Histories Of Cultural Participation, Values And Governance 1137550260, 9781137550262, 9781137550279

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 12
1.1 Introduction: Reading the Present Through the Past......Page 14
1.1.1 Political Discourses of Participation and Value......Page 17
1.1.2 Culture and Governance......Page 20
1.2 Conclusion......Page 22
Bibliography......Page 24
Part I Political Discourses of Participation and Value......Page 27
Chapter 2 Valuing Cultural Participation: The Usefulness of the Eighteenth-Century Stage......Page 28
2.1 Values and Usefulness: Languages of Experience......Page 31
2.2 Legitimate Cultures and Licence......Page 38
2.3 Riotous Cultural Participation......Page 43
2.4 Conclusion......Page 47
Bibliography......Page 48
3.1 Everyday Participation in Peterborough......Page 53
3.2 Foundation of the Peterborough Society......Page 56
3.3 Culture, Value, Practice: Larger Nineteenth-Century Debates......Page 64
3.4 Gentlemen’s Societies in the East Midlands......Page 68
3.5 The Place of History in Policy: Some Conclusions......Page 73
Bibliography......Page 74
4.1 Introduction......Page 77
4.2 Looking Backwards in Order to Look Forward......Page 79
4.2.1 Cultural Value, Cultural Authority and the Formation of Cultural Institutions......Page 80
4.3 CEMA, the Adult Education Movement and the Value of Participation......Page 81
4.4 CEMA and the Birth of a National Public Infrastructure for the Arts......Page 86
4.4.1 CEMA: The Early Days......Page 89
4.5 The Retreat from Everyday Creativity: CEMA Under Keynes......Page 91
4.6 Cultural Authority: Its Exercise and Forms of Resistance......Page 94
4.7 Conclusion: The Post-war Cultural Value and Participation Debates—The Legacy......Page 98
References......Page 102
5.1 Introduction......Page 107
5.2 Cultural Policy Studies, Community Arts and Cultural Participation......Page 110
5.3 Return to ‘Community’: Articulating a Dynamic Definition......Page 113
5.4 Creating a Community Theatre Practice on Dartmoor......Page 115
5.5 Dartmoor: Dwelling Place or ‘A Sort of National Property’?......Page 121
5.6 Spatial Dimensions of ‘Power’ and ‘Community’ in Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy......Page 124
5.7 Conclusion......Page 130
Bibliography......Page 132
Part II Culture and Governance......Page 137
6.1 Introduction......Page 138
6.2 How Parks Came to Be in Manchester and Salford......Page 139
6.3 Rural, Natural and Romantic......Page 141
6.4 Managing Park Users......Page 144
6.5 Cultural Strategies, Music and Taste-Making......Page 147
6.6 Institutions for Learning and Self-Organisation......Page 153
6.7 Parks and Policy: Then and Now......Page 155
Bibliography......Page 157
7.1 Introduction: Location and Place as an Object of Cultural Governance......Page 162
7.2 National Cultural Policy and Place, 1990s–2008......Page 166
7.3 Gateshead Cultural Policy and Practice......Page 171
7.3.2 Geography of Gateshead and Associational Identity......Page 174
7.3.3 Gateshead Community Arts Practice......Page 177
7.3.4 Public Art, the Gateshead Garden Festival and the Year of the Visual Arts......Page 180
7.3.5 Gateshead Quays Cultural Development......Page 183
7.4 Conclusion......Page 185
Bibliography......Page 187
8.1 Introduction......Page 192
8.2 More Than Measurement: Exploring the Social and Political Life of Taking Part......Page 195
8.2.1 Relationships with and Attitudes to Indicators......Page 197
8.2.2 Processes and Politics of Defining Participation......Page 205
8.2.3 Use, Impact and Limitations of Taking Part......Page 208
8.3 Discussion and Conclusions......Page 213
Bibliography......Page 217
9.1 Local and Regional—Peoples’ Theatre......Page 220
9.2 National—Taking Part......Page 222
9.3 International: The Swallows Partnership......Page 223
9.4 ….and an Afterthought......Page 226
Index......Page 227

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL POLICY RESEARCH

Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance Edited by Eleonora Belfiore Lisanne Gibson

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research Series Editor Eleonora Belfiore Department of Social Sciences Loughborough University Loughborough, UK

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research encourages theoretical and empirical contributions which enrich and develop the field of cultural policy studies. Since its emergence in the 1990s in Australia and the United Kingdom and its eventual diffusion in Europe, the academic field of cultural policy studies has expanded globally as the arts and popular culture have been re-positioned by city, regional, and national governments, and international bodies, from the margins to the centre of social and economic development in both rhetoric and practice. The series invites contributions in all of the following: arts policies, the politics of culture, cultural industries policies (the ‘traditional’ arts such as performing and visual arts, crafts), creative industries policies (digital, social media, broadcasting and film, and advertising), urban regeneration and urban cultural policies, regional cultural policies, the politics of cultural and creative labour, the production and consumption of popular culture, arts education policies, cultural heritage and tourism policies, and the history and politics of media and communications policies. The series will reflect current and emerging concerns of the field such as, for example, cultural value, community cultural development, cultural diversity, cultural sustainability, lifestyle culture and eco-culture, planning for the intercultural city, cultural planning, and cultural citizenship. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14748

Eleonora Belfiore · Lisanne Gibson Editors

Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance

Editors Eleonora Belfiore Loughborough University Loughborough, UK

Lisanne Gibson University of Leicester Leicester, UK

New Directions in Cultural Policy Research ISBN 978-1-137-55026-2 ISBN 978-1-137-55027-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Queen Vic Installation. Bristol. 2012. Ali Brown. Artist: Ali Brown in collaboration with Knitiffi Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Contents

1 Reading the Present Through the Past: A Critical Introduction 1 Eleonora Belfiore and Lisanne Gibson Part I  Political Discourses of Participation and Value 2 Valuing Cultural Participation: The Usefulness of the Eighteenth-Century Stage 17 Jane Milling 3 Cultural Participation and the Place of History: A Case Study of Peterborough Societies, Past and Present 43 Felicity James 4 From CEMA to the Arts Council: Cultural Authority, Participation and the Question of ‘Value’ in Early Post-war Britain 67 Eleonora Belfiore

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5 Enacting Community on Dartmoor: MED Theatre’s Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy (2015) and the Spatial Praxis of Community Performance Within a Conservation Zone 97 Kerrie Schaefer Part II  Culture and Governance 6 Histories of Public Parks in Manchester and Salford and Their Role in Cultural Policies for Everyday Participation 129 Abigail Gilmore and Patrick Doyle 7 Cultural Ecologies: Policy, Participation and Practices 153 Lisanne Gibson 8 Calling Participation to Account: Taking Part in the Politics of Method 183 Catherine Bunting, Abigail Gilmore and Andrew Miles 9 An Afterword 211 Peter Stark Index 219

Notes

on

Contributors

Eleonora Belfiore is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. She has published extensively on cultural politics and policy and particularly the place that notions of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts have had in British cultural policy discourses. For Palgrave, she has published, with Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-­edited with Anna Upchurch a volume entitled Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (2013). More recently, her research has focused on researching the politics of cultural value: She was Director of Studies of the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value (2013–2015) and co-author of its final report, Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth, published in February 2015. Eleonora is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Connected Communities project ‘Understanding Everyday Participation—Articulating Cultural Values’. For Palgrave, she edits the book series New Directions in Cultural Policy Research. Eleonora current research focuses on cultural democracy and contested cultural authority within contemporary policy discourse. Catherine Bunting is an independent consultant working in the arts and cultural sector; she was Director of Research at Arts Council England from 2005 to 2013. Catherine carries out research on cultural participation and value, with a focus on the practical application of

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data by organisations and policy-makers. Catherine has supported clients including Arts Marketing Association, Creative Scotland, English Heritage and Tate to understand their audiences and to assess the impact of their work. She carries out research on behalf of governments and institutions to inform the development of policy at local, national and international levels. Dr. Patrick Doyle is Hallsworth Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on the history of economic development and religion in Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also published widely on the history of co-operative movements in the same period. His first monograph, Civilising Rural Ireland: The Co-operative Movement, Development and the Nation-State, 1889–1939, was published by Manchester University Press in early 2019. Lisanne Gibson is Professor of Culture and Society in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research advances understanding of the societal effects of historic and contemporary cultural investment especially in relation to urban development; cultural policy and value; and cultural heritage. She has published 2 monographs, numerous articles and reports and edited 2 books and 5 special journal issues on cultural policy and politics. She is a member of the editorial committee of the International Journal of Cultural Policy. She is currently working with Andrew Miles (Manchester University) on a mono­ graph Understanding Everyday Participation—Culture, Place and Inequality (Palgrave, 2021) from the project ‘Understanding Everyday Participation—Articulating Cultural Value’ (AHRC, 2012–2018). She also co-edits with Miles the book series Palgrave Studies in Cultural Participation. Dr. Abigail Gilmore is Senior Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy and Head of the Institute for Cultural Practices, University of Manchester. Her research concerns local cultural policies, cultural institutions and their impact on place. She has a background in research management, impact assessment and evaluation commissioning and a Ph.D. in Popular Culture and Society which looked at the role of local music industries and communities in urban cultural development. From 2012 to 2018, she was Co-Investigator on AHRC Connected Communities ‘Understanding Everyday Participation—Articulating

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Cultural Values’, leading on the Manchester case study. Currently, she is Co-Investigator in the Policy Unit of the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (www.pec.ac.uk). Felicity James is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leicester, with a special interest in sociable circles of religious Dissent, and the work produced within them such as women’s writing and life-writing. Her publications include Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and a co-edited collection of essays, Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, c.1740s to c.1860s (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Andrew Miles  is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he works on issues of culture, stratification and mobility. From 2012 to 2018, he led the Understanding Everyday Participation (UEP) project, a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded study of everyday participation and cultural value (www.everydayparticipation. org, Miles and Gibson 2016). He is currently writing about the ways in which cultural capital and notions of cultural legitimacy are mobilised in everyday life to make up communities, reinforce social class boundaries and territorialise spaces and places. This writing includes a ­co-authored book on the UEP project for Palgrave Macmillan. His other main research interest is on social mobility, a subject he first studied as an historian in the 1980s and 1990s (Miles 1999). This interest was rekindled by his membership of the Great British Class Survey project, based on a collaboration between LSE and University of Manchester researchers, which recently produced a new account of social class in Britain (Savage et al. 2015). Jane Milling is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, UK. She has co-authored The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (2017), Devising Performance (2005/2015), Modern British Playwrighting: The 1980s (2012) and number of articles on grass-roots arts participation. She co-edited The Cambridge History of British Theatre: Volume 1 (2004), Extraordinary Actors (2004) and a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on Theatre, Performance and the Amateur Turn (2017). Dr. Kerrie Schaefer  completed a B.A. Hons. and Ph.D. in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. As a Associate Professor in Drama at the University of Newcastle, NSW, she was a member

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of the Performance, Community Development and Social Change ­practice-based research group, led by David Watt, and one of the founding members of the Arts and Health/Wellbeing Research Centre. She relocated to Exeter in 2007 to lead an M.A. in Applied Drama. She is finalising a monograph on theories and practices of Community Performance, supported by an AHRC Fellowship, BA/Leverhulme small grant and Singapore National Arts Council Research Development grant. In 2016, she collaborated with acta Community Theatre, based in Bedminster Bristol, to produce a National Festival of Community Theatre, supported by AHRC and ACE funding. She is also co-writing a book, with Jane Milling, on rurality and participation, stemming from UEP project research. Peter Stark’s work in cultural policy and projects has ranged from his founding directorships of South Hill Park Arts Centre and Voluntary Arts to the major capital projects—Baltic, Sage Gateshead and Millennium Bridge—that anchored the culture-led transformation of his native Tyneside. He was awarded the OBE in 1990 and a professorship in Cultural Policy and Management at Northumbria University in 2000. After 12 years working in South Africa, he co-authored the GPS Culture reports on Arts finding before securing £5m to renovate the Mining Institute in Newcastle. Inspired by that, he now works in climate change.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

‘Good Neighbours’ (Annie Gertrude Blunt and Jim Shahid Shah, outside 134 Gladstone St., Peterborough, 1980) by Chris Porsz 44 ‘Mum and daughters’ (Peterborough, early 1980s) by Chris Porsz 45 The Weir family in Peel Park, photographer unknown, reproduced with permission, reference PFOO197 © Salford Local History Archives 137 LS Lowry, Bandstand, Peel Park, Salford 1925 © The Lowry Collection, Salford. Reproduced with permission from The Lowry Collection 143 The Baltic, Sage and Millennium Bridge on Gateshead Quayside (Photograph: Wilka Hudson. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license [https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nd/2.0/]) 164 English local authority areas and participation in adult education, 2011/12 167 Antony Gormley, Angel of the North, completed 1998 (Photograph: S. Arrowsmith. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nd/2.0/]) 171

