Bath & North East Somerset Council has said it is “fully committed” to a beloved city centre gallery and is planning a quarter-of-a-million-pound investment as it struggles with visitor numbers.
The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath | Photo © John Wimperis
In the year before the Covid pandemic, almost 190,000 visited Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery on Bridge Street.
But the gallery only attracted 40,000 people in the 2021/22 year and visitor numbers are barely expected to exceed 70,000 for the foreseeable future.
Council leader Kevin Guy told the council cabinet on Thursday 9th March: “It is clear that there has been a change in visitor behaviour from the gallery’s current visitor base and figures are not yet where we would like them to be.
“The council continues to be fully committed to supporting and improving the Victoria Art Gallery to increase its appeal to visitors and residents.”
He said: “We have recently appointed a new senior curator and planned investment to the gallery includes £230,000 to fix the roof, £75,000 from external forms of funding to create new spaces and to encourage community and family and commercial activities, and the appointment of a new community engagement post explicitly to deliver programming to appeal to a wider cross section of the local community.”
Earlier in the week, the gallery’s struggle to attract visitors had been a key point of discussion at a council scrutiny panel, on Monday 6th March.
Councillor Grant Johnson raised the point that visitor numbers had previously been expected to rebound to a level of 130,00 visitors a year.
He said: “Now we are only estimating a return level of 71,000 which is a stark decline in visitor numbers compared to what was previously achieved and what we have anticipated in previous business plans”
Head of Heritage Services at the council Robert Campbell said: “It did tend to appeal to an older audience and we haven’t seen those audiences return in as great a number, and we are not alone in that in the sector.
“What I would say is the [Heritage] Service are the council are 100% committed to the Victoria Art Gallery.”
Councillor Lisa O’Brien commented: “I would recommend that you look very closely at the type of art that is being brought in.
“It is predominantly art as in painting, rather than sculptures, rather than other forms of art, and I believe that possibly we could start to appeal to a younger set, a less niche set, if the exhibitions were less niche in their objectives.”
She said: “I was there at the Lautrec exhibition. It was fabulous. It was interesting. It was alive. You had every type of age person coming to see it. It was absolutely wonderful.
“It was just sad it was only able to open for just over a week before it had to close for Covid and lost us a lot of money.”
John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter
