Friday night, and Exeter is buzzing.

By February 2026 the council had approved 16,935 student and co-living bedspaces — exceeding its own student-housing target by 103% — on the very city-centre sites that could have held Exeter’s cultural future. The Mary Arches car park, owned by the council itself, was signed over for 297 co-living units in April 2026. Last week, on the former Heavitree Road police station — 399 student flats, 414 co-living studios — the council even voted to cut the affordable homes owed, from 83 to 61, with no mention of creative space. Site after site, the same result: no affordable housing, no council tax, nothing of culture in their place.

Because the council had a rule to stop exactly this. Its own emerging Local Plan carries Principle 7, “Connected Culture,” requiring every major development to provide flexible space for the creative industries — schemes that don’t, it says, “will be refused.” That rule is on the books right now, at examination. It exists. The council just sells the future off instead.

On 21 January 2020, an Extraordinary Meeting of the full council formally resolved to build a new city-centre cultural venue — moved by the Leader himself. Not a vision statement. A formal resolution. Two months later, Covid arrived. The commitment was never revived, and never rescinded. As of 2026 it sits on the public record as a live, unactioned vote. The strategy being consulted on now doesn’t mention it at all.

On 14 April 2026, the government announced £127.8 million for cultural venues across the country — the first slice of a £1.5 billion fund. Theatre Royal Plymouth received £8,356,000. The Lowry in Salford, £8.5m. BALTIC in Gateshead, £3.6m. Exeter received nothing.

Not because it was rejected. Because there is no major cultural venue in the city with a project ready to apply. No venue, no organisation of the scale required, nothing for the Arts Council to fund. The next rounds of that money open over the next two years — and as it stands, Exeter still can’t use them. This is what having no venue costs. In real money. Right now.

Exeter calls itself a city of culture. It holds UNESCO City of Literature status. And during the life of its last cultural strategy, the Arts Council funding it receives fell from above the national average to below it — £12.92 a head, against £13.48 nationally. Norwich, which holds the exact same UNESCO title, gets £65.44 a head. Five times as much, for the same status.

At the same time, the council was cutting its own grants to local cultural organisations. We don’t have to characterise what that did — the council’s own 2026 report does:

“The previous loss of modest core funding grants from Exeter City Council has increased the risk of organisational failure.”— ECC’s own commissioned 2026 Cultural Strategy Assessment

Their sentence. Their report.

In 2017 the council’s own consultants costed a major cultural venue for Exeter at £40–55 million. The council spent roughly £45 million of public borrowing — almost exactly that range — on the St Sidwell’s Point leisure centre. Then it concluded the cultural venue “could not be built with public funds alone.”

The pool’s budget more than doubled on its way there, from £19.4m to about £45m, with no full-council vote at any point in the escalation. The council still owes £33.7m on it. And in 2024 the development its location was built to anchor was declared dead. The money for the venue existed. It went somewhere else.

Exeter College of Art and Design was founded in 1854, inside what is now the RAMM museum. For 153 years it gave this city degree-level art, design, fashion and illustration. In 2007 the arts faculty was moved to Plymouth, into a new £34m building. Four years later, Exeter City Council granted permission to demolish the old art school and replace it with 39 houses. The physical home of a century and a half of Exeter’s creative life — gone, for housing.

And here’s the part that stings: the council’s own 2026 report — the evidence base for the strategy it’s consulting on now — calls that loss a “tragedy.” Its word. Nineteen years too late.

Plymouth has higher deprivation than Exeter. It also has The Box, the Theatre Royal, an arts university, a permanent creative quarter at Royal William Yard — and, since 2007, Exeter’s own arts degrees. It published a strategy, “Igniting Plymouth’s Creative Spark,” that names its partners, commits to creative clusters, and backs a physical production park.

Exeter, with more money, produced two strategies that name no venue, identify no site, and — in their own words — carry “no financial implications arising from the recommendation.” The difference between the two cities isn’t wealth. It’s the decision to act, and to write it down.