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Fig. 9.1

Image from Eneas Mackenzie’s historical account of Newcastle published in 1827 (Eneas Mackenzie’s ‘Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastleupon-Tyne’ was published in 1827 by Mackenzie and Dent, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A copy of the work is available in the Local Studies Collection at Newcastle Central Library, from whose copy this image has been extracted) 216

CHAPTER 1

Reading the Present Through the Past: A Critical Introduction Eleonora Belfiore and Lisanne Gibson

1.1  Introduction: Reading the Present Through the Past This introduction contextualises the key themes explored in this edited collection—participation, values and governance—against the backdrop of current academic debates on cultural policy. We flesh out the broader methodological and theoretical standpoints from which the collection originates, expounding the contribution that a historical perspective can offer to understanding contemporary debates on politics and policy. This collection of essays originates from a ‘package’ of work on ‘Histories’

E. Belfiore (*)  Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Gibson  School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_1

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in a large funded project on ‘Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values’ (UEP).1 As part of the broader objectives of the UEP project, this collection of essays proposes a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between participation and cultural value. The essays collected in this volume represent the project team’s contribution to the development of an in-depth historical understanding of the development of definitions, assumptions and beliefs around the nature and value of cultural participation, its place in contemporary cultural governance and exploitation in local socio-economic development strategies. In this respect, this collection brings a novel critical perspective to current policy, practice and scholarly debates on the connections between culture, place-making and the creative economy. With respect to its geographical scope, the essays in the collection all focus on England and different localities within the country, and to the UK cultural policy context. The reason for this specific focus lies in the fact that the historical explorations presented in this volume are connected and complementary to empirical data gathering and ethnographic fieldwork conducted as part of the UEP project. This was focused on the comparative exploration of four different English ‘cultural ecosystems’2 selected for their differing patterns of funding and participation levels (Manchester/Salford, Gateshead, Peterborough and Dartmoor).3 Whilst the specificity of place is central to the analysis offered, we suggest a wider relevance and applicability of the broader point the collection makes about the importance, for cultural policy analysis, of recognising the centrality of the interrelations between place, space, culture, local practices and policy-making. We hope the volume might inspire others to extend to and test our arguments in other geo-cultural settings. 1 This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through Connected Communities Large Project funding for ‘Understanding Everyday Participation: Articulating Cultural Values’, 2012–2018, AH/J005401/1. 2 In the context of the wider project, we define cultural ecosystems as ‘a historically wrought, physically situated assembly of formal and informal cultural resources, participation contexts, practices and communities, which reflect the interplay of local structures of investment, supply and demand, and as such constitute distinct economies of participation’ (Miles and Gibson 2016, 153). 3 The UEP project also included a work package focusing on cultural participation in two Scottish ecosystems, Aberdeenshire and the Western Islands, which was supported by additional financial support by Creative Scotland. This strand of work is not discussed in detail here, but Miles and Ebrey (2017) is a good introduction to this part of the project.

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Orthodox models of the creative economy and ensuing cultural policy models are based on a narrow definition of cultural participation: one that captures formal engagement with traditional cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, but overlooks other activities, for instance community festivals and hobbies (Miles and Gibson 2016). This frame, founded historically on ‘deficit’-based assumptions of the logics for state cultural support (Miles and Sullivan 2012), misses opportunities to understand a wider and more representative variety of forms of participation and their (positive and negative) consequences. The essays in this collection are part of the project’s wider exploration of the meanings and the stakes that attach to ordinary, everyday participation (Miles and Gibson 2016, 2017). Beyond the confines of this project, though, this collection fulfils an important need for researchers and practitioners in the fields of cultural policy, arts management, heritage, museum, theatre and leisure studies in providing much-needed historical insight that sheds light on contemporary issues of cultural value and governance which are of great topicality. A number of high-profile research initiatives in this area have been a feature of research in the arts and humanities in England especially since 2014, notably the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016), the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value (Neelands et al. 2015) and Arts Council England’s (ACE) dedicated work on cultural value and its measurement resulting, for instance, in reports such as ‘The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society’ (2014) and ‘Understanding the Value and Impact of Cultural Experiences’ (2014). However, none of these initiatives adopt the distinctive approach of this collection, which is to illuminate contemporary policy issues through the investigation of their historical roots. The originality and value of this critical-historical approach is the disciplinary and intellectual significance of the chapters in this book. At the core of this edited collection is the conviction that by creating new understandings of the relationships between everyday participation and cultural value, it becomes possible to reveal evidence of hidden assets and resources that can be mobilised to promote better identification and more equitable resourcing of cultural opportunities, generate well-being and contribute to the development of creative local economies. Approaching participation as an historically and spatially situated phenomenon, and articulating the effects of heritage, context and place by historicising and deconstructing present-day understandings of

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participation and cultural value is central to this endeavour and has the potential to open up new avenues of research in this area. This edited collection, thus, represents both an original contribution to scholarship and an intervention in more practice-oriented debates on creative approaches to community engagement, place-based development and regeneration strategies as well as policy formation. Whilst it speaks to live debates in a number of germane fields of enquiry, the key intellectual location of the volume and its main scholarly contribution is within the field of cultural policy studies. Indeed, Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance is the first integrated, critical-historical examination of the terms, narratives and assumptions constructing present-day notions of participation and value, and the relations between them, from the perspective of cultural policy-making. The book is organised via two interrelated thematic histories, which correspond to the two sections into which the book is divided. Part I’s chapters focus on the ways in which discourses of cultural participation and value have been developed and mobilised historically and, in turn, the effects of these discursive coordinates on the development of cultural institutions and practices. The point of departure for chapters in Part II is the ways in which cultural policies have been tools to manage populations in various different ways. In all cases, chapters interrogate the ways in which the ‘problem of cultural policy’, the ‘politics of cultural value’, and the ‘problem of participation’ are the product of longrun histories. Often these backstories are not acknowledged in debates about cultural policy, which therefore can become circular and self-referential. As demonstrated by the historical research presented in each of these chapters, providing the long view allows a fresh perspective on these ongoing discussions which enables us to square the circle, providing new and original positions on the utility and effects of cultural participation, policy and practice and new articulations and understanding of long-debated policy ‘challenges’. 1.1.1   Political Discourses of Participation and Value The chapters in Part I trace the long-run intellectual history of cultural participation, examining its links with ideas of civic engagement, community well-being and prosperity. They explore how the attachment of certain types of participation to particular forms of value became embedded in and reproduced by institutions and policy. This theme also

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encompasses the examination of shifting treatments and representations of the ‘everyday’, exploring the role of commonplace practices and associational life in defining cultures, communities and relations of power and value, conceptions of time use and demarcations between work and leisure, and the commercialisation and privatisation of culture. The significance of the historical investigation of these ideas around participation and healthy communities and polities lies in the importance they retain in what Raymond Williams (1990 [1958], xiii) famously called ‘our modern structure of meanings’. It is precisely this connection, and the way it has driven the institutionalisation of cultural values and authority in policy-making and arts funding bodies and their practices in the twentieth century that forms the object of enquiry of this section of the book. In the words of Bronowski and Mazlich (1960, xii), ‘[i]deas are not dead thoughts, even when they are not contemporary; for they remain steps in the evolution of contemporary ideas’. The first part of this edited volume collectively offers a historical excursus of ideas around cultural participation and its interconnections to local and civic values, and community development. The exploration of these ideas’ legacy is woven through the book via a number of examples and case studies which begin with the eighteenth-century English theatrical experience and move through a number of case studies that stretch to the present day. Collectively, their scholarly contribution is to expose and explore the origin of the normative conceptions of desirable cultural participation which are at the heart of the administrative machinery for the promotion of culture and the public’s access to it, and the driving ideals behind much of contemporary audience development and ‘engagement’ work within publicly funded cultural institutions. The historical excursus begins with an exploration of eighteenth-century English theatrical experience and its regulation in Chapter 2. Here, Jane Milling’s chapter examines eighteenth-century modes of cultural participation through three examples: John Dennis’s The Usefulness of the Stage (1698), the aftermaths of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, and the Chinese Festival theatre riots of 1755. Through these illustrations, the chapter exposes the complexity of the theatrical experience and the multiple stakes of cultural participation in a particular historical moment and geographical location, and it posits that the insights thus offered represent a useful problematisation of the overly simplistic rhetoric of contemporary cultural policy on cultural participation (Milling 2019).

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Chapter 3 takes us forward into the nineteenth century via Felicity James’ account of the history of Peterborough Museum, founded in 1871 as the Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club as it emerged from a close scrutiny of the minute books of the Society. The minute books offer a precious insight into the ways in which values and beliefs about the social functions of participation in culture were developed and articulated, against the backdrop of wider contemporary events in national culture, represented, for example, by the diffusion of Matthew Arnold’s writing—whose enduring influence on British cultural politics and policy is widely recognised (Belfiore and Bennett 2008; Bennett 2005). By adopting an explicit focus on the local and the provincial, James’ chapter enriches our understanding of the nineteenth-century roots of contemporary attitudes to the arts and culture and their cultivation, by exposing the ways in which these have been influenced by already existing forms of sociability and cultural practices that date back to the previous century (James 2019). The last two chapters bring us progressively closer to the present day: in Chapter 4, Eleonora Belfiore focuses her analysis on the momentous period that saw the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain from the ashes of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) following the end of the Second World War. In particular, the chapter throws light on the vigorous debates that were already taking place around that time among British cultural leaders, politicians and educators on the vision that should guide the peacetime body for the financial support and development of the arts and culture in the country. The chapter, thus, contributes to the development of a critical-historical examination of the political discourses that have developed around notions of ‘access’, ‘participation’ and ‘engagement’ within post-war England. At the centre of Belfiore’s analysis is the way in which these notions, and the perceived resulting personal and social benefits, have been articulated and embodied in cultural policies, and the repercussions of a persisting tension between the two key declared aims of British arts policy: access and excellence (Belfiore 2019). Part I concludes with Kerrie Schaefer’s contribution in Chapter 5, a case study of the emergence and development of MED Theatre, a community-based theatre organisation in Dartmoor, a rural area in the South West of England. The chapter charts and discusses the way in which MED Theatre’s work represents a reaction to post-war practices of conservation management of the National Park located in the area, which

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tended to understand the landscape of Dartmoor primarily as a natural environment. In reaction to this view, the chapter looks at how through community-based theatre, an alternative, and more nuanced understanding of Dartmoor as both a cultural and an ecological landscape was able to emerge. This was possible through a process that ensures that control over the devising of the performance remains at all times with local Dartmoor people themselves, rather than external, professional elites. This case study leads Schaefer to consider how a recovery of the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘cultural democracy’ might revitalise long-standing British cultural policy debates and thus strengthen political, economic and cultural democracy in the UK (Schaefer 2019). 1.1.2   Culture and Governance The chapters in this section examine the historical articulation of cultural value and participation through the structures of government. Here, the interest focuses on the ways in which state cultural policies and programmes are developed and applied. The chapters in this section are thus interested in the intention of particular cultural policies, and crucially, these chapters are also focused on the actual effects of cultural policies. In both of these respects, the longer view provided by applying an historical lens allows an understanding of the ways in which the intended and unintended effects of cultural policies apply beyond the realm of culture and into the realms of the civic and the social. The nineteenth century is a key moment for the ‘multiplication of culture’s utility’ (Bennett 1995) where the rise of the Chartist movement, the extension of the suffrage and the need to ‘civilise’ the urban poor led to the development of cultural institutions, especially libraries and museums, in order to provide ‘rational recreation’. The development of public parks too was part of this utilisation of culture and (certain types of) recreation by governments as a strategy for regulating populations through the provision of healthy and ‘rational’ recreation. In Chapter 6, Abigail Gilmore and Patrick Doyle consider the history of public parks and their management in Manchester and Salford from the 1830s to the mid-twentieth century. They analyse how the design and administration of these spaces contributed to strategies for the regulation and improvement of urban populations. In addition, they show how the development of such spaces also provided a venue for a wide variety of forms of everyday participation. Thus, they conclude that ‘parks offer opportunities for

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the articulation and negotiation of cultural tastes and values across different socio-economic classes, alongside popular forms of participation in arts, culture and leisure’ (Gilmore and Doyle 2019). The 1980s and 1990s were another distinctive period for the use of culture to effect particular governmental outcomes. The UK and also internationally, governments were using culture as a tool to effect ‘development’ articulated in cultural, economic and social terms. Thus, UNESCO as part of its activities for the World Decade for Cultural Development (1988–1997) identified cultural development as a key objective of international policy. The Commission argued that an exclusive focus on economic development had led to a range of social, cultural and economic problems around the world and had ‘given rise to cultural tensions in many societies’ (1996, 7). To address these pressing international policy issues, the Commission argued that ‘there was a need to transcend economics, without abandoning it’ (ibid.). In this context, the idea of cultural development was introduced as a way of balancing cultural and economic policy objectives. The economist David Throsby (1995; 1997, 33) has argued that policy determination based solely on fiscal objectives is misled. This is especially evident in the area of cultural policy that should, he suggests, encompass, simultaneously, community demands for non-material well-being, intergenerational equity (i.e. the distribution and preservation of resources for future generations) and the interdependence of economic and cultural variables. According to Throsby, these are the conditions for a ‘culturally sustainable development’ (1995; 1997, 33). In response to arguments like Throsby’s, the focus of the cultural development agenda of governments increasingly grafted notions of ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ to the relations between communities and culture. As part of the cultural development agenda, culture has been used in the context of place-making and urban regeneration projects around the world. ‘Culture-led regeneration’ developments are frequently cited and have become almost shorthand for evidence of successful economic development through cultural investment (Gibson 2013). However, analyses of large-scale cultural investment in such regeneration developments very rarely take account of the interaction between local cultural structures and national cultural programmes. In Chapter 7, Lisanne Gibson argues for an analysis of the impact of cultural policy via a lens which understands locations as cultural ecosystems. She characterises these ecosystems as grounded in the ways in which historically

