I’ve only bought a lottery ticket twice. And I won. Well, sort of. A joint purchase with a friend netted us £2.93 on our first ever lottery ticket. Triumph! So we squandered the profit on another… and lost of course. Another friend told me last week that if you buy a lottery ticket on a Tuesday, you are more likely to be dead by Saturday than to win the lottery. Pshaw! That’s not the point! Sometimes on a grim Tuesday, buying a lottery ticket just lets you wallow in all that hope for a few days.
And there is another point, one we rarely think of. With the renaming of the Heritage Lottery Fund as the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the link with the lottery ticket you buy is strengthened just that little bit. I may not have become an overnight millionaire that day but some little part of my loss may have ended up enriching our heritage. I am really conscious of the difference the money spent over the past decades since 1994 has made to Britain. I’ll explain… I left Britain in early 1995 and didn’t return until late 2006. In those 12 years, Britain changed. Apart from the proliferation of gilet jaunes bossing us around, there was a definite and visible sense of revival in so many towns and cities; new museums; restored and revived historic streets. So many projects that seemed to be just a dream when I left were now reality.
Here’s one - I grew up with the story of Henry VIII’s great warship, The Mary Rose – it was found languishing on the seabed in 1971 when I was an excited schoolgirl; it was first raised in 1982 when I was tackling my first London job; but it took a grant of £23 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund to build the extraordinary museum that finally opened in 2013 so that we can all go and see it. In the early decades, without an independent central funding body, such a sum was inconceivable and, even if the ship itself could be raised, the whole project looked unrealistically ambitious.
Now Britain has a ship museum to rival the Vasa in Stockholm and we can all have a glimpse into the life of ordinary Tudor sailors.
It’s not just the big grand schemes for which we need the National Lottery Heritage Fund. More than anything it is small schemes, the restoration of Georgian street lighting in the wynds of Montrose, for example, or over 600 individual wildlife trust projects in pretty well every county or maybe funding small museums like the one-man-collection museum at The Holburne in Bath, that make the biggest difference and make our national life much much richer. Hurrah, National Lottery Heritage Fund! I’m off to get a ticket right now – Saturday seems a long way away.