Naked ambition
Public sector finances are very tight, but some local authorities are banking on culture to kickstart wider regeneration. Geraldine Kendall Adams reports
3,000 people came together in Hull city centre, stripped completely bare, and waited patiently in the pre-dawn chill as they were painted blue from head to toe. It’s not a sight the city’s residents see every day but it’s the kind of thing they’ll have to get used to in the coming months, as Hull prepares to take up where Derry-Londonderry left off, becoming the UK City of Culture for 2017.
The nude gathering – for a photoshoot by the American artist Spencer Tunick that will go on display in Ferens Art Gallery next year – gave City of Culture organisers their first inkling that the sense of anticipation building in the city ahead of the year-long festival was not just a figment of their imagination: the public’s enthusiasm is real.
“We were worried we wouldn’t get 1,000 people taking part, but 3,200 turned up,” says Simon Green, the director of cultural services at the council’s culture and leisure trust. “No one anticipated it would get to that level. It brought a huge slug of money into the local economy.”
It is the kind of success story the council is hoping will play out across the city in the coming year. And it is happening at a time when local authorities all over the UK are slashing their funding for culture. But some are bucking the trend through ambitious projects where cultural investment is being used as a means of bringing about much wider social and economic transformation.
“Cultural regeneration” has been a buzzword since the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim opened in 1997, transforming Bilbao from a nondescript Spanish city into a worldwide destination. Recently, it’s been joined by the related notion of “place-making”, the concept of creating public spaces that improve health, wellbeing and quality of life, which formed a centrepiece of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s recent Culture White Paper.
But it’s not all about getting a starchitect in to create an iconic new building (although the V&A Museum of Design Dundee, designed by Kengo Kuma, is certainly hoping to be a torch-bearer for that idea when it opens in 2018); for some councils, it’s about recognising the value of their existing offer and investing to make even more of it.
That’s where initiatives such as the UK City of Culture come in. Introduced to build on the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, the scheme seems to be targeting areas with a rich cultural heritage that have, for one reason or another, developed a bit of an image problem. Playing host to the festival in 2013 enabled Derry-Londonderry to show the public that there was much more to the city than its recent troubled history, and the impact of the event is still being felt there.
Meanwhile, there was a palpable sense of bafflement among the London-based media when Hull’s winning bid was announced four years ago: back then, if they thought about the city at all, it was as yet another deprived, post-industrial town up north with not much to do or see.
Hull is relishing the opportunity to prove them wrong. Although the deprivation is real enough, following the collapse of industry, particularly fishing, in the area, the city has been graced with a world-class gallery, grand 19th-century architecture and a beautiful waterfront – not to mention being the birthplace of the slave-trade abolitionist William Wilberforce. “People would come in with a negative view and leave with a positive one,” says Green.
Five years ago, something happened to make the council sit up and take notice of the power Hull’s cultural offer could have to transform the city and its image: the Ferens Art Gallery staged an exhibition of David Hockney’s largest ever work – the 40-foot wide, 50-canvas painting Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), attracting crowds that queued around the block.
“Politicians were wandering around a bit surprised by the scale of interest,” Green says. “It was one of those moments where you start to see people looking at what you do a little differently.”
Inspired, the council decided to bid for the City of Culture title and, although it missed out the first time round, the process showed the benefits of taking a “top level, strategic approach” to cultural regeneration across various council departments.
“People saw the process of aligning and trying to pitch as a good thing,” Green says. “There was a clear steer from politicians that we should have another go. You have to be committed – this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight.”
It was second time lucky for the council, which has since pledged to invest £80m in culture and infrastructure in preparation for the festival. And although the programme receives no central government funding, the council has also beaten its funding target and raised £32m for festival activities from private sponsors, including many in the local business community.
Winning the bid has had a snowball effect, bringing even more opportunities to build on the area’s cultural and artistic offer.
“Being City of Culture opens doors to some very esteemed company,” Green says. “We worked with the Royal Collection to display the Leonardo da Vinci drawings here, and now have a five-year arrangement with them. All of a sudden you’re thrust into this position where there’s a partnership like that on the table – that’s the lever it brings. It’s quite phenomenal.”
All of these elements have already transformed perceptions of Hull. “It immediately starts getting businesses looking at you in a different light,” says Green. “It shows them they’re relocating to a city that’s quite exciting. It makes Hull a destination that people want to visit and live in.”