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specific forms of cultural participation and practice interact with local and national cultural policies and programmes. In explicating the influence of local forms of cultural practice and participation, she makes an argument for a cultural policy grounded within the vernacular cultural practices of place as best able to facilitate cultural participation and practice in a way that develops and supports cultural and social ecosystems (Gibson 2019). Tools for the assessment of the effects of policy are most usually also tools for the construction and assessment of populations (Hacking 1982). The Taking Part Survey is the UK government’s flagship research instrument for cultural policy appraisal. In Chapter 8, Catherine Bunting, Abigail Gilmore and Andrew Miles examine the historical emergence and significance of Taking Part, using the accounts of civil servants, researchers and policy makers involved in its development to unpack and expose the underlying narrative of the survey itself. Drawing on approaches from cultural sociology, cultural policy studies and science and technology studies, they counter the official presentation of Taking Part as a neutral technocratic tool for evidence generation. In its place, they reveal the complex social and political life of the participation survey as an expression of a particular set of organisational histories and cultures, arguing that this form of evaluation measure has been complicit in a process that has worked to restrict democratic accountability and to reinforce narrow understandings of participation in cultural policy (Bunting et al. 2019).

1.2   Conclusion One of the guiding principles at the core of the UEP project’s intellectual and methodological approach was the interconnection of academic research with different forms of expertise and practice-based knowledge to be found within the policy and practice communities. Insights from our numerous project partners and stakeholders were sought from the outset to help the research team develop the topic guide used for interviews across ecosystems. Stakeholders’ expertise in illuminating, informing and complementing academic perspectives was central to the team’s ambition that UEP’s research outputs should combine rigorous, quality research with genuinely relevant and helpful contribution to fresh thinking in both policy and practice.4 In the light of this 4 For more on UEP and the question of the research-policy-practice nexus, see Belfiore (2016); for examples of UEP scholarship that have led to fresh thinking on policy and practice, see Gibson and Edwards (2016), Gilmore (2017), Miles and Ebrey (2017).

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intellectual positioning of the project as a whole, we wanted to ensure that in this volume too, the practitioner perspective was present and recognised. The book, therefore, concludes with an Afterword by Peter Stark, a veteran of local arts administration and policy in the North East of England, whose distinguished track record in the field was acknowledged with the award of an OBE in 1990. Stark has played a pivotal role in the establishment of arts organisations big and small, including the capital project bids that led to the development of The Baltic, Sage Gateshead and the Millennium Bridge, in the heyday of culture-led regeneration in Newcastle/Gateshead. Having been a key protagonist of the recent history of UK place-based policies for cultural development (as shown in the account of policy development in Gateshead in Gibson’s chapter), Stark offers a distinctly personal reflection on the material in the book and its resonance with decades of professional experience locally, nationally and internationally. It seems fitting for the book to end with an impassionate affirmation of the importance that awareness of history—both more and less recent—has in making sense of today’s policy priorities and of the lived reality of those involved in making and implementing policy decisions. We conclude this introduction with some thoughts on the interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship gathered in this volume. Much in the same way that the UEP project was predicated on recognising the value and contribution of practice-based knowledge to the exploration of cultural participation and the stakes that are attached to it (and, thus, to the reconfiguration of accepted notions of cultural value), the project has also been driven by the belief that explorations of complex cultural, social and policy issues require an inter- and multidisciplinary approach. The authors of the essays in this collection weave both humanities and social sciences approaches and methods through their research, and one of the ostensibly more innovative features of the UEP project is precisely the ways in which it rejects the prevalent ‘knowledge regimes’ within cultural policy. In Campbell and Pedersen’s (2011, 167) definition, ‘[k]nowledge regimes are sets of actors, organizations, and institutions that produce and disseminate policy ideas that affect how policy-making and production regimes are organized and operate in the first place’. As Bunting, Gilmore and Miles argue in Chapter 8, in the policy sphere, prevalent knowledge regimes display a predilection for quantitative data and methods drawn from the empirical social sciences, at the expense of arts and humanities approaches, which are seen as having less to

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contribute to policy sensitive research (Belfiore and Bennett 2010). In line with the UEP project’s interdisciplinary methodological stance, and its rejection of a hierarchy of disciplines and methods in cultural policy studies, the book highlights the contribution that arts and humanities— and particularly historical research—make, in allowing us to understand the relationships between culture and power in cultural policy and programmes, and what is at stake in everyday forms of participation (both for individuals and communities). This edited collection represents a proud statement of arts and humanities’ contribution, alongside and on a par with social sciences methods (both quantitative and qualitative), to studies of participation and cultural values. As researchers who also teach on university programmes aimed at future arts and museum professionals, we have witnessed the significance of an education infused with arts and humanities perspectives and methods in giving future practitioners a historical and theoretical understanding of the issues faced by the sector. This knowledge allows them a critical perspective on how cultural institutions and funding mechanisms operate and on their own practice within them (Gibson 2008). At the present time, which sees arts and humanities scholarship and study under attack for being ‘useless’ and irrelevant (Belfiore 2013), we hope this collection of essays will offer a powerful rebuttal and a compelling demonstration of the benefits that a humanities and historical perspective brings to the examination of live policy problems.

Bibliography Arts Council England. (2014a). The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society: An Evidence Review. Arts Council England. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Value_arts_culture_evidence_ review.pdf. Accessed 5 July 2019. Arts Council England. (2014b). Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experiences. Arts Council England. https://www.artscouncil.org. uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Understanding_the_Value_and_ Impacts_of_Cultural_Experiences.pdf. Accessed 5 July 2019. Belfiore, E. (2013). The ‘Rhetoric of Gloom’ vs. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock? In E. Belfiore & A. Upchurch (Eds.), Humanities in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 17–43). London: Palgrave. Belfiore, E. (2016). Cultural Policy Research in the Real World: Curating “Impact”, Facilitating “Enlightenment”. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 205–216.

12  E. BELFIORE AND L. GIBSON Belfiore, E. (2019). From CEMA to the Arts Council: Cultural Authority, Participation and the Question of ‘Value’ in Early Post-war Britain. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2008). The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History. London: Palgrave. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2010). Beyond the “Toolkit Approach”: Arts Impact Evaluation Research and the Realities of Cultural Policy-Making. Journal for Cultural Research, 14(2), 121–142. Bennett, O. (2005). Beyond Machinery: The Cultural Policies of Matthew Arnold. History of Political Economy, 37(3), 455–482. Bennett, T. (1995). The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility. Critical Inquiry, 21(4), 861–889. Bronowski, J., & Mazlich, B. (1960). The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. London: Hutchinson. Bunting, C., Gilmore, A., & Miles, A. (2019). Calling Participation to Account: Taking Part in the Politics of Method. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Campbell, J. L., & Pedersen, O. K. (2011). Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy. In D. Béland & R. H. Cox (Eds.), Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (pp. 167–190). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2016). Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project, Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/publications/cultural-value-project-final-report/. Accessed 5 July 2019. Gibson, L. (2008). In Defence of Instrumentality. Cultural Trends, 17(4), 247–257. Gibson, L. (2013). Piazzas or Stadiums: Towards an Alternative Account of Museums in Cultural and Urban Development. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1(1), 101–112. Gibson, L. (2019). Cultural Ecologies: Policy, Participation and Practices. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Gibson, L., & Edwards, D. (2016). Facilitated Participation: Cultural Value, Risk and the Agency of Young People in Care. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 194–204. Gilmore, A. (2017). The Park and the Commons: Vernacular Spaces for Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 34–46. Gilmore, A., & Doyle, P. (2019). Histories of Public Parks in Manchester and Salford and Their Role in Cultural Policies for Everyday Participation. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave.

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Hacking, I. (1982). Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers. Humanities in Society, 5, 279–295. James, F. (2019). Cultural Participation and the Place of History: A Case Study of Peterborough Societies, Past and Present. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Miles, A., & Ebrey, J. (2017). The Village in the City: Participation and Cultural Value on the Urban Periphery. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 58–69. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2017). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value in Place. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.20 17.1275129. Miles, A., & Sullivan, A. (2012). Understanding Participation in Culture and Sport: Mixing Methods, Reordering Knowledges. Cultural Trends, 21(4), 311–324. Milling, J. (2019). Valuing Cultural Participation: The Usefulness of the Eighteenth-Century Stage. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Neelands, J., Belfiore, E., Firth, C., Hart, N., Perrin, L., Brock, S., et al. (2015). Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth: The 2015 Report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, University of Warwick. https://warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalreport/warwick_commission_final_report.pdf. Accessed 5 July 2019. Schaefer, K. (2019). Enacting Community on Dartmoor: MED Theatre’s Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy (2015) and the Spatial Praxis of Community Performance Within a Conservation Zone. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Stark, P. (2019). An Afterword. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Value and Governance. London: Palgrave. Throsby, D. (1995). Culture, Economics and Sustainability. Journal of Cultural Economics, 19(3), 199–203. Throsby, D. (1997). The Relationship Between Cultural and Economic Policy. Culture and Policy, 8(1), 25–36. UNESCO World Commission on Culture and Development. (1996). Our Creative Diversity. Paris: UNESCO. Williams, R. (1990 [1958]). Culture and Society. London: Chatto & Windus.

PART I

Political Discourses of Participation and Value

CHAPTER 2

Valuing Cultural Participation: The Usefulness of the Eighteenth-Century Stage Jane Milling

In contemporary cultural policy and cultural policy studies, the value to individuals and groups of participating in aesthetic and cultural practices has been cast predominantly as beneficial, producing positive impacts ranging from individual well-being to social integration. The UK Government’s Culture White Paper (2016) opens with a commitment to ‘increase participation in culture, especially among those who are currently excluded’ (8) and articulates a view of cultural participation as an active force in the public realm for ‘rejuvenating our society and our national and local economies’ (6).1 The contemporary debates on cultural participation are usually underpinned by a desire to justify ongoing public subsidy. While in itself public subsidy is a vital and important 1 Despite the reuse of language, the detail is quite distinct from the political aspiration of Jennie Lee’s first A Policy for the Arts (1965) or the aim for social inclusion through culture under the Labour administration 1997–2010 (Belfiore 2004; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015).

J. Milling (*)  Department of Drama, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_2

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component of modern democratic culture, the modes in which the defence of public subsidy is conducted has had some detrimental effects on our recognition and articulation of the fuller experience of cultural participation, particularly the wider valuation of cultural participation, cultural legitimacy, and its politics. These three key problematics repeatedly emerge in our contemporary debates about cultural participation. First, many of the contemporary discussions of valuation itself are predicated on a model of the utilitarian benefits deriving from cultural participation. Despite extended critical discussion about the limitations of binary constructions of instrumental or intrinsic benefits (Gibson 2008; Gray 2007), the ongoing articulation of cultural participation frequently returns to some form of this valuation (Holden and Hewison 2014; Crossick and Kaszynska 2016). Second, in the important debate about a just distribution of resources and cultural participation as a public good, a static and rigid structure of legitimate and illegitimate forms of cultural participation has become enshrined (Bourdieu 1984; Snowball 2008). Third, in arguing for the benefits of cultural participation, the political inflection of specific cultural activities and the implications of that for political debate are less frequently discussed. Robert Hewison’s recent reflection on cultural capital (2015) points out that many of the ways in which we construe cultural participation—as the practices of an autonomous sphere free from economic or political interest, as utilitarian processes that forge social bonds and presage electoral engagement, as drivers of economic regeneration—can be traced from eighteenth-century Enlightenment conceptions of public life. This chapter returns to those eighteenth-century debates on the problematics of cultural participation to suggest that they offer the potential for fresh insight for our contemporary discussions. In sociological accounts from the rise of Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere (1989) and the fall of Sennett’s public man (2002), cultural participation has been presented as central to the formation of the modern public realm, and eighteenth-century Britain has been painted as the golden era of its emergence, when diverse strangers freely and actively participated in cultural and civic life. For Sennett, ‘modern public life, based on an impersonal, bourgeois, secular society, first took hold’ in the European eighteenth-century cosmopolis, where men played an appropriate civic, public role amidst ‘a gathering of strangers’ (2002, 47). Sennett’s central metaphor is the theatricality of public man. Cultural participation was key for Habermas in the epochal moment of the

