London invests in the arts. But is it the quantity or the quality that's important?

Taking advantage of the Nordic Bar's any bottle of wine for £10 on a Monday night offer, the talk turned to the merits of the 2012 Olympic Games. A friend of mine expressed his concern that the capital's arts provision would suffer at the hands of sport. I took delight in reporting the next day that Ken Livingstone had announced a £1.4 million fund for organisations to develop new cultural projects across the capital.

The fund has been established by the London Development Agency and will be delivered by the Arts Council England. According to the publicity boys at City Hall, this is just the beginning. More funding will be made available to support cultural projects in the run up to 2012. By blogging this, lets see if that promise is fulfilled over the coming years.

The fund was announced at the same time as a cultural audit that compares London's cultural environment with four other major world cities. Amongst the findings, the audit states that London has 184 museums compared with 157 in Paris or 91 in New York. And 55 major theatres compared with 39 in New York and 19 in Shanghai. New York has more major concert halls than London (12 and 9 respectively), but London stages more music performances each year than New York (32,292 against 22,204). London stages 200 festivals each year and has 400 venues offering music.

The audit has been rubbished by one of Ken Livingstone's most outspoken opponents, journalist Andrew Gilligan in today's Evening Standard. In amongst the rhetoric and accusations of suspect number crunching, Gilligan makes a valid point. It should be the quality of London's attractions and not the quantity that makes this city a world beater. For a copy of the audit, download it here and make your own mind up.