The knock-on economic impact of this is huge: the technology giant Siemens recently announced plans to build a £160m facility near the city to manufacture rotor blades for wind turbines, a project that will bring 1,000 new jobs to the area. A number of major retailers have also expressed an interest in moving there, according to Green.
More than that, the re-emergence of Hull has had a big impact on the city’s residents.
“Local people want it to be a success,” Green says. “There’s a sense of aspiration and pride. You can’t really put a price on that feel-good factor.”
One city hoping to emulate that feeling is Paisley, just west of Glasgow, which is home to one of the most economically deprived wards in Scotland. There, the council has made a £56.7m redevelopment of its museum and collections the flagship of a wider project to regenerate the town (which includes a bid to become the UK’s next City of Culture in 2021).
The council sees the town’s rich textile-making heritage, which is preserved in Paisley Museum, as the key to transforming its image and changing lives in a community where some families have been out of work for several generations.
“It’s a lot about people’s states of mind,” says Stephen Greenberg, the director of the museum consultancy Metaphor, which is masterplanning the redevelopment. “When they look at the fabrics in the museum: someone’s nan made it. This was really skilled work. When you know your nan did it you find a new sense of self respect. The way to reskill is finding confidence in knowing where you came from.”
Using the collections in this way – through co-curation projects, and related training programmes – is part of a wider anti-poverty agenda at the council. As well as giving people back a sense of pride and ownership over the museum – which was originally paid for by the city’s working people’s societies – maker spaces have been created in the museum where people can come to develop skills, such as digital animation.
The council also sees culture as a means of bringing footfall and investment back to the town centre, with plans to open a publicly accessible museum store on Paisley’s high street.
“I think it’s the only place in the UK that will have a museum store right on the high street,” says Morag MacPherson, the head of cultural services at Renfrewshire Culture and Leisure Trust, which is overseeing the redevelopment. “We want to bring people back to the heart of the city.”
Enhancing access to its design collections is intended to act as a draw for national and international tourists. The city is down the road from Glasgow International Airport; transport infrastructure is also being improved to enable people to travel there more easily from Glasgow across the river Clyde.
Despite losing out on a £15m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) bid last year, the council has no intention of scaling back its ambition or investment – plans to put in another bid are already in motion. It’s a refreshing approach when so many other councils see culture as a soft target for budget cuts. “Having museum collections at the heart of our economic strategy is quite unusual and exciting,” MacPherson says.
But it’s not just in urban centres that culture-led regeneration is a council priority. Further north of Paisley, the Scottish landscape transforms from lakes and highlands to the rugged cliffs of the Hebrides, before finally coming to an end at the country’s most westerly point, the remote archipelago of St Kilda.
The tiny group of islands, now uninhabited, is often difficult to get to because of the weather, but it’s one of just a few places in the world to hold dual – cultural and natural – Unesco World Heritage status thanks to a human history going back thousands of years, its archaeological features and its colonies of rare birds.
Now a project is underway to bring the archipelago’s unique heritage to a wider audience through a new visitor centre, Ionad Hiort (the St Kilda Centre), which will be built 40 miles away on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. It is hoped that the centre – supported by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (the council of the Western Isles) – will have a significant impact on Lewis and Harris, where the population has fallen steadily since the early 20th century.
“Lewis is full of people who are retired, so finding ways to regenerate the community and get more kids into primary school is a challenge,” says Metaphor’s Stephen Greenberg, who is contributing to the centre’s development.
The council hopes to open the centre in 2020 and has commissioned two architects, the Norwegian firm Reiulf Ramstad and local practice Dualchas, to collaborate on an ambitious proposal for the building’s design. It will be located on a cliff-top site in Uig, and will feature state-of-the-art interpretation, including virtual reality headsets allowing visitors to tour St Kilda’s archaeological ruins and underwater marine environment. The project is explicitly intended to kickstart a wider transformation of the area; it will offer maker spaces, outreach for schools, community events and a shop selling high-quality local produce. There are plans for seasonal festivals and a restaurant that will showcase local delicacies, such as lobsters and langoustines.
The area’s remote location is one of its major selling points, Greenberg says. “We can market it as the ‘restaurant at the edge of the world’, the ‘music festival at the edge of the world’.”