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bourgeois public sphere’s emergence as he recuperated those excluded from the political public sphere, such as women and non-qualifying men, into the Restoration literary public sphere which, he argued, was an essential precursor to the wider bourgeois revolution: ‘The ­ public sphere in the political realm evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters, through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society’ (30–31). While the historical actuality of both Sennett and Habermas’s accounts has been diversely critiqued and refined, yet the conceptual centrality of cultural participation to the definition of the public realm in modernity has remained a powerful trope.2 This chapter returns to the eighteenth century and one form of cultural participation—theatre-going—to explore the circumstances ­ in which competing discourses of value were employed by audiences, theatre makers, and government. Part of the usefulness of the eighteenth-century examples drawn upon here is that this was a period without government subsidy for theatre in England, yet it produced a good deal of government policy and legislation relevant to culture. Rather than rendering this period tangential to current concerns, the lack of cultural subsidy may be precisely why a return to the cultural rhetoric and practices of the eighteenth century is useful. The three case studies—John Dennis’s defence The Usefulness of the Stage, the repercussions of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, and the Chinese Festival theatre riots of 1755—expose the complex stakes of cultural participation in historical actuality, rather than just in terms of intellectual history, and offer to broaden the palette of our rhetoric about cultural participation. Why is that important? Because as Judith Butler reminds us, our language and rhetoric formulate our perception of the possible (2010). For Butler, the iterative performative effects of our theoretical construction produce the appearance of autonomy and separation for the cultural realm or the economic. Beyond recognising our contribution to these performative effects, Butler argues there is a need to exercise judgement not just about what works on the level of technical efficiency, but about what is best to be done. ‘To do this is to engage in politics… a concerted act of public deliberation on how to make common institutions’ (149). 2 Elegant historical critiques and extensions of Habermas’s conception of the public sphere include Downie (2003), Fraser (1990, 2007), Vickery (1983), and Warner (2002), yet the trope endures most recently in relation to the theatrical in Balme (2014) and cultural McGuigan (2005).

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Butler suggests that we might find alternatives beyond our current formulations of thought in historical analysis. Japanese political theorist, Masao Maruyama, argues the ‘“not yet” and the “unrealized” in social forms that came before’ (155) have powerful potential ‘which exceeds the established framework for understanding reality… a resource of the past becomes the way of articulating ideals’ (155). The task of this chapter then is to return to the ‘unrealized’ or ‘not yet’ potentialities of eighteenth-century constructions of cultural participation to challenge some of the ways in which we repeatedly construct the cultural realm today.

2.1   Values and Usefulness: Languages of Experience3 The eighteenth-century case studies help us focus on the question of valuation itself which is a key problematic at the heart of our contemporary discourses of cultural participation. While the debate about the role and utility of cultural participation is not a recent one (Belfiore and Bennett 2008; Gibson 2008; Bennett 1995), the need to justify public subsidy in post-war British cultural policy has had an impact on the language used about the value of cultural participation. Reignited in the late 1980s when Myerscough’s account of the Economic Importance of the Arts (1988) recast an economic logic for ‘investing’ in the arts, the ‘purely’ economically instrumental defence of subsidised cultural activity has been variously critiqued (Selwood 2002; Hewison 2006; Holden 2004, 2006) but remains an ideological force in our articulation of cultural value. In explicit terms, cultural economists seek to articulate the value of cultural participation in the languages of ‘willingness to pay’, ‘hedonic pricing’, or economic regeneration. Despite attempts to move beyond an economically instrumentalist view or to diversify the modes of ‘measuring’ benefits and values of cultural participation as ‘non-use’ measures (Donovan 2013; Holden and Hewison 2014), the HM Treasury Green Book remains inadequately brief on the subject of ‘non-market valuation’ (2013, 57). Even as it deals only with explicitly financially exchangeable aspects of culture, these are gathered under the unhelpful 3 Hennion (2003) argues for a consideration of aesthetic experience in cultural participation in music. For an extension of Hennion’s narrower definition of experience as intense passionate engagement, see Simon Stewart’s view of sustained and distracted modes of cultural experience (2015).

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phrase ‘non-market’ values as if such a binary could exist, one that presupposes a defined, quantifiable stability on the part of the market, and amorphous uncategorisable attributes, experiences, or values beyond. Critiques of the instrumentalisation of cultural participation within new public management structures (Belfiore 2004; Holden and Hewison 2014; O’Brien 2014) turn to a Bourdieusian-based articulation of ­cultural capital as an attempt to move beyond neoclassical economic ‘nonmarket benefits or externalities that the arts are purported to provide … to redefine the framework in which the arts and culture are evaluated’ (Snowball 2008, 9). Bennett et al. (2009) consider cultural participation as a productive force in shaping an individual’s social existence and status, ‘the most profitable portfolio combining educational qualifications, a degree of eclecticism, some subcultural commitment and appropriate forms of embodiment’ (259). While Bennett et al. disagree with some of Bourdieu’s formulations, they concur that the acquisition of cultural capital can be converted to social capital and can impact social mobility, and they call for ‘a more elaborate and better specified analysis of capitals or assets … to account for the diverse ways that cultural practice delivers profits to individuals and groups’ (259). Such re-iteration in economic terms of the value of cultural participation has implications for the breadth of our understanding. The double social life of method, as John Law and others have coined it (2011), has consequences for what we can imagine ‘counting’, both literally and metaphorically, and Law’s challenge is that accounts of cultural value are ‘generative’, not merely descriptive (Law 2004, 7). Underpinning this use of economic metaphors suggests Gray (2007) is a commodification of instrumentality. While all policy is ontologically instrumental, Gray argues systemic ideological approaches to the public sector have changed since the 1970s and produced ‘the shift from intrinsic notions of use to extrinsic notions of exchange … goods and services are redefined in how they are to be understood, their social role is re-defined, and the management of them requires change for the most effective and efficient realisation of their exchange status’ (208). It is this articulation of the exchange value of cultural participation, whether internalised as an endogenous force within the cultural sector or negotiated as an exogenous force from other spheres, that has come to play so important a role in contemporary debates around cultural value. The separation of the cultural realm from other realms, where equivalent exchange value may be found, underpins debates about the complex ‘instrumentalisation’ of cultural participation for impacts beyond intrinsic

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use-values to spheres articulated as different to the cultural (Gray 2009). This separation of spheres is one that has a long history and as Robert Hewison identified was at the heart of the conception of post-war public subsidy: ‘culture occupies a separate and autonomous sphere, where the universal and eternal values of art transcend those of politics or the market’, at the same time the value of art is not transcendental but useful, as ‘the overt instrumentalism of social and economic regeneration’ (2015, 21). As our cultural policy continually configures the value of cultural participation within such an instrumental or rather exchange-use formulation, it enshrines an economic, and implicitly market-based, articulation of value. Moreover, such an articulation also assumes a separation of the spheres of the cultural and the economic or the cultural and the social. As political economists of culture would remind us such separation is untenable, the ‘different ways of financing and organizing cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses, representations, and communicative resources’ available to different publics ‘and for the organization of audiences and use’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011, 53).4 The extent to which our ‘accounting’ for cultural participation has been coloured by the languages of economic valuation becomes clear when we return to the rich complexity of an eighteenth-century defence of culture before any hidden rhetorical defence of subsidy is in play. No less an argument about cultural values raged in 1698 when John Dennis authored his defence of The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion.5 In Dennis’s essay, there is a remarkable diversity of values attributed to participation in eighteenth-century theatrical culture by individuals, groups, and at a national level. Dennis was an early British moralist and forerunner of utilitarian thought which, through the prism of Jeremy Bentham’s writings, has been foundational for the rational individualism of contemporary neoclassical economics. Yet Dennis’s Usefulness draws our

4 Citing Golding and Murdock (2005), who see the economy as political and for whom the balance of private, capitalist enterprise and public or state intervention goes ‘beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’ (61). 5 Critique of the stage and public morality rages the pamphlet wars around the Collier controversy, see Kinservik (2002) and Wilson (2012).

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attention to the impassioned, contradictory, and multifarious languages that surrounded cultural participation in the eighteenth century in contradistinction to the more limited current debates.6 In the complex social and political reorganisation that surrounded the Williamite settlement of 1689, there were sections of society who saw a moment to re-establish the legitimacy of their role in civic participation and who sought to improve the general tenor of civic, public behaviour including in theatres. The Societies for the Reformation of Manners chipped away at ungodly behaviours in everyday life by using informers to bring prosecutions under existing laws to regulate swearing, Sunday trading, and theatrical obscenity (Curtis and Speck 1976).7 The informers were widely reviled, ‘the name of “informer” is enough to denominate a Man unfit for Society; A Rogue and an Informer are synonimous (sic)’ (Defoe 1698, 15), and were seen as intruding on the accepted, celebrated freedoms of English life in the public fora of the street or ‘licensed’ places of the tavern and stage. Defoe skewers the endurance of social hierarchy in the reformers’ apparently egalitarian call for social morality and urges magistrates to prosecute the rich as well as the poor, for poverty ‘is no Crime at all’ (7). The Societies claimed the queen’s support, but were predominantly lesser merchants and retailers, low church men and women. Theirs was an associational, judicially-managed challenge to the claims for the usefulness of the stage and other forms of cultural participation. A more widely read and thus more dangerous critic of the stage from the opposite religious and political persuasion was Jeremy Collier. High-church, non-juring clergyman,8 Collier undertook a moreor-less single-handed attempt to ‘reform’ the stage out of existence and in the process to make a name for himself. It is in explicit response to this attack that Dennis writes his defence. Collier’s critique was almost entirely a close reading of play content and the implication of his argument was that, as Plato had warned, watching theatre would corrupt 6 This intrinsic versus instrumental structure as employed in Bakhshi et al. (2009), McCarthy et al. (2004), O’Brien (2010) is somewhat different to early utilitarian argument which co-located utility and intrinsic qualities such as pleasure articulated by Bentham (1789). 7 Kinservik (2002) argues the Societies were a serious threat to theatre; Hume (1999) suggests they were not, but left the way open for the Licensing Act. 8 Non-jurors were Anglican clerics who refused the new Oath of Allegiance to William as king and thus were suspected as Jacobite supporters of the exiled James.

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people’s moral perspective and bring about social catastrophe by undermining faith in the existing social hierarchy. Written within living memory of the Civil War, and only ten years after the exile of James II and the imposition of the Williamite settlement, the possibility of upending social hierarchy was not mere rhetorical fantasy. There are no benefits to cultural participation in theatre-going for Collier. Many of our contemporary debates about the cultural value of cultural participation seem anaemic in contrast to Dennis’s riposte, which compounds multiple established and newly crafted arguments in defence of theatrical cultural participation. There is no separation between instrumental and intrinsic defences of cultural participation. Dennis’s ur-utilitarianism did not presuppose an economic individual rationally assessing ‘use value’, but emphases the co-existence of intrinsic and instrumental elements within the ‘whole’ of cultural experience9: For the chief end and design of man is to make himself happy.… In whatever he does or he does not, he designs to improve or maintain his happiness. (148)

In Dennis’s argument, passionate enjoyment experienced in cultural participation is an optimal state, where an individual escapes their ordinary, ‘languishing state of indifference’ (149). Passionate engagement with theatre and with fellow theatregoers, with both play content but also in the socially-mixed space of the theatrical auditoria, reinvigorates the ordinary person. Dennis here constructs a view of pleasure and passion that was characterised by his critics as akin to the unruly threat of the mob and a politicised understanding of enthusiasm,10 but Dennis suggests that the theatrical form itself sets boundaries around that passion—it may be at odds with Reason, but does not run beyond reasonable bounds. ‘The passions must be rais’d after such a manner as to take reason along with them. If reason is quite overcome, the pleasure is neither long, nor

9 Pleasure is a characteristic element of consequentialist thought, and the intrinsic experience of pleasure as a good equates to utility. On the shift from Bentham’s individual rational utilitarianism to neoclassical economics, Mill and nineteenth-century reconfigurations see Goodwin (2006). 10 Morillo (2000) explores the political battle between Tory and Whig writers that encouraged critics to construe Dennis’ egalitarian call to enthusiastic passion as ‘unwitting radicalism’ (23).

