Skip to content

Wales Millennium Centre

Wales Millennium Centre
This landmark building is a home for the performing arts in Wales.

A home for the arts

The Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) opened in November 2004. It has an ongoing programme of opera, ballet, contemporary dance, drama, cinema, and art exhibitions.

It is home to the following arts organisations:

The Welsh Assembly Government provides five of the seven resident organisations (marked with a *) with a total of £800,000 per year. This offsets the additional costs they incur by being based in the WMC.

Building a landmark

The Welsh Assembly Government provided a £37m contribution to build the WMC. The final cost of building was £106.2m.

Funding

Between its opening in November 2004 and April 2008, the Welsh Assembly Government provided the WMC annually with £1.2m. This comprised £750,000 in revenue support and £450,000 as a contribution to a sinking fund for the maintenance of the building.

In April 2011 responsibility for funding WMC was transferred from the Welsh Government to Arts Council Wales. WMC receives capital funding of £300k per year and revenue funding of £3.7m per year. This comes from the annual grant made by the Welsh Government to Arts Council Wales.

Audience figures

Since the Wales Millennium Centre opened:

• more than 5.5 million people have visited the centre;
• over 1.3 million people attended more than 1500 performances held in the Donald Gordon Theatre and the Weston Studio;  
• over 200,000 people have attended 55 productions by the Welsh National Opera;
• over 48,000 people have taken guided tours of the building;  
• over 35,000 school children have stayed overnight;
• there have been over 1,700 free performances in the foyer; and
• more than 1,600 business functions and conferences have been held with over 93,000 delegates.  

More information

To find out more about the Wales Millennium Centre, please visit its website.

Wales Millennium Centre website