The island is just at the start of the process of regeneration; the centre’s success could lead to more investment in infrastructure such as the ferry service – which is infrequent and sometimes leaves visitors marooned on the island overnight – as well as better B&B provision. With remote working now more of a possibility, thanks to the internet, boosting the cultural offer could also draw people to move back to the Outer Hebrides, Greenberg says – as long as the islands’ broadband connection improves.
“All of these things start to build a critical mass over time,” he says. Regeneration isn’t instantaneous – but some councils are clearly in it for the long game.
Now the gallery is engaged in a unique research project to measure what it describes as the “social return on investment” in culture. The research will measure the outcomes of Art Inspiring Change, a child-led learning programme that engaged 80 children from local primary schools to regenerate their own town through art and culture.
The full report was not due to be released until after Museums Journal went to press, but the gallery’s head of learning and visitor experience, Karen Eslea, says that so far the research has shown that “visitors and participants gain a feeling of connectedness to family and friends, receptiveness to new experiences, empowerment, increased self-belief, and a will to be more active members of the community, among other things”.
The Art Inspiring Change programme, in which children work with artists and community volunteers to transform neglected spaces and develop their leadership and communication skills, will conclude with the opening of four transformed sites in the town in July 2017.
• Accommodation space increased 13% ahead of 2013 and two new boutique hotels have opened since then.
• 84% of schoolchildren were prouder to be from the city as a result of the festival.
• In 2013, Derry-Londonderry came fourth in Lonely Planet’s list of top 10 cities to visit worldwide.
• More than 600 new jobs were created in the city in 2015, with evidence suggesting they came as a direct result of the festival’s positive impact.
• A hub to provide incubation space for creative industries opened last year and is currently occupied by 16 businesses.
• The city has acquired several new venue spaces, including an outdoor concert venue that can hold up to 35,000 people.
• Ongoing regeneration investment, such as the £10m restoration of the city’s Guildhall, has opened up spaces previously seen as run down or dangerous.
• A number of new cultural projects are in the works, including an £11m maritime visitor and genealogy attraction.
The nude gathering – for a photoshoot by the American artist Spencer Tunick that will go on display in Ferens Art Gallery next year – gave City of Culture organisers their first inkling that the sense of anticipation building in the city ahead of the year-long festival was not just a figment of their imagination: the public’s enthusiasm is real.
“We were worried we wouldn’t get 1,000 people taking part, but 3,200 turned up,” says Simon Green, the director of cultural services at the council’s culture and leisure trust. “No one anticipated it would get to that level. It brought a huge slug of money into the local economy.”
It is the kind of success story the council is hoping will play out across the city in the coming year. And it is happening at a time when local authorities all over the UK are slashing their funding for culture. But some are bucking the trend through ambitious projects where cultural investment is being used as a means of bringing about much wider social and economic transformation.
“Cultural regeneration” has been a buzzword since the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim opened in 1997, transforming Bilbao from a nondescript Spanish city into a worldwide destination. Recently, it’s been joined by the related notion of “place-making”, the concept of creating public spaces that improve health, wellbeing and quality of life, which formed a centrepiece of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s recent Culture White Paper.
Being City of Culture immediately starts getting businesses looking at you in a different light. It shows them they’re relocating to a city that’s quite exciting"
But it’s not all about getting a starchitect in to create an iconic new building (although the V&A Museum of Design Dundee, designed by Kengo Kuma, is certainly hoping to be a torch-bearer for that idea when it opens in 2018); for some councils, it’s about recognising the value of their existing offer and investing to make even more of it.
That’s where initiatives such as the UK City of Culture come in. Introduced to build on the success of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, the scheme seems to be targeting areas with a rich cultural heritage that have, for one reason or another, developed a bit of an image problem. Playing host to the festival in 2013 enabled Derry-Londonderry to show the public that there was much more to the city than its recent troubled history, and the impact of the event is still being felt there.
Meanwhile, there was a palpable sense of bafflement among the London-based media when Hull’s winning bid was announced four years ago: back then, if they thought about the city at all, it was as yet another deprived, post-industrial town up north with not much to do or see.
Hull is relishing the opportunity to prove them wrong. Although the deprivation is real enough, following the collapse of industry, particularly fishing, in the area, the city has been graced with a world-class gallery, grand 19th-century architecture and a beautiful waterfront – not to mention being the birthplace of the slave-trade abolitionist William Wilberforce. “People would come in with a negative view and leave with a positive one,” says Green.