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sincere, nor safe’ (150). For Dennis, the value of theatre to the state is in its provision of a shared experience of passionate engagement not only among the elite theatregoers, but as part of a mixed audience, where those elements that might lead to rebellion or revolt such as a sense of grievance, misleading examples from ‘factious guides’ (165), or envy of the great can be debated within the fiction and the auditorium. Much as he would like it to, Dennis suggests that social status does not correlate directly to theatrical cultural participation. It is not from the monarchy or aristocratic circles that theatre gained support, ‘of our Princes, how few have had any Taste of Arts!’ (162) As a result of this, Dennis does not expect that there will be aristocratic nor elite patronage of the theatre, although he does remind the reader of the potential benefit that state subsidy would bring: The Athenians were highly sensible of the Advantage which the State received from the Theatre, which they maintain’d at a publick prodigious Expence, and a Revenue was appropriated to that peculiar Use. (166)

His call was to take cultural participation in the theatre seriously enough to fund it through taxation from ‘state’ coffers, since the theatre brings together individuals to experience debates and reflect on matters of good government, and that the managed space of theatre becomes a forum for debate, preventing such debate spilling into disturbance beyond its walls. Yet Dennis does not much care what theatre people come to see, and he is ready to admit that quite a lot of what people were seeing on the stage was bawdy, immoral, or silly. For Dennis, the overriding component of this mode of cultural participation is that it enforces social mixing, ‘nothing tends to the uniting Men more, than the bringing them frequently together, and the pleasing them when they are assembled’ (169), engaging collected groups, who might not agree about what they see, in shared imaginings. Dennis whisks through the usual worthy benefits of the stage—it inculcates right thinking through content, the example of the fable, and the aspiration to heroic valour—but he predominantly reflects on the external elements of the theatrical encounter. This cultural participation unites a diverse group of people against a common enemy. In this, solidarities are built through shared experiences of entertainment and, most significantly, that the theatre has the capacity to entertain the English.

26  J. MILLING there is no Nation in Europe, that is so generally addicted to the Spleen … our Jealousies and Suspicions … have so often made us dangerous to the Government, and, by consequence, to ourselves. (151)

Pleasure is our national passport to social contentment. Pleasure is cast here as a natural national right: Dennis asserts ‘Liberty is a jest if you take away reasonable Pleasure; for what would signifie Liberty if it did not make me happier than him who is not free?’ (168). In this argument, Dennis urges that theatre’s entertainment value is its moral value, and its ornament is its use. Of course, Dennis’ perspective betrays a particular partisan and religious perspective beneath its happy jingoism—it is impossible to read anything from the eighteenth century without being aware of its location in those debates. However, here he is clear it is in the enjoyment of our cultural participation that we reveal the value of our civic engagement in the public realm, as a nation of free-born Englishmen, relishing the liberty brought us by the rise of parliament and waning of monarchical power; pleasure and culture are our right and our inheritance. Cultural participation is figured as engagement with a national public realm. Dennis’s Usefulness of the Stage was only one of his considerable output on questions of literary aesthetics that accompanied his less successful playwriting. The many tracts he produced during the early eighteenth century were in conversation with multiple other voices around these questions of the worth of theatrical and cultural engagement. While we might offer caveats concerning the political limitations of the context in which Dennis and his correspondents are writing, they are articulating a set of ideas of the values of participation that have been ‘unrealised’ in our recent discourses. In contemporary cultural policy, economic language has come to dominate our discussions of cultural value, limiting our articulation of why, how, and what cultural participation is and does. The strictures of ‘non-market’ values or what Throsby calls ‘cultural price’, ‘an exchange value reached by negotiation amongst parties to a market transaction, where the ‘market’ is that for the cultural content of the work’ (Throsby 2010, 21), do not allow the valuation of the fuller experience of cultural participation, collectively as well as individually. More worryingly, these economically inflected discourses are employed as if this is an activity of ‘realpolitik’ beyond the ideological, a ‘more practical’ way of allowing cultural policy to defend subsidy and to talk to the Treasury, allowing ‘the notion of cultural value’ to be ‘made

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operational so that it can be incorporated into actual decision-making in the cultural policy arena’ (21). Returning to Dennis’s defence of reasonable passion, the significance of social mixing, the importance of shared imaginings, and the liberty induced by pleasure, is not a return to an idea of the cultural sphere as separate from that of the economy or politics. Such articulations of usefulness from Dennis and his correspondents remind us that cultural participation is a set of material practices with material consequences, diversely engaged with by diverse populations, and that such participation’s worth is not calculable only in terms of economic approximation or convertible capital, but as a foundational element of the modern public realm.

2.2   Legitimate Cultures and Licence The second problematic that our eighteenth-century example can enlighten is the static conception of ‘legitimacy’ in contemporary cultural policy. In the eighteenth century, cultural participation was legislated for and legitimated in relation to public, civic engagement in complex and paradoxical ways. It was not a given, at this juncture in English history, that the theatre was a component of legitimate culture. By exploring the negotiation of cultural legitimacy that surrounded the introduction of the Licensing Act in 1737 and some of its unexpected ramifications, we are reminded that cultural participation is participation ‘with’ or ‘in’ diverse and unequal cultural goods or practices and that legitimacy is made and remade by particular practices of cultural participation. Cultural participation in modern cultural policy terms usually means consumption of what is designated legitimate culture. This idea draws on a Bourdieusian notion of the force of cultural distinction. For Bourdieu (1984), cultural capital reproduces its advantage for the individual beyond the cultural realm to create social, economic, and political benefit to those au fait with what Bourdieu designates ‘legitimate’ culture.11 Bennett et al.’s UK focused reformulation of Bourdieu’s analysis 11 Bourdieu (1984) notes the significance of experience: ‘The manner in which culture has been acquired lives on in the manner of using it;… within the educational system it devalues scholarly knowledge and interpretation as ‘scholastic’ or even ‘pedantic’ in favour of direct experience and simple delight.… Acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition’ (2, 3).

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of 1960s France concluded that contemporary British cultural tastes are more diffusely arranged and bisected by gender, age, and ethnicity as well as class, but even ‘clothed in an inclusive ethic, [cultural capital] still helps secure the reproduction of the privilege of the professional-executive class’ (259). Bennett et al. follow and refine Peterson and Simkus’s notion of the cultural omnivore, who enjoys highbrow and popular culture and for whom ‘the aesthetics of elite status are being redefined as the appreciation of all distinctive leisure activities and creative forms along with the appreciation of the classic fine arts’ (1992, 252). Yet within this formulation, what can be considered as ‘legitimate’ cultural participation remains static, even while wide-ranging diverse tastes are championed by cultural omnivores, ‘command of consecrated culture remains a token of distinction which probably has not yet ceased to function as an effective form of cultural capital’ (Bennett et al., 189) and what counts as consecrated culture tends to be that which is publicly subsidised. The deduced benefits of cultural participation underpin the articulations of government cultural policy to provide accessible arts and culture, enshrined, for example, in the establishment of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport itself (Selwood 2002). However, as O’Brien and Oakley suggest: The idea that not engaging in state funded cultural activity (with that non-engagement revealed by state administered surveys) is a problem, relates to the change in British society that has seen cultural engagement become a marker of a particular kind of normality. An illustration of this new ‘normal’ comes in the figure of the omnivore. (11)

O’Brien and Oakley counsel against a ‘deficit’ model where non-participation in subsidised or ‘legitimate’ cultural events can be cast as an individual’s social, educational, or even, moral flaw. Indeed, Jancovich and Bianchini (2013) suggest that the desire for wider access has paradoxically entrenched the existing order of cultural provision, that ‘arts policy has used the participation agenda as a means to legitimise existing funding decisions, rather than employing research findings to challenge what is currently being funded’ (64). It is, of course, quite understandable that funded cultural institutions should attempt to engage constructively with rhetorical discourses of participation and its social benefits, both as a way of recognising their contribution to the cultural mix and as a way of rearticulating their role in cultural and civic life.

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However, two difficulties are evident here: first, a rather limited view of what counts as cultural participation emerges, one that privileges participation in legitimate, publicly-funded cultural activities rather than the ‘rich vernacular culture of everyday practices based around ostensibly mundane activities and social networks’ (Miles 2013, 189).12 More importantly, these discourses of cultural participation have a potentially limiting effect on our conceptualising of ‘legitimate’ culture itself, reifying ‘legitimate’ culture as a relatively straightforward range of outcomes from cultural institutions, rather than allowing us to see the contingent and complex pictures of different modes of cultural activity in diverse cultural fields. The question of the formulation of the legitimacy of culture, outside the mechanisms of public subsidy, can be explored by looking at evolving attitudes towards theatrical performance in eighteenth-century Britain. The central piece of governmental intervention and policy in the eighteenth century for the theatre was the Stage Licensing Act of 1737. The passage of the Licensing Act was probably engineered by political pique and was produced by anxiety around the power of cultural participation. The popular theatres of early eighteenth-century London readily mocked the government, particularly its first minister Robert Walpole and King George II. The ostensible reason for the introduction of the Licensing Act was a scurrilous farce The Vision of the Golden Rump that attacked the king and ministers and was (falsely) attributed to Henry Fielding, the house dramatist and manager of the most popular unlicensed theatre venue in London. The farce was allegedly delivered into Walpole’s hands by actor-manager Henry Giffard, Fielding’s direct competitor in the patent Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Whether Walpole commissioned the farce to precipitate the crisis or Giffard initiated it in an act of sharp commercial practice, the persuasive, denigrating force of theatrical performance, and the influence of this kind of cultural participation on the minds of citizens, was assumed by all—managers, commentators, and ministers. The Licensing Act’s totalising language attempted to set up a sharp distinction between legitimate and illegitimate culture, not on the basis of the art form itself, but through reclassification of the organisations permitted to operate as theatres. The Act iteratively condemned as common 12 A fuller discussion is found in Miles and Gibson edited special issues of Cultural Trends 25.3 (2016) and 26.1 (2017).

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rogues all actors not employed or sheltered within the duopoly of the two patent London houses. In limiting the approved organisations to London, the Act attempted to regulate the geographical extent of theatrical culture and limit the audience pool to those most visible to authority, and it produced by default the implicit establishment of metropolitan theatre as legitimated culture. The Licensing Act cast its stricter re-imposition of oversight of material by the Lord Chamberlain as an attempt to reform and elevate standards. The danger of too much cultural participation was implicit both in the rhetoric of the act and in the press responses and appeals. Politically resistant commentary performed using attractive theatrical visual spectacle and available at cheap prices in the small unlicensed theatres in London had proved a kind of cultural participation too challenging to permit. Certainly, the rhetorical aspiration and the legal framing of the Act set out to curtail cultural participation, and, in doing so, it cast most existing theatre as illegitimate culture. Yet, in practice, the Act had practically no impact outside the centre of London. Touring companies and regionally based groups continued working under locally issued licences from Justices of the Peace. Little more than ten years after the Licensing Act, important regional centres were erecting permanent buildings expressly for theatrical performance, where there was, as David Thomas puts it, sufficient ‘support of leading members of the local community’—Bath had two theatres by 1750 (2014, 103). This flurry of building indicates that despite the lack of legally recognised sanction from the centre, regional urban communities employed theatrical culture to legitimate their status as culturally sophisticated and significant urban centres. The autobiographical account of touring manager Ryley The Itinerant (1817) shows how this regional independence worked. Ryley was granted leave to play by the Justice of the Peace but ‘should anyone be vile enough through malice, fanaticism, or from any other motive to lay an information’ the magistrate admits he would be forced to take notice of it (286). Here, illegitimate theatrical cultural participation, in the terms of the Licensing Act, is accepted as normative, and those who attempt to prevent theatre performances are suspect, acting from a position of political interest, that is placing individual or partisan interest above what is ‘best’ for the whole community. The Justice in Ryley’s account concludes that he knows ‘from experience [plays] have helped to refine the manners of the lower classes’ (292). A second unexpected outcome from the Licensing Act was the production of a generation of theatregoers who made little attempt to

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distinguish what we might now term high art from low. Theatre has always been a hybrid form. Shiner (2001), Abrams (1985), and Bourdieu (1984) suggest that the eighteenth century saw a bifurcation of creative activities into ‘fine arts’ and crafts. Yet theatre could be considered a potential ‘fine art’ only if studied coolly in pieces as poetic language or musical score—it was distinctly a lesser craft considered as a whole in its generically muddy, visually suspect, embodied enactment. More than this, the Licensing Act’s insistence on control of spoken drama led to a reduction of opportunities for playwrights to have work staged and produced a remarkable generic mixing. Given the reduction in performance venues for spoken drama, and the concomitant reduction in the volume of legally staged spoken drama, sustaining the elitist virtues of French neoclassicism, indeed having any opportunity to see French neoclassicism performed, were markedly reduced. Instead, audiences had to enjoy Harlequin Doctor Faustus or ‘monstrous’ mixings of burletta, dancing, farce, pantomime, or the increased presence of music within the evening’s entertainment and the play gratis in the middle. This shift in repertoire altered the ‘normal’ play-going experience for audiences of all ‘sorts’ across the century. Every theatregoer was an omnivore, and Harlequin was not simple buffoonery, nor was farce politically neutral or culturally vacant. The mixed offerings were in continual generic, performative, and frequently parodic, dialogue with the culturally legitimated spoken theatre of the patent houses. Here was governance of cultural participation gone awry in a gloriously subverted manner. What the Licensing Act and its completely unintended consequences reveal are the divergent interests of London, Westminster, and regional justices of the peace, and the complexity of the way theatrical participation was legitimated and valued within regional centres around Britain. Today, we might consider theatrical performance a straightforward component of Bourdieusian legitimate culture. Paul DiMaggio suggests it was in the early twentieth century that theatre in America entered into ‘the edifice of ‘high culture’ and the constitution of certain artistic expressions as cultural capital took place not once but rather over a period of many years’ (1992, 43).13 We might note with DiMaggio that systems of cultural classification are ‘products of human action, continually subject to accretion and erosion, selection and change’ (43) and reaffirm that 13 See also DiMaggio (1982) where he discusses an earlier moment of theatrical legitimation (42).

