V&A Dundee welcomes £5 million from UK Budget
16 March 2016
The UK Government today (Wednesday 16 March) announced an additional £5 million for V&A Museum of Design Dundee.
Philip Long, Director of V&A Dundee, said: “We’re delighted to receive £5 million additional funding from the UK Government today, in addition to the generous support from funders including the Scottish Government, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Dundee City Council and Creative Scotland.
“V&A Dundee is a transformative project for Dundee, Scotland and the UK. As the first V&A museum anywhere in the world outside London, we will showcase Scotland’s globally important history of design and innovation – and inspire the designers and entrepreneurs of the future.”
Dundee has a strong history of design innovation – including aspirin, biomedical research that has led to hundreds of new cancer drugs, comics including The Beano and The Dandy, orange marmalade, and video games including Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto – which resulted in it becoming the UK’s first UNESCO City of Design in 2014.
Philip Long added: “Our project will also help bring international attention, investment, jobs and tourists to the beautiful, vibrant city of Dundee.
“V&A Dundee is already very active, well before we open our extraordinary new museum to the public. We’re taking design into schools and communities, showing people of all ages the impressive power of design to help us understand and solve problems – and improve lives.”
This week it was also announced that V&A Dundee will be the official UK representation at the XXI Milan Design Triennale, which opens in April, to a global audience of up to 500,000 visitors.
Philip Long continued: “We’re particularly proud of the work we have done already in inspiring school pupils to become designers, and nurturing the careers of emerging design talent such as Will Morris and David MacKenzie who created our fabulous Adventures in Design comic strip for the upcoming Milan Design Triennale.”
The new museum is the first in the UK by Kengo Kuma, the renowned architect now designing the Tokyo 2020 Olympic stadium, and will open in 2018.
V&A Dundee is at the heart of Dundee’s waterfront regeneration, a £1 billion, 30-year masterplan to design an open, inclusive city of the future.
Dundee was this week voted in The Times’ ’20 hippest places to live in Britain’, while GQ recently named it ‘Britain’s coolest little city’.
Major funders of the £80.11 million construction of V&A Dundee include:
Scottish Government – £25 million
Heritage Lottery Fund – £12.5 million
Creative Scotland – £4.5 million
Dundee City Council – £6.5 million
Growth Accelerator Funding – £12.61 million
Waterfront Dundee – £4 million
Fundraising campaign – £15 million
Today’s announcement will contribute towards the ongoing fundraising campaign for capital costs of the museum building and for programmes which further extend the reach of the project into the community.
