The Wordsworth Trust, which operates museums near Grasmere devoted to the Lake District's most famous Romantic, lost £80,000 of its annual grant in the latest Arts Council England (ACE) funding round.
That cash had been used to fund a contemporary literature programme, including poetry readings, a full-time literature officer and a poet-in-residence – currently the Birmingham-born writer Zaffar Kunial, one of the Faber New Poets for 2014.
On Tuesday night, hours after the trust was kicked out of the Arts Council's national portfolio, it was due to receive an annual visit from the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage, aglow from rave reviews for his stage adaptation of the Iliad, The Last Days of Troy.
Michael McGregor, the trust's director, received the bad news from an ACE representative by telephone just before 9am on Tuesday.
McGregor said it was a bittersweet day because they had also found out they would continue to be supported to the tune of £300,000 a year by the ACE's major partner museum programme as part of the Cumbrian Museums Consortium, which also includes Tullie House in Carlisle and the Lakeland Arts Trust.
Tullie House, which has popular exhibitions on the Romans as well as contemporary art shows, remains in the ACE portfolio and has been promised an additional £1,045,165 each year for the next three years.
McGregor said it was too soon to tell whether jobs would be lost at the Wordsworth Trust as a result of the funding cut. It may try to plug the gap by increasing the price of tickets or of slices of poppy and carraway seed cake made to a recipe from the poet's sister Dorothy, available in the museum tearoom.
It costs £7.50 to visit Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's home in the hamlet of Town End, near Grasmere, in which he wrote (with a little help from Dorothy) I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud. "We need to take stock and have discussions at a trustee level once we've absorbed the news," said McGregor in the handsome slate cottage where the trust is headquartered.
In the car park outside, busloads of oblivious Japanese and American tourists pulled in for their 20-minute tour of the Wordsworth residence and a visit to the gift shop to stock up on daffodil memorabilia. Around 50% of the trust's annual £1.4m budget is self-generated, coming from the daffodil mugs and tea towels as well as admission prices. Until Tuesday's cut, a further 30% came from the ACE, and the rest was cobbled together from grants and donations.
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for the South Lakes, complained that arts in the region were still underfunded.
"[The consortium award] is fantastic news for them and is a testament to the leadership of their individual organisations," he said. "However, I believe that these funding awards hide the issue of the inequality of arts and culture funding throughout England. We need to continue to press for fairer arts funding for the north and especially Cumbria."
Funding for the arts in the north rose by £2.4m (3.1%) to £79.6m, compared with £162.6m for London, Farron pointed out.