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legitimacy cannot inhere in an art form per se, nor indeed can ‘cultural capital’. Participation in theatrical cultural activities might take many forms, not all indicating compliance with monologic accounts of government-backed authority. The example of the eighteenth-century Licensing Act reminds us that the question of cultural legitimation is fraught, in continual flux, and needs to be continually ‘produced’.

2.3  Riotous Cultural Participation These eighteenth-century examples reveal that the symbolic resonances of participating in theatrical culture are readily interpretable in terms of the political. As Jim McGuigan argues, cultural policy is about ‘the politics of culture in the most general sense: it is about the clash of ideas, institutional struggles, and power relations in the production and circulation of symbolic meanings’ (1996, 1). Many of the arguments for the benefits of cultural participation figure it as a public good and debate the politics of access to established culture or the politics of cultural participation’s potential for social mobility or social cohesion. The ‘unrealized’ rhetoric of the eighteenth century reminds us that, although less frequently discussed, cultural participation does not inherently produce politically consensual symbolic meaning, but has the potential to provoke dissensus, conflict, or unruliness. For Chantal Mouffe, adversarial, agonistic political activity is fundamental to democracy. For her, the greatest danger is that we see our contemporary organisation of social institutions as apolitical and a result of an inevitable consensus, as ‘the natural consequence of technological progress… because, through a process of sedimentation, the political origin of these contingent practices has been erased’ (89). Instead, we might revisit the discourses and experience of cultural participation from the eighteenth century in order to remind ourselves of the emergence of some of these ‘contingent practices’ and to identify the potential for agonistics, rather than consensus, in contemporary cultural policy.14

14 Mouffe analyses Boltanski and Chiapello (2007)’s observations on the absorption of the ‘aesthetic strategies of the counter-culture’ (Mouffe, 90) and argues what is needed now is ‘a set of counter-hegemonic interventions, to disarticulate the existing hegemony and to establish a more progressive one thanks to a process of re-articulation of new and old elements into different configuration of power’ (Mouffe 2008, n.p.).

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Cultural participation in the theatre in the early eighteenth century implied engagement with national political concerns: cultural participation was central to the imagining of nationhood and the evolution of the modern national state. Hobsbawm’s notion of the rise of nationalism from the 1760s suggests that many European countries, prior to their modern configuration as nation states at the end of the nineteenth century, forged a consciousness of ‘nation’ through cultural and folkloric means (71). Benedict Anderson, following Gellner, identifies an earlier Enlightenment evolution of nations as limited, sovereign communities, ‘because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (2006, 8). David Wiles extends Anderson’s formulation of these national imagined communities into the theatrical realm and notes ‘most forms of pre-modern theatre maximized the audience’s awareness that it embodied a community that transcended familial and neighbourly relations’ (8). In other words, eighteenth-century theatrical participation worked to imagine the nation, through the content of plays that presented symbolic representations of nationhood, as well as through theatre’s very mode of address to audiences cast as standing for a wider national public. An enduring sense of ‘British’ culture was performed in this period in opposition to Catholicism and the French, as Linda Colley suggests (Colley 1992). However, as Homi Bhabha (1990) reminds us, there is an ongoing process of ‘the nation’s “coming into being” as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes this instability of knowledge’ (3). Through symbolic means and through its mode of production, theatrical activity in the early eighteenth century did not produce politically consensual images of a cohesive nation, but rather opened up space for an impassioned debate about the values of national cultural identity. The Chinese Festival riots in the theatrical season of 1755 offer a particular lens through which to examine the political values bound up in the national-political-cultural nexus. David Garrick, manager of the patent theatre at Drury Lane, contracted the French ballet master Jean-George Noverre to bring over his dancers to perform the spectacular ballet afterpiece The Chinese Festival. However, before the ballet opened an undeclared naval war between Britain and France began, and ‘the uniformed part of the people, stimulated by others… denounced vengeance against the managers’ and the English audience ‘threatened the manager [Garrick] with

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their governance’ (Davies 1781, 188).15 The ballet afterpiece opened 8 November 1755, but was forced to close after five nights of rioting. Garrick had attempted to forestall xenophobic trouble with a puff article before the first performance, where he reported that ‘there are above sixty performers concerned in the entertainment, more than forty of which are English, assisted only by a few French’ (Langhans 1984, 144). George II attended the opening night, but this did nothing to stop sections of the audience protesting. The Journal Etranger for 25 November reported the spectacle of ninety dancers entering in glittering procession to applause: broken by three or four piercing calls and as many voices from the gallery echoing the cry ‘no French dancers’. The Nobility and all honest folk shouted to throw them into the pit and applauded the louder to drown the sound of catcalls. (144)

The following night, the journal reported, All the My lords leaped into the pit some with staves, others with sword in hand… The English ladies, far from being affrighted by the horrible scuffle … pointed out to them the people to be knocked out… The outraged Nobility struck right and left regardless breaking arms and heads and blood was running everywhere. The ballet ceased until finally the nobility turned out the mutilated rioters. (Davies 1781, 190)

The French journal’s account of the riots indicates the violence was initiated by the nobility, those English ‘mylords’ determined to continue the entertainment despite the resistant catcalls from the cheaper gallery seats. By contrast, the London Evening Post’s account centred on the ‘leader’ of the challengers in the gallery who declaimed: O Britons, O my Countrymen! You will certainly not suffer these foreigner dogs to amuse us. Our destruction is at hand. These sixty dancers are come over with one desire, to undermine our Constitution! (Wilson 1994, 138)

15 Although the war in Europe did not formally occur until the following summer, British ships were harassing French trading vessels, over North American colonies and India, as a prelude to ‘the first global war for empire’, the Seven Years War (Fordham 2010, 3).

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Theophilus Cibber reported that the protestors in the gallery included members of the Anti-Gallican Society, a trading association that promoted English export and art and resisted French imports, a group he praised as ‘the Trading Part of the Nation’ for their patriotism (Wilson, 137). As Heather McPherson argues, the riots were a form of class conflict, with the aristocrats as the brutalisers, revealing a ‘vociferous, dialogic participation’ in the theatre as well as the ‘volatility and factionalism of London audiences’ (2002, 237). Dongshin Chang (2015) agrees patriotism was exacerbated by class boundaries, where the nobility saw the ballet as the consumption of chinoiserie and a display of their cosmopolitan fashion taste that enhanced their cultural capital and overrode the ‘French’ connection for them. While the lesser sort, unable to consume chinoiserie, were not interested by the ‘chinaface’ and chose to read the performance primarily as French. Chang notes with irony that those Anti-Gallican traders who shouted from the gallery may well have been the importers of chinoiserie artefacts so highly prized at that time. Garrick attempted a compromise, with three performances a week of the fantastically expensive French/Chinese ballet for the boxes, interspersed on other nights with something for the gallery. This met with no success. The difficulty for the theatre, as Cibber argued, was the diversity of its audience, where ‘all degrees of persons from noblemen to artisan – all who pay their place at the theatre – boxes, pit and galleries like the king, lords and commons constituted the body politic’ (McPherson, 240). The King’s presence failed to quell the rioters. An extensive campaign for and against the dancers was kept up in the press. Matters worsened on Saturday 18 November when ‘our friends [the nobility] were at ye Opera, & the common people had leisure to do Mischief’ (Ou, 44). The disorder spread onto the streets outside the theatre: Garrick was forced to ask in the militiamen to attempt to keep order. In the end, the gallery carried the day. Garrick replaced the ballet with a two-act farce, Arthur Murphy’s The Apprentice, which ran for 16 nights with a new prologue written by Garrick and spoken by Murphy as ‘author’: No smuggled, pilfer’d Scenes from France we shew, ’Tis ENGLISH—ENGLISH, Sirs!—from top to toe. (1756, n.p.)

Here, cultural participation was operating in full agonistic form. The king twice attended and is twice ‘insulted’ by his people. The nobility defended the spectacle by bloodying the riff-raff, yet the gallery won

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out: the performance was removed and the governance of a self-styled British audience was imposed. National political agendas were being debated through the use of cultural participation at this moment, which was not centred on the symbolic content of the performance, the balletic appropriation of a spectacular chinoiserie, but rather on the material conditions of the performance’s production which could not be separated from the politics—national, imperial, and aesthetic—that the production represented. Here, cultural participation prompted a profoundly contested moment of debate over national legitimate culture.

2.4   Conclusion In these three examples, we can trace the echoes of an intellectual history of ideas of anti-theatricality or the philosophy of aesthetics, as well as charting nascent forms of cultural policy in the official languages of licence and law, treatise, and defence. However, each case study demonstrates that we need to be attuned to the practicalities of that intellectual history in its specific context, as it is the place, time, circumstances, and participants that determines the particular character of the cultural valuation attributed to these cultural events by different participants. From each example, we can trace the journey of ideas and practices that we continue to employ in our contemporary cultural policy language and practices, but the examples reveal other ‘unrealized’ potentials that have not yet been as fully developed. The eighteenth-century case studies have reminded us that contemporary cultural policy has too frequently articulated a defence of subsidy for cultural participation in terms of an instrumentalism predicated on exchange value and thus implicitly or explicitly on an economic equivalence. Cultural participation, understood as far more than the consumption of cultural goods, is participation in material practices that are not beyond the economic sphere, but nor are they reducible to economic description. We could more fruitfully return to the ‘unrealised’ potentials of eighteenth-century descriptions of cultural experience. In Dennis’s defence, and other British moralists of his day, cultural participation is articulated as an experience of those qualities required in an active democracy—the arousing of reasonable passion, the pleasures of and in assembly, and the shared recognition of liberty—not as the means to instrumental ends, or rather not only as means, but also in and of itself. Such a case study offers us the ‘unrealised’ articulation of the values of culture, without the requirement to operationalise them as economic proxies or as exportable expressions of soft power.

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The eighteenth-century case studies also remind us that the ‘legitimacy’ of a particular form of culture is not a static description of ontology, but an articulation of a set of relationships that serve particular interests and that are made and remade. The final example reminds us that cultural participation may very well not lead to social cohesion. Inevitably, cultural participation involves participants in acts of evaluation and reflection of their experience. As the eighteenth-century riot suggests, cultural participation in an event, experience, or process may well produce irreconcilable judgements about that participation’s meaning, significance, and value. Such judgements are political acts, ‘a concerted act of public deliberation on how to make common institutions’ (Butler, 149). The usefulness of a theatrical riot, echoed in Baz Kershaw’s call for unruly audiences (2001), lies in its making explicit an agonistics that underpinned the foundation of the modern public realm and that, as Mouffe reminds us, is essential to the democratic state. In this view of agonistic democracy, the primary purpose of cultural policy should be not social cohesion but the facilitation of cultural events, processes, and experiences that summon such a diversity of participants that orders of worth and debates around the values of culture in its richest, fullest complexity are always at stake.

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40  J. MILLING Holden, J. (2006). Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Why Culture Needs a Democratic Mandate. London: Demos. Holden, J., & Hewison, R. (2014, July 14). Turbulent Times: The Prospect for Heritage. Heritage Exchange. http://www.heritageexchange.co.uk/sites/ default/files/Holden%20%26%20Hewison.pdf. Accessed 26 Mar 2016. Hume, R. (1999). Jeremy Collier and the Future of London Theatre in 1698. Studies in Philology, 96, 480–511. Jancovich, L., & Bianchini, F. (2013). Problematising Participation. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 63–66. Kershaw, B. (2001). Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre. Modern Drama, 44(2), 133–154. Kinservik, M. (2002). Disciplining Satire. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Langhans, E. A. (1984). The Children of Terpsichore. In S. Strumm Kenney (Ed.), British Theatre and the Other Arts (pp. 133–145). London: Associated University Presses. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law, J., Ruppert, E., & Savage, M. (2011). The Double Social Life of Methods. CRESC: Goldsmiths Research Online. http://research.gold.ac.uk/7987. Accessed 26 Mar 2016. McCarthy, K., et al. (2004). Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. Pittsburg: Rand Corporation. McGuigan, J. (1996). Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. McGuigan, J. (2005). The Cultural Public Sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4), 427–443. McPherson, H. (2002). Theatrical Riots and Cultural Politics in EighteenthCentury London. The Eighteenth Century, 43(3), 236–252. Miles, A. (2013). Culture, Participation and Identity in Contemporary Manchester. In J. Wolff with M. Savage (Eds.), Culture in Manchester: Institutions and Urban Change Since 1850 (pp. 176–193). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2017). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value in Place. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 1–3. Morillo, J. (2000). John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory and Literary Theory. Eighteenth Century Studies, 34(1), 21–41. Mouffe, C. (2008). Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention. Transversal: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 4. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/mouffe/en. Accessed 26 Mar 2016. Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Murphy, A. (1756). The Apprentice. London: Paul Vaillant.

