Morph, Picade and Belle and Sebastian: The British Kickstarter success stories

Backers have pledged £22.5m in the year that crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter opened to UK projects.

There have been a total of 1,550 successfully funded projects in the UK, which range from redesigning the London Underground map to an innovative way to learn Chinese.

Currently there is also a project to bring back much-loved children’s character Morph, which is £10,000 off its £75,000 goal.

The successful projects have raised £17.1m; unsuccessful appeals see the money returned to backers. It took projects in the US over 20 months to raise the equivalent amount.

The platform opened to UK projects in October last year within a week, 171 projects had 15,000 pledges from backers.

The first UK campaign was Picade, an arcade cabinet that was compatible with mini-computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

Of those backing the UK projects, 40 per cent were domestic and 26 per cent were from the US. A fifth were from the European Union and the difference elsewhere around the world.

A quarter of the projects backed were in film and video, including lead singer of Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch, who used Kickstarter to turn his 2009 album God Help the Girl into a film. That is now edited and due to premiere early next year.

Publishing and games appeals made up 13 per cent each. Music was 11 per cent and art nine per cent.

This week, Kickstarter revealed that in total more than 50,000 projects have been successfully funded with more than 5 million people worldwide backing a project to the tune of $852m.