Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery

16 April 2024

Nuneaton Musuem and Art Gallery sits in a lovely position in Riversley Park, Nuneaton, just outside the ring road that encircles the town centre. In 2019, the Government awarded £23.2 million for Nuneaton under the Town Deals funding, subject to approving the submitted plans for spending the money. A Board was set up, public consultation took place and by the end of 2020, a list of projects was submitted and given the go-ahead. The projects chosen can be found here 

A planning application was submitted for extending the Museum and this was approved on 10/02/2022. Looking back through the minutes of the Board meetings. it was noted in February 2023 that....

'Museum & Parks Project Update
The Programme Manager provided a verbal update on the status of the project. It was recognised that this was the flag ship project of the programme with it being a key cultural asset and its links to the wider visitor economy, but because of a funding gap there was a risk of the project not being delivered.'

It wasn't until February 2024, when the Council did their budget that it was announced that this project was not going ahead, along with the cancellation of the Wheat Street project, the Queens Road/Corporation Street project as well as the Weddington Road cycle link. The Visiting Nuneaton - Changing Perspectives had already been dropped.

Whilst we understand that there have been inflationary pressures, there has been no public consultation on the changes to which projects are happening. One has to question how the Board has been overseeing the projects, particularly when the Leader of the Council said last week ' we will not engage in pet projects, which you could argue some of the original submissions were'. He has been on the Board since the outset and, it should be noted, has not attended a Board meeting since March 2022. The Town Deal website, www.mytownnuneaton.co.uk has not been updated since June 2023 and the twitter/X feed has not been used since January 2022.

How much money has been spent on the projects that were subsequently dropped? We know, for sure, that architects fees and planning fees were accrued for the museum project. Other projects almost certainly also had quite an amount of planning before they were dropped. There needs to be much more transparency, consultation and openness about the whole process when these funds are made available.It would also appear that there was very little if any contingency factored into these projects. This must be a learning curve so the same does not happen with the Bedworth Town Deal that is just commencing.