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Myerscough, J. (1988). The Economic Importance of the Arts in Great Britain. London: Policy Studies Institute. O’Brien, D. (2010). Measuring the Value of Culture: A Report for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. London: DCMS. O’Brien, D. (2014). Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries. London: Routledge. O’Brien, D., & Oakley, K. (2015). Cultural Value and Inequality. Swindon: AHRC. Available at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News-and-Events/News/ Documents/Cultural-Value-Inequality.pdf. Ou, H. (2008). The Chinese Festival and the Eighteenth Century London Audience. Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 2(1), 31–52. Peterson, R. A., & Simkus, A. (1992). How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups. In M. Lamont & M. Fournier (Eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (pp. 152–186). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenfeld, S. (1939). Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces 1660–1765. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryley, S. W. (1817). The Itinerant: Or, Memoirs of an Actor. London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones. Selwood, S. (2002, December 30). Measuring Culture. Spiked Culture. http:// www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DBAF.htm. Accessed 26 Mar 2016. Sennett, R. (2002). The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin. Shiner, L. (2001). The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snowball, J. (2008). Measuring the Value of Culture. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Stewart, S. (2015). Aesthetics and Time: Sustained and Distracted Modes of Engagement. Cultural Sociology, 9(2), 147–161. Thomas, D. (2014). The 1737 Licensing Act and Its Impact. In J. Swindells & D. F. Taylor (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832 (pp. 91–106). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Throsby, D. (2010). The Economics of Cultural Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickery, A. (1983). Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History. Historical Journal, 36(2), 383–414. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Wiles, D. (2012). Theatre and Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, B. D. (2012). A Race of Female Patriots. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Wilson, K. (1994). An Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture. In L. Stone (Ed.), An Imperial State at War, Britain from 1689– 1815 (pp. 128–164). London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Cultural Participation and the Place of History: A Case Study of Peterborough Societies, Past and Present Felicity James

3.1  Everyday Participation in Peterborough Images of everyday participation are captured by the photographer Chris Porsz in his series of street photographs of Peterborough: gossiping, reading, neighbourly conversation, moments of commonplace practice which usually go unacknowledged, but which Porsz’s images invite us to observe in detail. He used the image reproduced here, taken in 1981, as a way of introducing a talk given at the Peterborough Museum Society in March 2015, in which he discussed how he seeks to record social history, to understand how communities live alongside one another, and the sorts of activities they engage in day to day (Fig. 3.1). Porsz’s selection of subjects, captured going about their everyday lives, goes to the heart of the question: what constitutes cultural participation? So, too, does the setting for his talk. In speaking to the Museum Society, Porsz was taking part in a longer history of community F. James (*)  University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_3

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Fig. 3.1  ‘Good Neighbours’ (Annie Gertrude Blunt and Jim Shahid Shah, outside 134 Gladstone St., Peterborough, 1980) by Chris Porsz

participation and engagement in Peterborough, which is locally well recognised but which has never been fully analysed. Indeed, the city is classified as a ‘cold spot’—an informal term employed by Arts Council England to describe ‘geographical areas with relatively low levels of

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Fig. 3.2  ‘Mum and daughters’ (Peterborough, early 1980s) by Chris Porsz

attendance and participation’ in cultural activity (Fleming and Erskine 2011). But what, exactly, constitutes cultural participation? Recent work has begun to scrutinise and question the ways in which types of formal and traditional cultural practices, often associated with or contained within institutions, have become gradually entrenched as legitimate objects of state support or academic scrutiny. Long-standing cultural policies and state-funded programmes have reinforced ‘an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a limited set of cultural forms, activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm’ (Miles and Gibson 2016, 151). Thus, quotidian forms of participation—shopping, talking, and socialising, as recorded in Porsz’s photographs—have been overlooked (Fig. 3.2). The Peterborough shoppers here, deeply engaged in their daily activity, are ideal illustrations of the sorts of cultural participation which tends to be overlooked, with its own forms of grouping, patterning,

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and connection. Understanding Everyday Participation—Articulating Cultural Values aims to analyse histories of governance, power, and cultural policy and simultaneously to investigate present-day forms and sites of cultural participation, not excluding mundane and everyday activities. Gilmore (2017), for instance, views everyday participation in parks by different communities in Salford and Manchester through the lens of ‘commoning’: contextualising present-day park use in a longer history of the development of the public park and the enclosure of common and wastelands. Miles and Ebrey (2017) call attention to the specific historical configurations underlying the community of Peterculter in order to understand its complex constructions of civic value and ‘common culture’. My chapter aims to contribute to this debate by exploring some strands of the long history of cultural participation in and by particular communities. As I will argue, we should not only historicise our understanding of how cultural value has been created but also contextualise it—like Gilmore, Miles, and Ebrey—in terms of geographical location and history. In this essay, I am focussing on the setting for Porsz’s talk: Peterborough Museum, at a meeting of the Museum Society, which was founded in 1871 as the Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club and which continues to run an active programme of lectures and events. It is a particularly appropriate place to start our investigation of the history and place of cultural participation because such local institutions, with their long histories, deserve to be examined in detail as a clue to the legacies of cultural participation in specific places. In this essay, therefore, I discuss the history of this particular institution, describing its foundation, then setting it in the context of national debates on culture, particularly Matthew Arnold’s influential definitions of the term. I then contextualise it in terms of the rich history of local societies in the area, urging a perspective which looks beyond our usual focus on nineteenth-century formulations of culture and instead takes longer eighteenth-century practices into account. Porsz’s affectionately anthropological interest in the everyday life of Peterborough can then be placed in a larger framework of participation practices, shaped by place and history.

3.2  Foundation of the Peterborough Society The Society has a vivid record of its history and development in a comprehensive collection of Minute Books, now held by the Peterborough Museum. The Minute Books give a sense of cultural values under

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construction, as the changing aims and purpose of the Society—putting together its rules, planning events, assembling a museum collection—are debated and clarified. It was shaped by the enthusiasm of key individuals, including J.F. Bentley, the first president, Dr. Thomas Walker, the surgeon at the infirmary, and John William Bodger, the local chemist and keen collector, arguably the shaping force of the Society as it developed and its secretary for sixty-five years. It began as a small group of around twelve to fourteen members, including women. Each member paid five shillings a year to join, with those under fifteen paying two shillings and sixpence, and summer membership, which covered field trips, was only two shillings. For context, a ticket to see the first FA Cup Final in March 1872 cost one shilling: each of the eight instalments of Middlemarch, published from December 1871 onwards, cost five shillings. Therefore, although a significant outlay, membership of the Society was not highly priced in relation to other leisure activities of the period. Despite its initial small size, the Society nevertheless had high ambitions. The Minute Books covering its early years show a carefully considered set of goals and a clear purpose for the Society, as captured in its list of ‘objects’ set out in the first annual report for 1872: 1. to promote a love for the works of Nature and to cultivate a purer taste for Works of Art; 2. to make complete lists of the Fauna and Flora of the neighbourhood both recent and Fossil; 3. to record sections of exposed Strata; and 4. to establish a Museum for the preservation of specimens of Natural History, Botany, Geology, and the Fine and useful Arts and also a Library of Reference.1 The desire to cultivate a ‘purer taste for Works of Art’—although, as we will see, in keeping with other Victorian institutions—seems not in fact to have been a large part of the Society’s remit. Mentions of the arts appear to have dropped from view as the Society established itself and its 1 Peterborough Museum Archives, Minute Book I: Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club, ‘Peterborough Natural History Society […] Design, Objects, and Management’, 1872 [non-paginated]. Quoted by kind permission of the Peterborough Museum Society, with thanks for their help, especially Elizabeth St Hill Davies, and that of Museum staff, especially Glenys Wass.

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focus, at least in its early years, concentrated on the practical collection of ‘the Fauna and Flora of the neighbourhood’ and an understanding of its archaeology and geology. Early meetings sometimes comprised only a handful of members and included discussions of botany, entomology, and local geology. The first meeting, for instance, featured an exhibition of a microscope and of caterpillars feeding on the flowering plant horehound: the emphasis seems to have been on practical tips and hints members could use at home. Subsequently, the events broadened in remit to include lectures on industrial processes, scientific advances, and archaeology, although local interests remained a common feature. By 1876, the Society numbered around seventy members and was sufficiently established to have its annual ‘Conversazione’ in the Drill Hall reported in the local newspaper, with mention of its fine display of flowers, stuffed birds, insects, eggs, fossils from local quarries, paintings, microscope arrangements, a mechanical singing bird, a camera stereoscope, and a ‘stroboscope, or magic disk’.2 In setting up a ‘Conversazione’—evening gatherings which could serve as both education and entertainment—the Society was participating in a larger Victorian trend to popularise science. Samuel Alberti has shown the importance of the conversazione, describing it as ‘a ubiquitous culture event of tremendous significance and popularity’ (2003, 211), and Simon Naylor (2015) has further demonstrated how these events established scientific discussion and exchange in the provinces. Moreover, as Alberti (2003, 211) points out, our current practices tend to obscure our appreciation of the diversity on offer at such Victorian events: Too often we carry our current disciplinary boundaries with us to our historical studies, obscuring the proximity of diverse cultural practices. The exhibitions and demonstrations were part of an ongoing tradition of interwoven discourses that was characteristic of Victorian urban life.

The mixed nature of the Peterborough exhibits is thus in keeping with Victorian conversazione practices. More generally, it helps us understand the ‘diverse cultural practices’ of previous eras. The conversazione shows a less compartmentalised approach firstly to science and the arts and also to culture, leisure, entertainment, and education. As we will see, this 2 26

April 1876, Minute Book I: Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club.

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was also practised by individuals connected to the Society, such as the long-time curator of the Museum, J.W. Bodger, whose interests ranged across geology, history, and archaeology, encompassing different aspects of everyday cultural practice in his quest to discover more details about the Peterborough locality. Yet this is not to suggest that such ‘diverse cultural practices’ were entirely harmonious, since there seems to have been some tension between the different activities of the Society. Certainly, the early Minute Books contain several reproaches to members for their lack of exertion in cataloguing local geological formations and botanical discoveries, as in the President’s Report for 1872, where he complains that he ‘is not quite satisfied as to the amount of local scientific work which has been carried out by the Society’. Local fossils and rocks have not been properly recorded; ‘no List has been made or even attempted’ of local botany; ‘[in] the Mosses, Fungi, Grasses, Fishes, Land and Freshwater Shells and Ferns no steps have been taken to collect the local kinds and to preserve a list of them or even naming them’.3 It is a repeated complaint through the early years of the Society, which shows itself to be not simply a repository or collection but a tool to discover and record local environment. Anxieties around attendance and participation were present even in the Peterborough of the 1870s: ‘It was said, when the society was first established, that there would be scarcely half-a-dozen people in the town with sufficient geological or scientific taste to cause them to join as members. That prediction, however, had not been verified…’.4 The Society continued to fluctuate, nonetheless, in numbers and finances. An ambitious series of public lectures by visiting speakers attracted a good deal of interest, including Thomas Hepworth from the Royal Polytechnic on ‘The Electric Light: How Far will it Supersede Gas?’ accompanied by ‘brilliant Experiments’ (Advertisement for talk, 6 December 1880; Minute Book I). Entry costs to the lectures ranged from 6d to 2 shillings, but the minutes record that the Society suffered a loss as a result. Despite this disappointment, such public talks seem to have marked a more outward-facing role for the Society, which perhaps was now modelling itself in a small way on institutions such as the Royal Polytechnic, 3 President’s Report, 1872. Minute Book I: Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club. 4 From a report on ‘Conversazione’ 26 April 1876. Minute Book I: Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club. Hereafter references in text as ‘Minute Book I’.

