Find
We monitor completed projects funded by Arts Council England, the British Council and UKRI, across every art form and research discipline, and build a picture of what was produced and what happened next.
A community interest company
Public funding ends. The work doesn’t have to.
Residue CIC finds publicly funded arts and research projects that produced something valuable and were never continued — then assesses, revives and continues them.
The gap
Every year, good work is left behind.
Public funders invest in thousands of projects across the UK. Many of them produce something that outlasts the grant: a method, a set of relationships, a group of trained participants, a dataset, a body of work, a way of working that others have already started to copy.
When the funding period ends, most of it stops. Not because it failed. Because nothing exists to carry it forward.
Follow-on funding does exist, but it is applicant-led. It asks the original team to apply again — often years later, often after they have dispersed.
What does not exist is an independent function that looks at what has already been made, works out what still has value, and continues it.
That is the gap Residue CIC exists to fill.
Nothing is leftover if someone still needs it.
What we do
We treat unfinished work as a resource.
Residue CIC works one layer above the project: not making new work from scratch, but recovering the value public money has already produced.
Assess
We look for what is still live: methods, relationships, materials, findings, skills, audiences. We test whether continuing it would create real public benefit — and what it would take.
Continue
Where the original team wants to carry on, we help them. Where they have moved on, we broker a new partnership, license the work, or deliver the continuation ourselves.
Record
Everything we continue is documented and published, so the sector can see what was recovered, how it was done, what it cost — and what did not work.
How it works
A pipeline, not a grant scheme.
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01
Scan
Desk research into public funding records, published evaluations and sector knowledge, to identify projects that ended with value still in them.
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02
Shortlist
Each candidate is tested against clear criteria: strength of output, length of dormancy, latent public value, and feasibility of continuation.
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03
Approach
We go to the original artists, researchers and organisations first. Always. Nothing is continued without their agreement.
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04
Assess
Together we work out what continuing would involve — scope, cost, intellectual property, capacity, partners.
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05
Continue
Delivery, adaptation, partnership or licence. Whichever protects the work and the people who made it.
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06
Record
We publish what happened, including the attempts that went nowhere.
On authorship
Residue CIC does not take work. Original authorship, credit and intellectual property stay with the people who created it. Where an original holder has dissolved or cannot be traced, we work through a documented licensing and attribution process before anything is continued.
Scope
What we cover.
Funders
Arts Council England · British Council ·
UKRI — and other public funding bodies as the organisation
develops.
Forms
All art forms — visual arts, theatre, dance, music,
literature, craft, digital and interdisciplinary — and research
forms, including practice-based research.
Geography
National ambition. Leicester and the East Midlands pilot
phase.
Status
Community interest company limited by guarantee. Asset-locked. Any surplus
is retained and used for the company’s community purpose.
Pilot phase
Starting in Leicester. Built for the UK.
The first phase of Residue CIC runs in Leicester and the East Midlands, where the networks, relationships and local knowledge already exist.
Year one is deliberately small: a handful of continuations, properly documented, to test the model and build the evidence base for scaling.
The pilot location is an operational decision, not a limit on the mission. Residue CIC is designed from the outset as a national programme.
About
A community interest company.
Residue CIC is a community interest company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales.
It is asset-locked: any surplus is retained in the company and used for its community purpose. There are no shareholders and no private profit.
- Company name
- Residue CIC
- Legal form
- Community interest company limited by guarantee
- Company number
- 17440797
- Company status
- Active
- Registered office
- L C B Depot, 31 Rutland Street, Leicester, England, LE1 1RE
- Regulator
- The Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies
- Companies House
- View public record
- Community interest statement
- Available on request
Contact
Get in touch.
We want to hear from:
- Original project holders whose work was never continued
- Funders and commissioners
- Potential partners, collaborators and board members
- Researchers working on public funding, legacy and cultural value