A monument to idiocy: A £65m 'digital arts centre' nobody wanted

By Robert Hardman for the Daily Mail
Updated: 19:06 EST, 30 January 2009

When future generations come to study the rise and fall of New Elizabethan Britain - from post-war economic basket case to land of plenty and then back again - they will ask themselves a simple question: where did it all go wrong?

No doubt, most will point to the City, Downing Street or Wall Street. But for a vivid illustration of the folly of the age, these historians should take themselves to the West Midlands and the site of a former bus station in West Bromwich.

There - if it hasn't collapsed or been bulldozed - they will find a magnificent monument to the incompetence and deluded arrogance of the ruling elite who governed Britain at the start of the 21st century.

Folly: Digial arts centre The Public in West Bromwich

'Ah, no wonder the New Elizabethans were a bunch of morons if they did this,' they will say, crossing their arms and nodding sagely.

And they will stand back and marvel at the sheer, barking buffoonery of the thing they call, confusingly, The Public.

Now, I am not for one minute blaming the poor people of West Bromwich or, indeed, this monstrous pink-tinted waste of space towering above them for the nation's present ills.

But when you spend a few hours in this empty 'attraction' doing nothing - because there really is nothing to do - and you ponder the fact that local, regional, national and European government joined forces to fritter away £65million of your money on this parody of modern values, then it no longer seems so surprising that the country has gone from boom to bust in a matter of months. In fact, it explains it all.

The Public is a four-storey community arts centre shaped like a 300ft long shoe box with pink, blobby windows. Situated between the vacant rear of a tired shopping arcade and a roundabout, it was supposed to cost a hefty £25million and to 'spearhead' (that much-loved public sector buzzword) the regeneration of West Bromwich. At its core would be a ' groundbreaking' gallery of DIY digital art.

Today, six months after opening, The Public has cost a staggering £65million, but the gallery is still sealed off for technical reasons and the rest of the place is virtually empty.

The Tories have called it 'the biggest arts scandal for decades'. Shadow Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has demanded a National Audit Office investigation. And yet this week, the Government - in the form of the Arts Council - has decided to chuck a farewell gift of another £3million at a project that makes the Millennium Dome look like a brainwave. Bad?

There is one positive thing to say about The Public: it is easy to find. Go to the middle of West Bromwich and then head for the thing that looks like a B&Q superstore with eyes.

When I arrive, there are ten customers in the spacious ground-floor cafe - swankily called 'Couture' - but nine turn out to be members of staff.

A lone pensioner reading a book over a cup of tea is the only member of the public in The Public. So, the photographer and I treble the turnover by ordering coffees.

Empty: Robert Hardman in the cafe of The Public

There are big signs for a exhibition by documentary artist Esther Shalev-Gerz entitled Les Portraits des Histoires. It's on the third floor, but when I try to summon the lift, one of the wearily underemployed attendants tells me not to bother.

'It's shut,' she says. 'You can only visit the ground floor.'

So that leaves me with the cafe, the arresting chrome cocoon that turns out to be the loos and, well, that's it. Even the gift shop is shut.

I can also stare up at the vast sloping walkway which will, one day, take paying visitors on a digital art journey (at £6.95 a time). But the technicians are still working on it, so it's sealed off.

And because you have to use this walkway to get to LesPortraits des Histoires, the exhibition is out of bounds - even though it's just sitting there. Pure genius.

I sit by the big pink sliding doors for 15 minutes and count 16 people coming into the building. Of these, two have dropped in to use the lavatory, while another 11 walk straight across the ground floor and out of the big pink sliding doors on the other side.

It turns out this is a useful shortcut for people heading from nearby office buildings to the Queens Square Shopping Centre. This place has a word missing from its name. It should have been called The Public Convenience.

I ask passers-by for their views. They are not hostile, just supremely indifferent.

'I can't see the point of it really,' says Kirk Pearce, 21, a retail assistant.

'This town doesn't have a swimming pool or cinema. Why can't we have those instead?'

'It's just not a very welcoming building,' says a lady from the probation office over the road. 'I've watched it go up, but I've never set foot inside.'

In the interests of fairness, I should report there were at least a dozen people eating in the cafe at lunchtime, the food was jolly good - this is a cafe that boasts its own 'nutritional consultant' - and it was served by a cheerful waitress.

The new management - who were not involved in the shambolic development of The Public - report that 46,000 people have attended ' workshops' and events there.

Tonight, for example, there will be a free Blues Jam session by local musicians in a part of the cafe called the Pinktank. Tomorrow lunchtime, you can hear a Birmingham jazz ensemble called the Mike Burney Quartet. That's free, too.

