Is the taxpayer about to stump up another £16 million for the Duchess of Northumberland’s pet project, Alnwick Garden? Mary Keen investigates
To him that hath shall be given, and to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland hath been given quite a lot. We are talking public funding here. The £11.5m Lottery sum awarded to secure the Duke’s Raphael for the nation is a record for a work of art. This could be chicken- feed, however, compared with the funding the Duchess hopes to bag for her pet project, the Alnwick Garden, which by the time it is completed will have cost an estimated £42m.
When I interviewed Jane Northum-berland in March for the Daily Telegraph, she said something that I agreed not to mention in that article. Ten minutes into our talk in her Portakabin office, she was outlining such ambitious plans for phases two and three of the garden – a total spend of £32m, following the almost £10m that went on phase one – that I cut her short to ask, ‘How will you get the money?’ She replied that half of it was already promised from government funding for the North-East and European grants. I got the feeling that her financial adviser (John Lovett, a chartered accountant and family friend) would have preferred her not to have told me. Now the time has come to tell the story.
The garden was hived off from the ducal empire and turned into a private charitable trust in April. The Duke has given away the 42 acres of land on which the garden and its attendant carparks sit for 99 years. The Duchess was made a trustee. The chairman of the board is Dr John Bridge, who chairs One NorthEast, the regional development agency designed to generate growth and create wealth.
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