Councillor Patel (Cabinet Member for Customer Services, Culture, Leisure and Sport) introduced the report highlighted –

a)    The Box opened on 29 September 2020 and had just celebrated its second anniversary;

b)    Since its opening The Box had received over 350,000 visitors, during a period that saw the venue closed due to COVID19 pandemic measures between 31 December 2020 to mid-May 2021;

c)    The investment in The Box had been significant and the project was hugely ambitious supported by several funders including the Arts Council of England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund;

d)    The facilities for museum and archive materials had been improved significantly with an accessible climate changeable area;

e)    There has been a focus on achieving physical and intellectual access;

f)     The Box has changed perceptions of Plymouth, generating civic pride, and had had significant national and international media attention;

g)    A significant number of visitors were local people and engagement has been done with local schools, colleges, universities and some of the hardest to reach communities within the city;

h)    The British Art Show opened on 8 October 2022 and would run until 8 January 2023.

Victoria Pomery (Chief Executive Officer, The Box) supported the presentation and highlighted –

i)     Over 350 people attended the opening of the British Art Show on Friday 7 October 2022 with a further 2000 over the following weekend;

j)     The vision at The Box was to reimage the future through the past;

k)    The Box had worked in partnership with partners and curators for The British Art Show;

l)     The exhibition featured the inspiring and challenging work from artists including 6 Turner Prize nominees and 3 Turner Prize winners;

m)  The importance that a wide range of ages were engaged with through the British Art Show and of the learning and engagement team, headed up by Chloe Hughes (Engagement Programmes Manager), who worked to engage as many local people as possible with The Box;

n)    6 ambassadors had been recruited, with extensive and varying networks and backgrounds between them, to further engagement;

o)    The Tap-In app had been used to gather data on those who are attending The Box, and to inform engagement programmes with the groups of people who had not attended.

In response to questions it was reported that –

p)    The Box would be ambitious in applying for awards and would consider applying for the Art Fun Museum of the Year and had also been visited by a judge for a South West architectural prize and the archives had received two accreditations;

q)    Based on footfall at the time, The Box was on track to achieve its target of 200,000 visitors in the financial year 2022/23;

r)    Income revenue from the shop was down 30%, but changes had been made to merchandise available and research into audiences and propensity to spend, this could also be affected by the cost of living crisis;

s)     The value of the box cannot just be measured by revenue income;

t)     Venue hire figures had improved;

u)    The Box had been working with Foster’s to monitor and maximise spend in the café, but the cost of living crisis had impacted the spend per head;

v)    The focus was on bid writing to fundraise for future projects;

w)   The income target of the previous museum had been £965,000 in 2013/14,  and the income target for The Box in 2022/23 was £2.5 million;

x)    The net budget from the previous museum had been reduced by replacing income streams with bids;

y)    The catering had experienced inflation costs over Summer 2022 relating to cost of materials and wage inflation, whilst trying to recover from the effects of the COVID19 pandemic;

z)     Programming was key in securing higher numbers of visitors, especially new visitors, who might spend more at the gift shop;

aa)  Schools local to The Box were repeat visitors, and funding had enabled the engagement team to engage with schools in deprived areas, but schools across the city had struggled to plan visits due to travel costs;

bb) The ambassador programme would be monitored and evaluated for its successes, and a teacher ambassador network was also utilised;

cc)  Plans for work to be shown at The Box are worked on 2-3 years in advance and at the time of the meeting there were no plans to show work from local artists such as Robert Lenkiewicz and Beryl Cook with the focus on working with up and coming living artists;

The Chair congratulated and thanked The Box team for working on such a successful cross-party project.

The Committee agreed to:

1)    Note the report.

2)    Recommend that they were provided with a report with up to date information on visitor numbers to The Box per ward to see which wards had lower engagement levels;

3)    Recommend a report was to be provided on schools by ward that had been engaged with so Councillors could consider using their Community Grant funds to assist local schools that might not have engaged due to funding for transport.