£100m raked in by School of Art in aftermath of fires
Insurance and fundraising payouts as rebuild stalls
GLASGOW School of Art has raked in more than £100 million from insurance claims and fundraising as a result of the two fires while its rebuild has stalled, The Herald can reveal.
More than £78m was raised through insurance settlements and fundraising in the wake of the fire that gutted Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building in 2014.
Some £18m has already been received by way of interim payment over the 2018 fire which decimated the Mack. But is understood to be related to contract works associated with the rebuild of what is one of Scotland’s most precious landmarks that was taking place in the wake of the first fire in 2014.
A settlement amount of £8.5m has already been agreed for fire damage to GSA’S Reid, Bourdon and Assembly buildings, but after nearly six years, no agreement has yet been reached on any payout over the extensive damage sustained by the Mack.
The Herald previously revealed that a six-year failure to reach an agreement over the “complex” insurance claim relating to the Mack blaze is believed to have contributed to what has been described as “inertia” over its £100m-plus reinstatement.
The 19 months of delay over the rebuild of the Mack has been described as a “national scandal” which will add millions to its estimated cost.
The June 2018 fire destroyed the iconic Category A-listed Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Building as it neared the end of multi-millionpound restoration project following a blaze in May 2014.
But attempts at the reinstatement of the masterpiece, originally designed by renowned Scots architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, have stalled and serious questions have been raised about whether the restoration will ever happen.
A design team that was supposed to have been in place, according to the GSA itinerary, by August 2022 has still not been arranged.
GSA refers to any insurance income received from the Mack fire in its official financial records as a “contingent asset”, meaning that it is only a potential financial gain.
The school has said it is “still working with our teams of professional advisers to progress towards settling the complex insurance claims associated with the 2018 fire”.
Meanwhile, new questions have been raised over why there has been no attempt to raise funds for the new rebuild, while the reinstatement process is 19 months behind schedule and counting.
The Herald can reveal that the insurance settlement over the business interruption and property losses from the 2014 fire was £45m. In addition, insurance receipts in relation to the heritage assets lost totalled £4.3m.
Glasgow School of Art Development Trust, a charity established eight years ago to start a £32m appeal for what it said was n £80m Mackintosh Campus Project, was still holding on to nearly £6m, according to its latest annual financial records signed off in
March 2023 and seen by The Herald. At that point, it had raised £23.587m, with £17.910m paid to GSA.
It was expecting to continue operating to make a new fundraising drive “in the future”.
A £5m pledge towards the appeal from the UK Government which had not been received in 2022/23 has now finally been added to the fund – bringing it to nearly £30m.
The Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, a devotee of Rennie Mackintosh, and the former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi, agreed to be trustees of the fundraising scheme.
At the time of the blaze in June 2018, the Mack was covered by an insurance programme designed to co-ordinate general liability coverage for all parties working on the construction project following the 2014 fire.
That comprised cover for the contract works and the pre-existing
structure. According to GSA financial statements, the interim payments made by the insurers is in relation to the contract works while an agreement is still to be reached over what is to be received over the existing structure.
The value of the works in restoring the Mack in the wake of the 2018 fire have effectively been written off.
In January last year, Penny Macbeth, the School of Art director, said it did not anticipate calling on government funding if the project went to plan. And Muriel Gray, the first female chair of the board of governors at GSA, said the school hoped to use minimal amounts of public money for the project and rely on funds from its insurance cover and a private fundraising drive.
A three-year-old detailed business case examination of the project revealed that while a variety of funding sources may be available to deliver the capital project and support operation of the new building, its affordability was “dependent” on the outcome of the insurance claim.
Professor Alan Dunlop, one of Scotland’s leading architects who once put his hat in the ring to become the next chair of GSA and is a stakeholder consultee for the project, had questioned why attempts have not been made to raise public funds.
“Although we do not yet know the scope of the commission and just what a faithful restoration actually means, advice from building professionals is that to do the restoration properly will take more than the £62m,” he said.
“Having spent £35m restoring the library after the 2014 fire, I cannot see how more money can be raised through donation or by insurance, particularly when the cause of the 2018 cannot be established.”
Renowned UK architect Sir David Chipperfield, who last year won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award in architecture, and who has previously declared that the Mack should be rebuilt following the agreement of an “acceptable”, has admitted it would be “very difficult” to justify the use of public funds for any reinstatement at a time when “schools needed new roofs”.
Speaking as part of a lecture series, he also said the project to recreate the 1909 architectural masterpiece will need “total buy-in from everybody”.
He has said the Mack should be declared as a “monument of exceptional importance” and that the decision in the way it should be rebuilt should be based on “intellectual and technical criteria and opinion”.
Describing the Mack’s current state as “a terrible tragedy”, he said: “[Making a copy] is not where I’d go to originally [if I was looking at the project] because you’d like to find some other solution.
“But I’ve been there [to Glasgow] and I don’t think there is any other solution.”
He added: “I think you can rebuild it as a very high-class copy. There are enough drawings and evidence and photographs, and we know enough about it.”
But he said: “You can’t do a project with that complexity, without total buy-in from everybody.
“I think it’s very difficult for a community to say how much you’re going to spend on that? What, rebuilding that? Is it that important?
You can’t do a project with that complexity, without total buy-in from everybody
What about, you know, all the schools that need new roofs?
“I can’t see how politically, especially in Scotland at the moment [that you can] justify that expenditure because to do it properly, it would be really problematic, but meaningful.”
GSA, in literature sent to potential independent governors last summer, stated that it remained “committed to the rebuilding of the iconic Mackintosh Building, returning it to its central role in the creative life of our students, staff, city and nation”.
Appointment details stated: “Since 2018, works have continued to focus on stabilising the remaining structure and clearing debris and the production of the Strategic Outline Business Case ... [The] plan for rebuilding will form part of the GSA’S wider Estates Strategy, aligned to the school’s academic ambitions.”
GSA says that its “understands the sense of concern from many people” over progress over the reinstatement of the Mack but that ig remains committed to the project.