Five years ago, something happened to make the council sit up and take notice of the power Hull’s cultural offer could have to transform the city and its image: the Ferens Art Gallery staged an exhibition of David Hockney’s largest ever work – the 40-foot wide, 50-canvas painting Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), attracting crowds that queued around the block.
“Politicians were wandering around a bit surprised by the scale of interest,” Green says. “It was one of those moments where you start to see people looking at what you do a little differently.”
Inspired, the council decided to bid for the City of Culture title and, although it missed out the first time round, the process showed the benefits of taking a “top level, strategic approach” to cultural regeneration across various council departments.
“People saw the process of aligning and trying to pitch as a good thing,” Green says. “There was a clear steer from politicians that we should have another go. You have to be committed – this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight.”
It was second time lucky for the council, which has since pledged to invest £80m in culture and infrastructure in preparation for the festival. And although the programme receives no central government funding, the council has also beaten its funding target and raised £32m for festival activities from private sponsors, including many in the local business community.
Winning the bid has had a snowball effect, bringing even more opportunities to build on the area’s cultural and artistic offer.
“Being City of Culture opens doors to some very esteemed company,” Green says. “We worked with the Royal Collection to display the Leonardo da Vinci drawings here, and now have a five-year arrangement with them. All of a sudden you’re thrust into this position where there’s a partnership like that on the table – that’s the lever it brings. It’s quite phenomenal.”
All of these elements have already transformed perceptions of Hull. “It immediately starts getting businesses looking at you in a different light,” says Green. “It shows them they’re relocating to a city that’s quite exciting. It makes Hull a destination that people want to visit and live in.”
The knock-on economic impact of this is huge: the technology giant Siemens recently announced plans to build a £160m facility near the city to manufacture rotor blades for wind turbines, a project that will bring 1,000 new jobs to the area. A number of major retailers have also expressed an interest in moving there, according to Green.
More than that, the re-emergence of Hull has had a big impact on the city’s residents.
“Local people want it to be a success,” Green says. “There’s a sense of aspiration and pride. You can’t really put a price on that feel-good factor.”
One city hoping to emulate that feeling is Paisley, just west of Glasgow, which is home to one of the most economically deprived wards in Scotland. There, the council has made a £56.7m redevelopment of its museum and collections the flagship of a wider project to regenerate the town (which includes a bid to become the UK’s next City of Culture in 2021).
The council sees the town’s rich textile-making heritage, which is preserved in Paisley Museum, as the key to transforming its image and changing lives in a community where some families have been out of work for several generations.
“It’s a lot about people’s states of mind,” says Stephen Greenberg, the director of the museum consultancy Metaphor, which is masterplanning the redevelopment. “When they look at the fabrics in the museum: someone’s nan made it. This was really skilled work. When you know your nan did it you find a new sense of self respect. The way to reskill is finding confidence in knowing where you came from.”
Using the collections in this way – through co-curation projects, and related training programmes – is part of a wider anti-poverty agenda at the council. As well as giving people back a sense of pride and ownership over the museum – which was originally paid for by the city’s working people’s societies – maker spaces have been created in the museum where people can come to develop skills, such as digital animation.
The council also sees culture as a means of bringing footfall and investment back to the town centre, with plans to open a publicly accessible museum store on Paisley’s high street.
“I think it’s the only place in the UK that will have a museum store right on the high street,” says Morag MacPherson, the head of cultural services at Renfrewshire Culture and Leisure Trust, which is overseeing the redevelopment. “We want to bring people back to the heart of the city.”
Enhancing access to its design collections is intended to act as a draw for national and international tourists. The city is down the road from Glasgow International Airport; transport infrastructure is also being improved to enable people to travel there more easily from Glasgow across the river Clyde.
Despite losing out on a £15m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) bid last year, the council has no intention of scaling back its ambition or investment – plans to put in another bid are already in motion. It’s a refreshing approach when so many other councils see culture as a soft target for budget cuts. “Having museum collections at the heart of our economic strategy is quite unusual and exciting,” MacPherson says.