All very nice, of course, but I suspect that thousands of pubs and bars up and down Britain will manage to lay on much the same this weekend, but without a £65million subsidy.

Out-of-bounds: The walkways sit untouched

So how on earth did this happen? It is a familiar tale. Back in the fluffy Nineties, there were huge reservoirs of Lottery money sloshing around for Blairy fairy new ideas.

Forget boring museums full of old stuff and facts, we were told. It was time to, y'know, like, free the kids' imagination 'cos kids are our future'. So, we got the £780million Dome with its eminently forgettable message of whatever it was.

We got the £60million Earth Centre, an eco-fun park near Doncaster where compost would be cool.

Quangocrats and dreamy educationists extracted hundreds of millions for these visionary schemes based on little more than wishful thinking.They bombed (though the Dome has redeemed itself as an excellent concert venue, thanks to the commercial nous of hardheaded businessmen).

In West Bromwich, a community arts group got together in 1996 and asked for funds to build a cultural centre - a perfectly sensible idea for a deprived area. But the grants on offer were so generous that the idea got out of control.

Plans for a respectable arts centre ballooned into visions of a shining 'beacon' devoted to digital art. Suddenly, big name modernist architect Will Alsop was involved.

The Arts Council, which had already spent £5million on developing the idea, handed over £17.5million to build a 'landmark' building.

Then Alsop's business crashed, followed by the consortium behind the project, but it was too late. The Public was already taking shape.

The Arts Council and the local authority, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, had to step in. The Arts Council poured another £6million into the pot, while the council coughed up £18million.

The regional development quango, Advantage West Midlands, and the European Union chucked in £8.4million and £8million respectively - remember these sums the next time you hear them pleading poverty.

Then there was another £2million from the Government's New Deal slush fund. The whole bill had come to £64million by last summer's opening.

Culture minister Margaret Hodge, duly saluted The Public as follows: 'It chimes exactly with the way the arts in the 21st century are going. It will act as a trailblazer for regeneration in the area and will place West Bromwich at the forefront of this country's brilliant cultural scene.'

Never mind what the people of West Bromwich had wanted. Never mind that a swimming pool would have cost a fraction of the price.

The grandees with the grants all insisted there had been the mandatory 'in-depth consultation process with the local commyooniteee . . .'

Regardless of that consultation, officialdom decided that what these Black Country folk were really crying out for was not a pool or a cinema, but an interactive digital art gallery.

You can just picture the officials ticking their boxes as they shovelled more and more of your money into this project.

Fans of the Daily Mail's Jobzilla Lingo Bingo competition - based on the claptrap used in public sector non-jobs - will be familiar with the genre.

'The Public Convenience': Robert Hardman amongst the constantly changing colours during his tour

Strategic outreach programme? Tick. Sustainable, challenging multi-cultural environment for kids? Tick.

Driving the transformation agenda? Tick.

Here is the ad which The Public put in the Guardian in its quest for a humble marketing assistant: 'In our inquiry based business and programme models, learning is at the centre of all . . .'

Learning what? Even if this place was fully operational, I can't fathom what it would teach.

David Clarke, director of The Public, appears and apologises for the technical problems. He urges me to return when the place is working properly.

He shows me a new theatre with 250 seats and takes me to see a workshop area and a bank of screens where visitors will learn to construct their own digital personalities or 'avatars'.

But aren't people already doing this on the internet at home? 'It's not the technology that is exciting, it's the interaction between all the people,' he says.

An experienced arts administrator, David is enthusiastic about the prospects for the place and is thrilled by this week's Arts Council decision to pledge a final payment of £3million to get it working.

'There is always a risk in these projects and you'll sometimes have one that doesn't work out,' says an Arts Council spokeswoman. 'But we believe that The Public was a great aspiration for a deprived area and we still want to see it realised.'

But Ed Vaizey, for the Tories, is adamant that enough is enough: 'The Arts Council is throwing good money after bad. They should pull the plug, not waste another £3million.'

Sandwell's (Labour) council, however, is full of optimism. 'Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but we've got this building and we're going to make it happen,' says Councillor Bob Badham, head of regeneration.

After this colossal expense, I hope it happens soon. The staff cannot pretend to be busy for much longer. It was recently reported that they were being given knitting lessons to help fill their empty days.

This was later denied by a spokesman who provided a glorious Jobzilla explanation: 'This training enabled gallery assistants to assist the Learning team in the delivery of first-class educational workshops and activities to more than 1,000 children and adults.'

No doubt these knitting workshops were, indeed, 'delivered' beautifully - as they should be after all this investment.

But the simple fact remains. The people of West Bromwich have been given an empty £65million box which may or may not provide them with digital art when they would much rather go for a swim.