Their Clients Include BP, Aramco & Shell; Now They're Advising UK Arts Orgs On How To Justify Taking Oil & Gas Money [View all]

Sadler’s Wells, a top performing arts theatre in London, hired one of the United Kingdom’s biggest public relations agencies — and one with close ties to the oil industry — to help it defend a sponsorship deal with Barclays. Brunswick Group — whose clients have included oil giants BP, Shell, and Aramco, as well as Barclays, a major financier of fossil fuel development — drafted a May 23 letter to the Financial Times defending corporate sponsorships of the arts, and signed by Sadler’s Wells and 10 other leading UK cultural institutions, according to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by campaign group Culture Unstained and shared with DeSmog.

The letter was part of broader efforts by a group of high-profile theatres, museums, and galleries scrambling to respond to protests, open letters, and artist boycotts over sponsorship deals that critics accuse of disguising corporate complicity in the climate crisis and Israeli military operations in Gaza. “A fossil fuel PR firm, Brunswick Group, is being commissioned by a publicly funded arts institution, Sadler’s Wells, to defend the theatre’s partnership with Barclays, the UK’s biggest climate-wrecking bank, which is also named by the United Nations as complicit in the genocide of Palestinians,” said Isobel Tarr, co-director of Culture Unstained.

Sadler’s Wells income of £41.8 million for the year ending 31 March 2024, the most recent information available in the UK Register of Charities, included about £4.6 million from nine government grants. “By drawing other arts institutions into a defensive communication strategy which Brunswick Group themselves designed and delivered, it has manufactured a polarising narrative of ‘protestors versus the arts’ which is not remotely representative of the views held across the sector,” Tarr added.

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An employee of the Science Museum, who also asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions, said the letter was “universally ridiculed” by museum staff in private group chats. “It has been mentioned fairly regularly as an example of the divergence felt between workers, particularly among the lower grades, and the Science Museum’s leaders and directors,” the employee said. The employee added that many staff remain opposed to the Science Museum’s partnerships with Indian conglomerate Adani Group, the world’s largest privately owned coal producer, and BP. BP supplies oil used by the Israeli military through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, according to the U.N. report.

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https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/16/how-a-big-oil-pr-firm-helped-top-uk-cultural-institutions-defend-their-fossil-fuel-sponsorships/