The UK government is calling on artists, architects, and engineers to submit design proposals for a memorial commemorating the late Queen Elizabeth II, and the winning submission will be erected in London’s St. James’s Park near Buckingham Palace. The budget is between £23 million–£46 million—paid for using public funds.
The first of the competition’s two phases launched in December and closes January 20. Five shortlisted competitors will then battle it out during a ten-week design stage, with the winner announced next summer.
Such a staggering budget may seem to befit the late queen, a towering figure of British history, but why is so much money being thrown at this statue when the country is still gripped by austerity? Almost all sectors, especially the culture sector, are in dire straits.
Ministers have slashed the UK’s art and culture budget in recent years. Since 2017 alone, local government funding in England has fallen by 48 percent. Those cuts have already had material consequences. Take the case of Suffolk county in eastern England, for example. At the start 2024, the council there announced its intention to completely halt funding arts culture programs, a move that could severely impact spaces such as Thomas Gainsborough’s house in Sudsbury.
Is it fair that millions of pounds are now earmarked for a statue of a dead monarch when many art institutions across the UK are struggling to survive? I wrote Sandy Nairne, the former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery and a member of the Queen Elizabeth II statue’s jury, to ask. He forwarded my question the UK government’s press office, which said, “As a national memorial to the country’s longest-serving and much-respected Monarch, the Government has identified a provisional construction budget. This is a guide for designers to develop proposals. All submissions will be judged against a number of criteria including value for money.”
The press office’s spokesperson further said the initiative to build the monument was set in motion by the last Conservative government and that the current Labour government supports it.
Many institutions in the country receive vital funding from that government. Consider the Tate museum network, which oversees some of the biggest institutions in the UK. Thirty percent of the Tate’s funding comes from the UK government. According to Tate’s December report on its 2023–24 accounts, the network is running on a budget deficit for the second year in a row. The report suggests it should “develop a new financially sustainable business model.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s no way the government would allow the Tate to close, but regional cultural institutions have been left by the wayside. In 2024, the government failed to save the ill-fated Eastleigh Museum in Hampshire or the Museum of Crannock Chase in the West Midlands, to name just a couple of lost institutions. They are two of the more than 500 British museums have shuttered since 2000.
On December 10, Lisa Nandy, the UK culture secretary, said, “We are very aware that there is a lot of fragility in our sectors—in music, in arts, in museums.” Why, then, is the British government spending up to £46 million of taxpayers’ money on a statue? If ministers don’t want to spend it on museums, what about pumping it into the debt-ridden, failing NHS instead, buying some life-saving equipment for a hospital, or something that will make a tangible difference to the country?
And why not pay for the statue of the Queen using money from the Sovereign Grant, an annual taxpayer-funded settlement that’s the main source income for the British monarchy? The grant for 2024–25 is £86.3 million, the vast majority of which is spent on the upkeep of properties and staff costs. Why doesn’t the royal family live more frugally for a few months and pay for the statue itself?
The public benefits from thriving museums and cultural institutions, and so do artists—and it’s hard to be an artist right now. If a system works, cultural funding should trickle down from the establishment to help struggling artists. After all, if there are no artists, art stops being made. A recent report by the University of Glasgow highlighted the economic plight of artists in the UK. The average income for artists in the UK is the equivalent of just $15,600, which marks an almost 40 percent decrease since 2010 (when it was $25,000).
One prominent art world figure I spoke to the other day highlighted the dire situation of museums here in the UK. He joked about the cost-cutting “bags of vinegar-like wine and wretched canapés” served at an opening at one major London museum, compared to the decadent feast laid on by the Slovak National Gallery for another recent party.
Perhaps if we stopped fetishizing the royal family by building exorbitant monuments to them, the hors d’oeuvres might improve at exhibition openings in the UK, at the very least.
