The Light Comes On in Durham
A £17 million redevelopment has reopened a museum that closed a decade ago — and turned it into a test of whether Britain can build a cultural country rather than a cultural capital.
Aalimi Nation · UK Culture Desk | Durham
On Saturday 22 August, a brass band played outside a remodelled 1960s building at Aykley Heads, on the edge of Durham, and a museum that had been shut for ten years opened its doors again under a different name.
The Light is what Durham County Council has made of the former Durham Light Infantry Museum and Art Gallery, which closed in 2016 because too few people were visiting to keep it viable. The £17 million redevelopment, by the architects NORR, has roughly doubled the size of the original building. It is, by the council's account, the first venue in County Durham of its scale dedicated to contemporary art of national and international significance.
The path here was not smooth. Construction setbacks and local opposition — some residents objected because veterans' ashes had been scattered on the museum grounds — meant nearly a decade passed before a formal plan was approved in 2023 under new council leadership.
What has emerged is not simply a gallery where a museum used to be.
An exhibition about the light bulb
The opening show, Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light, runs until 17 January 2027 and gathers more than twenty artists who work with artificial light as a material: Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen, Jenny Holzer, David Shrigley, Cerith Wyn Evans, Chila Burman, Dan Flavin, Katie Paterson, Iván Navarro and others across three galleries.
Its organising idea is local. Joseph Swan, born in Sunderland within the historic county of Durham in 1828, developed the incandescent light bulb independently of Thomas Edison. One of Swan's original bulbs from 1878–79 sits at the start of the exhibition as a provocation, and the show traces how artists from the 1960s onwards took the same technology — fluorescent tubes, neon, LEDs, digital media — and turned a functional invention into an artistic medium.
The title comes from a 1913 Russian Futurist opera in which the protagonists set out to capture the sun.
"It is a privilege to curate the inaugural exhibition," said Natasha Howes, who assembled the show. The venue's artistic director, Tony Guillan, described the project as "a rare opportunity to help shape a new kind of cultural space from the ground up — one that brings contemporary artistic practice into dialogue with history, scientific discovery and technological innovation."
The military history has not been discarded. A permanent exhibition, We Are The Durhams, covers more than 250 years of the regiment through objects, film, sound and interactive displays. Gillian Kirkbride, the council's heritage venues and collections manager, said the approach was deliberately personal. "There are stories we've never told before," she said, describing an attempt to move past "the idealised soldier who is just in a trench in the First World War wearing khaki." The men were "artists, musicians, astronomers."
Entry to the venue and the DLI exhibition is free. Victory Over the Sun is ticketed at £10 for adults booking online and £2.50 for under-18s.
The larger argument
The Light matters beyond Durham because of what it is being asked to demonstrate.
Britain's cultural economy has long concentrated in London — the largest museums, the auction houses, the creative firms, the funding. The counter-argument now being made in policy is that access to culture should not require a train ticket to the capital, and that regional institutions can be economic infrastructure as much as artistic ones.
Durham is placing its bet accordingly. The Light sits within the emerging Durham Innovation District, a partnership between the county council, the developer Muse and Durham University, and is intended as an anchor institution for it — a cultural venue positioned as part of a growth strategy rather than a cost line. The county already hosts Lumiere, the UK's light art biennial, which draws large crowds to the city every two years.
Other strands of the same policy are visible elsewhere. In June, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced £1.6 million, jointly with the arts-access charity Art Explora, for what is billed as Britain's first permanent mobile museum, designed to take works from national collections into communities. From 2027 it is expected to tour 36 to 40 weeks a year, visiting around 40 to 45 locations annually and reaching an estimated 100,000 visitors and 520 to 600 schools in its first four years.
The government's long-term music strategy, Turn It Up, adds £15 million to the Music Growth Package, bringing it to £45 million across more than 2,000 projects over three years and supporting at least 40,000 artists and music professionals — with support extended beyond established performers to emerging and mid-career artists, managers, labels and publishers. A further £12.5 million from dormant assets funding is earmarked for a Music in Libraries programme, allowing libraries in England to apply for recording facilities, studios, performance spaces and equipment. Around £10 million is allocated for creative mentoring, including for care-experienced young people.
The common thread is a redefinition of what cultural infrastructure means. A library becomes a recording studio. A regimental museum becomes a contemporary art venue. The building stays; its function is rewritten.
Who pays, and who benefits
Edinburgh is where the harder question is being asked.
Scotland's first visitor levy took effect there in July, charging 5% on accommodation for the first five nights. It could raise as much as £50 million a year, with 35% earmarked for culture. Festival organisers are now arguing that the events generating much of that visitor spending should receive a proportionate share of it, as they face rising costs, infrastructure pressure and competition for public funding.
The underlying question applies well beyond Scotland. If culture generates economic value for a city, how much of that value should return to the people and organisations producing it?
That question will decide whether venues like The Light survive their second decade. Opening a gallery is a capital problem, solved once. Keeping it open is a revenue problem, faced every year — and the building at Aykley Heads has already closed once, for exactly that reason.
The test
Britain's creative strength was never confined to London. It exists in the theatres of Manchester, the galleries of Newcastle and Durham, the music scenes of Liverpool and Birmingham, the festivals of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and in hundreds of smaller towns.
What has been concentrated is not talent but money, and the institutions that money builds.
Whether that changes depends on things less photogenic than an opening weekend: sustainable revenue rather than emergency grants, transport links, arts education, affordable studio space, and enough opportunity for a young artist in County Durham to build a career without relocating.
The Light will be judged on its visitor numbers, as its predecessor was. But the more useful measure is whether, in ten years, a comparable venue can open somewhere else in the north without anyone calling it remarkable.
