14.94m capital funding
• Co-investment model with Plymouth City Council unlocked £50m investment from outside funders in Plymouth’s cultural sector in 5 year period from 2016

Key Features: 

Two new world-class venues: The Box and Market Hall, that opened in 2020-21 aiming to building pride in place, support local communities, and boost visitor economy. 

• The Box: Plymouth’s award-winning museum, art gallery and archive. The venue beat visitor targets by over 30% within 2 years of opening. Their educational programme welcomes more than 7,000 participants per year from schools. 
• Market Hall’s Immersive Dome - the first of its kind in Europe - creates a shared, seamless virtual reality experience without the need for a headset and supports the fast-growing digital and immersive sectors. 

The productivity of Plymouth’s cultural sector is £69,000 GVA per full-time employee - well above the £49,770 average for the city. Theatre Royal Plymouth contributes £36m to the economy of Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall with the third largest economic footprint of any theatre in the UK. 

Building Capacity

Plymouth, Britain’s Ocean City, has connections to the sea going back beyond the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 and now include Western Europe’s largest naval base, commercial and ferry port and one of the most important global concentrations of marine research and production. Yet to achieve its ambition to grow the city’s population to 300,000 by 20347, (currently 264,700), Plymouth faces several challenges, with an ageing population, talent drain, comparatively low productivity and a low-wage economy.

With the visitor economy and culture identified as one of six flagships in Plymouth’s Plan for Economic Growth (2020-2025), Plymouth City Council recognises the importance of its cultural strengths to help improve long-term prosperity and rebalance its economy, underpinned by a robust cultural strategy.

Ten years after publication of its first Culture Strategy, productivity of Plymouth’s creative and cultural sector is now £69,000 GVA per full-time employee - higher than the average across all sectors in Plymouth.

The local authority’s long-term commitment to the sector has given funders the confidence to invest, with Plymouth City Council securing more than £50m investment in the sector by outside funders in the last five years alone. This success has led to a renewal of the Plymouth Culture Plan for 2021 - 2030, which aims to develop a diverse and resilient creative and cultural sector to position it as “the driving force for economic and social prosperity in Plymouth.”

Having twice hosted the British Art Show, Plymouth also now boasts two new world class creative and cultural venues, both opened in the space of ten months between September 2020 - July 2021.

The Box - Plymouth’s award-winning museum, gallery and archive - and the incredible Market Hall and Immersive Dome mark the culmination of decades of strategic investments, capacity building and partnership between Plymouth City Council, Arts Council England, Plymouth’s universities and the city’s many pioneering cultural organisations.

Plymouth’s emergence as one of the most vibrant and creative waterfront cities in Europe is a story of what can happen when a bold strategy, with culture at its heart, is executed with unwavering commitment by a strong leadership team with fully committed partners.

While investments have been wide and varied across the city, the two most significant recent capital investments - The Box and Market Hall - serve as a perfect illustration of the scale of Plymouth’s ambition and how its remarkable cultural heritage meets a bold, innovative future.

City-wide Investments

• The Box 
• Market Hall and Immersive Dome 
• KARST
• Theatre Royal Plymouth

The Box: 

Following a total investment of £47m, The Box opened in 2020 as one of the UK’s biggest new cultural attractions - an 8,000 square metre venue incorporating a repurposed museum and library as well as an ambitious new-build archive - “the Box in the sky”. Bringing together five historic collections previously housed across 12 sites, The Box has 14 exhibition spaces, a new contemporary art gallery in a historic church, a new public square, bistro and shop.

In a little over two years after opening, The Box is already comfortably beating its visitor targets by over 30%, with a projected 230k - 250k visitors by the end of 2022/23. While this ensures financial sustainability and helps support the city’s visitor economy, Plymouth’s Director of Economic Development, David Draffan is clear that “through investing in culture, the ‘prize’ is not the number of visitors. The prize is the whole ecosystem … a sense of place, ambition, branding. It’s about how cities are perceived by their residents”.

Market Hall and Immersive Dome: 

University of Plymouth’s Institute of Digital Art and Technology, (iDAT), has developed a global reputation in immersive technologies. Since its foundation in 1998, iDAT has provided a home for playful experimentation at the boundaries of creativity and technology. Yet for all its global reach, iDAT was - until recently - almost invisible in its native city.

