FASCINATING details are emerging of how “Project Vane” aims to restore the arts to Darlington’s empty Arts Centre.

It is an exciting project which could provide a blueprint for how the arts can survive in the age of austerity.

Rather than a subsidy of taxpayers’ money, profits from a boutique hotel will be used to support the arts. It will not be a one-way street, though. The arts will pay the hotel back in kind, by creating a unique ambiance and a unique selling point.

It seems simple, although it should be noted that Project Vane appears very dependent on an Arts Council grant to get it up and running. This, though, is supposed to be the new model for state spending: in the future, the state will enable the private sector to provide amenities that were once run by public money.

Consequently, a reborn arts centre will probably be a more hard-headed commercial enterprise compared to the rather bohemian old one.

It has been the devoted clientele of the old arts centre that has led the campaign to save it, although the town as a whole seems to feel that it doesn’t want the 1870s building demolished and replaced by a modern housing estate. That would detract from Darlington’s character. It would make it more of a bland place.

The disappointment is that this has not been done in a more joined-up fashion.

The sudden closure has meant that the many and various arts groups have been physically split up around town – although the Darlington for Culture group is trying to keep them together in spirit – and that the centre’s paying audience has been lost.

Many people attended from across the wider area, and it will be hard for a new centre to win them back after a gap of several years.

The project is exciting enough to succeed. Without it, it is hard to see how an arts centre could ever reemerge, so Darlington has to hope that Project Vane will not be in vain.