Plans for £5m centre for imagination
Multi-million pound plans to create a National Centre for Imagination in Sunderland have been unveiled.
The Echo understands that an ambitious bid has been launched to establish the new flagship cultural attraction somewhere in the city centre.
The Wearside-based National Centre for Imagination (NCI) was chosen from a pool of funding bids for the £15million Northern Cultural Regeneration Fund that came through to the North East LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership) and aims to focus on young people’s creativity and imagination.
If successful, the centre will also include an institute of performing arts.
Andrew Hodgson, Chairman of the North East LEP, said: “We received a very impressive set of bids to put forward for potential funding from the Northern Culination tural Regeneration Fund.
“The entries we received clearly demonstrated the scale and ambition of emerging cultural projects right across the North East. The National Centre for Imagination particularly demonstrated a strong fit with the criteria set out by DCMS to create a lasting legacy of cultural regeneration.”
The two key goals of the fund are to:
Encourage sustainable cultural and creative regeneration in the North of England
Benefit areas of the North of England that have historically had low levels of cultural and creative investment.
Keith Merrin, Chief Executive of Sunderland Culture –the organisation behind the proposal and Sunderland’s bid to become City of Culture 2021 – said the centre would unleash the imaginations of young people and stimulate their inventiveness.
“If we are successful in securing this funding, the National Centre for Imag- will be the headquarters of Inventors, the globally-successful programme devised by Sunderland-born artist, designer and inventor Dominic Wilcox,” Mr Merrin said.
“The NCI will also be home to DigiLab, where children and young people will have the opportunity to use emerging digital technologies to learn new skills and develop their ideas.”
Plans include a provision for the upper floor of the NCI to be devoted to the University of Sunderland’s performing and creative arts provision, with the university working with leading practitioners and providers in the region.
“It’s another stepping stone in raising the profile and image of the city’s overall cultural offer and further making the case for Sunderland to be UK City of Culture in 2021,” Mr Merrin added.
Sunderland will find out this Thursday whether it will be City of Culture 2021, with the result announced live on BBC One’s The One Show.