The Clore Duffield Foundation

The Clore Duffield Foundation

The Clore Duffield Foundation was established in 1964 by Sir Charles Clore, the financier, retailer, and property investor whose fortune seeded one of Britain's enduring charitable vehicles. His daughter, Dame Vivien Duffield, merged the original Clore Foundation with her own philanthropic entity in 2000, creating the current structure. The Foundation's wealth originates in Clore's retail empire — he built the Sears plc chain — and in extensive commercial property holdings across London. Today the Foundation operates as a grantmaker to UK charities, but its signature is not merely cheque-writing: it conceives, builds, and retains physical assets that house cultural education. The Foundation deploys grant capital across the arts, education, social welfare, and health, with an institutional commitment to Jewish cultural life. Its most visible strategy is the creation and endowment of Clore Learning Spaces — dedicated educational rooms inside museums, galleries, and heritage sites. Over 70 such spaces operate across the United Kingdom, including inside major London institutions. The Foundation also serves as the primary benefactor of Eureka! The National Children's Museum in Halifax, and is closely tied to the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain through the Clore Gallery, which it funded. Adjacent to its grant-making, the Foundation maintains a co-owned asset in JW3, the Jewish Community Centre on Finchley Road in London. Dame Vivien Duffield's personal professional network — she chairs the Royal Opera House Endowment Fund and holds honorary membership at the Carlton Club — reinforces the Foundation's institutional adjacency to the arts establishment. Team scale and total assets are not publicly disclosed. The Foundation's board of trustees includes Melanie Clore, the founder of Clore Wyndham Fine Art and a cousin of the chair, alongside Richard Oldfield, executive chairman of Oldfield Partners, and James Harding, editor-in-chief of Tortoise Media. The governance structure embeds both family and external professional trustees, a model that places the Foundation between a tight family office and a professionally staffed institutional endowment. The Foundation's Israel-registered affiliate, Clore Foundation (Israel), operates a parallel grant-making program in that jurisdiction, giving the Clore philanthropic enterprise a dual domestic and international footprint. The Foundation's structural differentiator is physical: it builds and retains real assets rather than simply distributing grants. The 70-plus Clore Learning Spaces, the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain, the Clore Garden, and a stake in JW3 mean the Foundation holds a property portfolio intimately tied to its mission — operating more like a cultural developer than a traditional family foundation.