But it’s not just in urban centres that culture-led regeneration is a council priority. Further north of Paisley, the Scottish landscape transforms from lakes and highlands to the rugged cliffs of the Hebrides, before finally coming to an end at the country’s most westerly point, the remote archipelago of St Kilda.
The tiny group of islands, now uninhabited, is often difficult to get to because of the weather, but it’s one of just a few places in the world to hold dual – cultural and natural – Unesco World Heritage status thanks to a human history going back thousands of years, its archaeological features and its colonies of rare birds.
With remote working now more of a possibility, boosting the cultural offer could draw people to move back to the Outer Hebrides – if the islands’ broadband improves"
Now a project is underway to bring the archipelago’s unique heritage to a wider audience through a new visitor centre, Ionad Hiort (the St Kilda Centre), which will be built 40 miles away on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. It is hoped that the centre – supported by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (the council of the Western Isles) – will have a significant impact on Lewis and Harris, where the population has fallen steadily since the early 20th century.
“Lewis is full of people who are retired, so finding ways to regenerate the community and get more kids into primary school is a challenge,” says Metaphor’s Stephen Greenberg, who is contributing to the centre’s development.
The council hopes to open the centre in 2020 and has commissioned two architects, the Norwegian firm Reiulf Ramstad and local practice Dualchas, to collaborate on an ambitious proposal for the building’s design. It will be located on a cliff-top site in Uig, and will feature state-of-the-art interpretation, including virtual reality headsets allowing visitors to tour St Kilda’s archaeological ruins and underwater marine environment. The project is explicitly intended to kickstart a wider transformation of the area; it will offer maker spaces, outreach for schools, community events and a shop selling high-quality local produce. There are plans for seasonal festivals and a restaurant that will showcase local delicacies, such as lobsters and langoustines.
The area’s remote location is one of its major selling points, Greenberg says. “We can market it as the ‘restaurant at the edge of the world’, the ‘music festival at the edge of the world’.”
The island is just at the start of the process of regeneration; the centre’s success could lead to more investment in infrastructure such as the ferry service – which is infrequent and sometimes leaves visitors marooned on the island overnight – as well as better B&B provision. With remote working now more of a possibility, thanks to the internet, boosting the cultural offer could also draw people to move back to the Outer Hebrides, Greenberg says – as long as the islands’ broadband connection improves.
“All of these things start to build a critical mass over time,” he says. Regeneration isn’t instantaneous – but some councils are clearly in it for the long game.
Social return on investment at Turner Contemporary
Having recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, Turner Contemporary is a touchstone for successful culture-led regeneration projects. The art gallery has transformed the fortunes of the faded seaside town of Margate – since it opened, the town has welcomed more than two million additional visitors and seen 72 new businesses established.Now the gallery is engaged in a unique research project to measure what it describes as the “social return on investment” in culture. The research will measure the outcomes of Art Inspiring Change, a child-led learning programme that engaged 80 children from local primary schools to regenerate their own town through art and culture.
The full report was not due to be released until after Museums Journal went to press, but the gallery’s head of learning and visitor experience, Karen Eslea, says that so far the research has shown that “visitors and participants gain a feeling of connectedness to family and friends, receptiveness to new experiences, empowerment, increased self-belief, and a will to be more active members of the community, among other things”.
The Art Inspiring Change programme, in which children work with artists and community volunteers to transform neglected spaces and develop their leadership and communication skills, will conclude with the opening of four transformed sites in the town in July 2017.
Derry-Londonderry's legacy in numbers
• The UK City of Culture festival brought a 55% increase in overnight visitors and a 75% increase in visitor spend.• Accommodation space increased 13% ahead of 2013 and two new boutique hotels have opened since then.
• 84% of schoolchildren were prouder to be from the city as a result of the festival.
• In 2013, Derry-Londonderry came fourth in Lonely Planet’s list of top 10 cities to visit worldwide.
• More than 600 new jobs were created in the city in 2015, with evidence suggesting they came as a direct result of the festival’s positive impact.
• A hub to provide incubation space for creative industries opened last year and is currently occupied by 16 businesses.
• The city has acquired several new venue spaces, including an outdoor concert venue that can hold up to 35,000 people.
• Ongoing regeneration investment, such as the £10m restoration of the city’s Guildhall, has opened up spaces previously seen as run down or dangerous.
• A number of new cultural projects are in the works, including an £11m maritime visitor and genealogy attraction.