All that has changed following the opening of Plymouth’s £7.6m Market Hall. The surprise inside this 18th-century grade II listed building is a world-class cutting-edge technology in the shape of a 15m Immersive Dome - the first of its kind in Europe and one of only two such facilities in the world, positioning Market Hall as a key cornerstone of the regeneration of Devonport and Royal William Yard.

The redevelopment of Market Hall as a cutting-edge digital facility was originally proposed back in 2013 and subsequently delivered by Real Ideas Organisation. Real Ideas is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) and Community Interest Company (CIC), with a strong social remit to make real change happen for people, organisations and places.

Working in close partnership with Plymouth City Council, Arts Council England, Plymouth University and many others, Real Ideas developed its organisational capability over a number of years through a growing portfolio of capital projects, including coworking spaces at Devonport Guildhall and Ocean Studios. Combined with the organisation’s track record for engaging communities, supporting social enterprise start-ups and exploring new technologies, this ensured that funders had the necessary confidence to invest in the bold, exciting vision of the Market Hall and Immersive Dome.

KARST:

Founded in 2012 by artists inspired by Plymouth’s hosting of British Art Show 7, KARST stands as testament to how a successful cultural programme can catalyse new investment and capital development. KARST is now firmly established as one of the most ambitious contemporary art galleries in the South West, providing gallery space, a creative hub, community outreach programme and 2,000 sq ft of studio space for local contemporary artists to develop their practice.

Theatre Royal Plymouth: 

Since 1982, Theatre Royal Plymouth has been a large-scale touring and producing venue. An anchor institution in the city centre, Theatre Royal Plymouth encourages greater footfall to the high street, attracting nearly 324,000 trips to the theatre, (pre-Covid), roughly 35% of whom were first-time visitors. 

Activating Spaces and Leveraging Investment

Complementing and leveraging its capital investments across the city, Arts Council England has supported Market Hall project partners Real Ideas, Plymouth University, iDAT and Arts University Plymouth to help build capacity, partnerships and organisational resilience and to support innovation and development of the fast-growing immersive sector. Recent programmes, including those supported through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Cultural Development Fund (CDF), have included:

• iMayflower16

Programme of large-scale festivals, creative sector business support, skills and learning programme and creative start-up support to complement Plymouth’s Mayflower 400 culture and heritage programme

• Illuminate Festival17

Light-based festival connecting all of the Mayflower 400 destinations across the UK and internationally

• IGNITE Festival of Creativity18

Connecting emerging talent with industry and the public to ignite economic growth, productivity and employment

• Fab Lab Plymouth Smart Citizens Programme

Delivered by Arts University Plymouth to support citizens in developing skills to design and make their own objects and products using digital fabrication. As the UK’s only member of the Fab City Network, this supported Plymouth’s aims to become a “locally productive, globally connected self-sufficient city”

• iMayflower Ideate business support programme

Bespoke mentoring programme and events, delivered by Creative UK, supporting over 20 companies working in immersive technology across Plymouth

• Fulldome UK Festival22

Internationally renowned festival capitalising on Plymouth’s unique Immersive Dome, including speaker seminars, workshops from immersive industry leaders and premiere screenings

Making Plymouth ‘investable’

Like most large-scale capital projects, both The Box and Market Hall have had long gestation periods. Significant capital investments by both Arts Council England and Plymouth City Council have helped leverage additional funding to secure the combined budget of £65m to realise these two world-class facilities, underpinned by the strategic funding framework of Plymouth Culture and its cultural strategy for the city.

Originally established in 2010 via Theatre Royal Plymouth, the Plymouth Culture Board built on significant capital investment and organisational development in Theatre Royal around this time.

New cultural focus for the city saw its Heritage and Arts service becoming part of Plymouth City Council’s Economic Development department, with the city being chosen to host British Art Show 7 in 2011 further cementing its growing reputation.

Since then, and over the course of the past ten years, Plymouth Culture has emerged as an independent organisation and an Arts Council England NPO in its own right, working closely with Plymouth City Council to help deliver its wider strategic objective and backed by a bold, and now refreshed, strategic plan.

Crucially, Plymouth’s Culture Plan and its importance to the local authority’s wider objectives has benefited from cross-party support throughout its development.

To find out more about Plymouth’s journey to a diverse and resilient creative and cultural sector, read our case study: 

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