Project partners
The British Council
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. It supports peace and prosperity by building connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide. This is done through work in arts and culture, education and the English language. The British Council work with people in over 200 countries and territories and are on the ground in more than 100 countries. In 2022-23 the organisation reached 600 million people.
Arts Council England
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences. From 2023 to 2026 we will invest over £467 million of public money from Government and an estimated £250 million from The National Lottery each year to help support the sector and to deliver this vision.
The Arts Council Collection is the most widely circulated national loan collection of modern and contemporary British art. Founded in 1946, the Collection reaches the broadest possible audience through long loans to public institutions, exhibition loans, touring exhibitions, as well as digital and print publications. The Collection supports artists in the UK through the purchase and display of their work, and safeguards it for future generations, using the highest possible standards of collection care.
Coventry University
Coventry University has a long history of arts education and research having been established as the Coventry School of Design in 1843 to provide the skills needed by local industrialists.
The university will occupy floors five and six of the building, where it plans to create a Cultural Hub that will offer a variety of facilities for the academic community, the arts and the general public, adding to the world-class facilities it already has on its city centre campus, including the recently opened Delia Derbyshire building.
CV Life
CV Life provides a vast leisure and cultural offer to all communities in Coventry and visitors to the city, offering everything from attractions, museums, leisure centres, educational programmes to community outreach projects. CV Life manages four of Coventry’s finest cultural visitor attractions: Coventry Transport Museum, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, The Lunt Roman Fort and The Old Grammar School. Between them, the attractions proudly tell stories of Coventry’s unique history to over 500,000 visitors per year from around the world.
Museums and cultural destinations all have difficulty with displaying their entire collection and CV Life is no different and is working on the documentation and conservation of the collections ahead of the move to the City Centre Cultural Gateway. They are using this time to build more awareness of their collections generally. Launching on 11 May, the Collecting Coventry exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum will include a variety of collection material managed by Culture Coventry Trust, that reflect 75 years of collecting efforts. The exhibition will provide the opportunity to gain feedback from visitors and carry out evaluation about the types of collections policies and programming that visitors most want to see to inform future plans.