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with its crowd-pleasing lantern shows and cabinet of curiosities, making science entertaining. Over the next few years, there are mentions of other Royal Polytechnic lecturers visiting such as B.J. Malden, who offered a show entitled ‘From Cannon Street to Cabul’, sixty dioramic views featuring scenes of the Afghan wars in 1881, and followed it with a ‘Grand Astronomical Entertainment’ in 1882. These shows—part educational, part entertaining—show that the Society was seeking to appeal to a popular audience, and their continued provision through the 1880s suggests that despite occasional financial losses, they must have been broadly successful. Certainly, by the 1890s, the public lecture series were very well established and crowded. The ‘crush to obtain admission was extraordinary’ for a lecture in 1895 on ‘Spiders – their work and wisdom’: ‘Ladies fainted during the evening, and had to be carried out’ (Report on the Gilchrist Lecture, February 21, 1895; Minute Book I). In addition to this public-facing educational work, the quest for a museum in which the Society could keep its collections continued for several years. The minutes of a meeting in December 1877 detail the ‘long-held want of a museum together with a reference library of scientific works and [hope] that Peterboro would soon make an effort, like many other provincial towns to acquire that which not only affords amusement but tends to raise the mind above its ordinary level’ (Minutes, December 10, 1877; Minute Book I). By 1880, the Society had acquired rooms in Long Causeway and had begun to advertise for and receive numerous exhibits. Some of these were eclectic: the remains of the heads of elephants and hippopotami, Chinese idols, engravings of royalty, and collections of fans. But the real aim of the museum, as J.W. Bodger noted in several appeals, was to gather together items of local interest. By 1892, the Peterborough Advertiser was listing numerous acquisitions and donations relating to this: Pleistocene fossils gathered from the region, Roman remains, and straw and bone marquetry work ‘made by the French prisoners at Norman Cross’ (cutting from the Peterborough Advertiser, February 6, 1892; Minute Book I). Many similar items are still on display in the present-day Museum: they speak to the Society’s long-standing interest in exploring and cataloguing the local environment and community, past and present. They also demonstrate the enthusiasms of the two main organisers of the Society in the later years of the nineteenth century, J.W. Bodger and Charles Dack. Bodger was a keen local collector with a wide-­ranging interest in collecting everyday items of social history and culture for

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the museum. He was an eager participant in archaeological debate, for example contributing a drawing of an ice-skate made out of animal bone, which had been excavated in Huntingdonshire, to Robert Munro’s Prehistoric Problems (1897) in an attempt to settle difficult questions about the exact nature and chronology of particular practices: prehistoric, classical, and present-day. The collection which bears his name in the Peterborough Museum encompasses a wide range of prehistoric finds. But Bodger’s interest in the material aspects of everyday culture was not limited to the past. At the same time as his contribution to the debate about prehistoric bone skates, he and Dack, the museum curator at that point, put out an appeal for items made at the Napoleonic prisoner of war camp, Norman Cross, a few miles from Peterborough. The camp had been active from 1797 to 1814 and was intended to be a place of humane treatment, with the prisoners encouraged to learn how to read and write and to earn a little money through selling their crafts, including models, toys, and pictures. Bodger and Dack wanted to create a record of these crafts, which had been very widely known at the time, and sought to collect items which the public might be hoarding in their attics, holding a special exhibition to showcase the work. They amassed an enormous collection which is still one of the highlights of the museum, featuring intricate pictures of straw and bone, decorative items, watch stands, shrines, figurines, and mementos of Nelson. Thus, while the rooms sometimes hosted visiting displays, such as the annual loan of objects from the South Kensington Museum, organised jointly by the Peterborough Natural History Society and the Peterborough School of Science, Art and Technology, the main focus for the museum’s collecting activities was on building a collection of objects of local interest, largely collected directly from Peterborough’s inhabitants. Moreover, if the museum sourced its collections from local people, it was in turn controlled by them, since it was owned not by a central body but by all the members of the Society. This, too, was in keeping with the initial remit of the Society. It had, from the start, nurtured a keen sense of collective identity. The 1872 Report decrees that the ‘management of the affairs of the Society is vested in the whole body of Members’, and that ‘every Paper read to the Members shall become the property of the Society’ (Annual Report, 1872; Minute Book I). It also encouraged the sharing of exhibits and of reference works. The same principles applied to the foundation of the museum, which was seen, like the papers delivered at the meetings, as the collective property of the Society. This led

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to some angry exchanges in the late 1890s as the future of the museum was debated in the wake of the Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891. The Act invested urban authorities with the power to provide and maintain museums, and the Society was at first eager to explore this new source of support and funding. However, in return, the Peterborough Town Council required that the collection of the Society ‘become the absolute property of the corporation’ (letter of 20 November 1897, from W. Mellows to J.W. Bodger and C. Dack; Minute Book I). But this went directly against Society rules, and there was little enthusiasm for ceding control of the museum. After meetings where ‘strong feelings’ were voiced on both sides, the Society decided to retain control of its collection, although one consequence of this was that the museum did not obtain a permanent home until 1931, with the donation of its current buildings by Percy Malcolm Stewart, Chair of the London Brick Company. The Society managed the collections through the twentieth century, changing its name to the Museum Society in 1947 to reflect that this had become its primary concern. In 1968, the Society gifted the collections to the city, and they therefore passed into the control of the council, but it was not until 2010 that the management of the buildings and their collections passed entirely to an independent trust, Vivacity, which manages culture and leisure facilities on behalf of Peterborough City Council. The Society, as a collective entity, therefore managed to retain control of its collections for over a century, probably because, from the start, it had a clear sense of purpose: to understand the local environment and to build up a shared understanding of its history. As such it taps into an important strand of Victorian intellectual life, the ‘co-operative, mobile, investigative, subtly theoretical and didactic vigour’ of the learned Society, which, as Simon Knell (2009, 1) has analysed, could use careful local observation to shape national narratives. Knell’s case study, the Geological Society of London, was, like Peterborough, formed from social interchange and from close detailed observation of the material world. Knell’s analysis of the Geological Society and ‘the energy and spirit, mobility and philosophical position of its highly co-operative membership’ (2009, 8) provides us with an important Victorian narrative of museum building, one which runs slightly counter to the characterisation, as Minihan (1977) has analysed, of museums as vehicles of improvement, relaying the ‘civilising, ennobling influence’ of the arts to the people. Minihan traces a growing interest from the turn of

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the nineteenth century, gathering pace in the 1830s and 1840s, in the utility of museums to impart ‘upper-class culture and values to the lower classes’, and cites the Select Committee on National Monuments and Works of Art, appointed in 1841, enquiring into museums and public edifices ‘as a means of moral and intellectual improvement for the People’ (1977, 87). Through the later decades of the nineteenth century, public debate raged about the extent to which the arts should be supported by the government—arguments which drew not only on economic and social justifications but also on larger Romantic-Victorian discussions about the transformative power of art. Yet simultaneously there were other important drivers for local natural history museums and learned societies. Although there is one mention of cultivating a ‘purer taste for works of Art’, this quickly drops from view in the minutes of the Peterborough Society. Instead, the emphasis was placed firmly on impartially gathering and cataloguing different examples of nature and culture from the region, past and present, and painstakingly building up an image of local history, archaeology, geology, and everyday practice. Some objects collected by the Peterborough Society still have the power to trouble current definitions of culture, as with the items made by the Napoleonic prisoners of war. One of the pieces acquired by Bodger and Dack, a cockerel painstakingly made out of mutton-bones, was recently exhibited in the Tate Britain British Folk Art exhibition (2014). Its inclusion prompted debate from critics about the boundaries of art and the definition of folk (Buck 2014; Myrone 2014). As an artefact produced by a French prisoner and sold for profit, it does not easily fit into narratives about artistic authenticity or national identity either, both of which are sometimes invoked as a way of helping to understand folk art. It seems to illustrate Myrone’s comment that the ‘value of “folk art”’ lies in ‘a complex position-taking which seems to efface or invert hierarchies of taste, but which nonetheless produces cultural value in asymmetrical and uneven ways’ (2009, 47). Yet in their appeal for such items, Bodger and the Museum Society are looking less to ‘produce cultural value’ or make judgements about taste, but to reflect the local community and its specific history. In their attentiveness to what makes up a collective identity, the Society and its museum allow us a different perspective on cultural value, one which offers an interesting counterpoint to the narratives of museum building which feature in Minihan’s study. In the sections which follow I look, first, at the larger national debate surrounding cultural value in the later nineteenth century and then suggest an alternative

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model for the Peterborough Society, drawn from the long history of local cultural practice, specifically gentlemen’s societies of the surrounding area.

3.3   Culture, Value, Practice: Larger Nineteenth-Century Debates The wrangling about the status and role of museums should be placed in the context of a larger debate about cultural value, judgement, and taste through the long nineteenth century. Specifically, the foundation of the Peterborough Society in 1871 is contemporaneous with two important and influential definitions of culture: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). However, the two uses of the word culture by Arnold and Tylor in fact offer opposing perspectives, both of which are significant in determining how we should place the example of Peterborough. We should first turn to Arnold, whose definition of culture as ‘a study of perfection’ (1993, 59) exerted a powerful influence over later nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. For Arnold, culture has a ‘moral, social, and beneficent character’ (p. 61), which can exert a civilising and healing influence over humanity. In defining this ideal, Arnold was taking part in a much larger debate about the place and relevance of culture in national identity and governance, speaking out both against those who saw it as an archaism, a ‘frivolous and useless thing’ when set against the real work of economic growth and national prosperity and against those who saw culture as a reflection of individual behaviour. Culture does not mirror ordinary life: culture, in Arnold’s reckoning, is the ideal to which life should aspire. It ‘indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that’ (p. 64). Despite the implications of this comment on the ‘raw person’, Arnold’s aim was not an elitist one. Culture, he argues, should not be viewed or valued as ‘an engine of social and class distinction’, a ‘badge’ of superiority (p. 58). However, it does entail an idealistic commitment to intellectual and moral improvement: it is the opposite of narrow self-interest and represents a ‘moral and social passion for doing good’ (p. 59). It is, moreover, an ongoing process of questioning and revising

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perspectives: ‘Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming’ (p. 62). This aspect is sometimes written out of Arnold’s definition of culture, which is often reduced to ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’, as if this might represent a set body of texts or thought (p. 79). On the other hand, Arnold’s concept of culture does, undeniably, struggle with the question of who might decide or define ‘perfection’ or set the standards for the ‘beautiful, graceful and becoming’. As such, Arnold’s model works against the era’s ‘diverse cultural practices’ (Alberti, 211) and may have contributed to the tightening of disciplinary boundaries which took hold through the twentieth century. In these senses, then, we might view Arnold as a useful counter-position to the perspective being formed at the same time by the Peterborough Society, with its emphasis on materials of local interest and its diverse investigations into science, history, and archaeology. It’s hard to fit the cockerel made of mutton-bones, with its jaunty tail and joyfully rendered scarlet comb, into Arnold’s sense of what should be celebrated as culture. The Society’s drive is to collect and order everything, not necessarily to decide what is ‘best’ or ‘becoming’. In this, it fits more closely with a different view of culture which was emerging at the time. This view, which we might characterise as a more anthropological outlook, is perhaps best explained by Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). Arnold’s emphasis was on the improvement of the ‘raw person’; Tylor, instead, focussed on the analysis of that person’s behaviour. Tylor had been developing his concepts since the 1860s, drawn from his own archaeological and anthropological expeditions, as well as his reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In Primitive Culture, he defines culture ‘or Civilisation’ as a ‘complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (vol. I, 1). This is much closer to the outlook of the Peterborough Society, but this definition of culture did not gain the same sort of traction as Arnold’s ideas, which we might see as shaping policy through the twentieth century. Part of the reason for Arnold’s influence is his powerful, allusive rhetoric, rich in echoes of his reading, especially Wordsworth. His ideal of culture was, at heart, shaped by his love of Wordsworth and the Wordsworthian concept of poetry, as put forward in the ‘Preface’ to Victorian editions of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, as enlightening the reader, leaving his ‘affections strengthened and purified’ (Wordsworth 1974, vol. I, 147). To guide us towards this ideal, both writers suggest

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that Society needs cultural arbiters: for Wordsworth, this is the Poet, a man distinguished from others through his sensibility and tenderness, ‘who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul’ (vol. 1, p. 159). For Arnold, these are ‘men of culture’, a form of disinterested intellectual aristocracy (p. 79). Such men might lead us into ‘fresh pastures and teach us to love and enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, enlarging our sensibility and purifying instincts’ (Keynes, 23). That last phrase carries the authentic resonance of Arnold, with an echo of Wordsworth coming through in the word ‘purifying’. Yet this is a quotation not from Culture and Anarchy, but from Maynard Keynes, in a speech to mark the launch of the Arts Council in summer (1945). As Oliver Bennett (2005) has convincingly argued, Arnold’s Wordsworthian conception of the transformative moral and social power of the arts, mediated by key figures of cultural authority, had a profound effect on institutions and policies of the twentieth century. While views of culture such as Edward Burnett Tylor’s remained important to a definition of modern anthropology, the rhetoric of cultural policy drew, instead, from the Arnoldian-Wordsworthian model. Keynes’s speech is only one example of the manifold ways in which the echoes of Romantic ideals resonate through post-war policy. Indeed, we might go so far as to say, with Bennett (2007), that ‘post-war cultural policy in Britain was itself a Romantic project’ (2007, 17). As Bennett shows, this Romantic ideal has continued into more recent governmental rhetoric. Lord Chris Smith, in his role as Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport in the late 1990s, repeatedly referred to creative activity as having the power to ‘uplift people’s hearts’, to inspire, transform, and invigorate lives: a small reminder, perhaps, that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and that their Romantic ideals shaped his approach to culture (Smith 1998, 6). Perhaps hoping to channel the electoral successes of those Blairite years, Ed Miliband in notes for a televised leaders’ debate in April 2015 also invoked a Wordsworthian phrase, referring to himself as a ‘happy warrior’, from Wordsworth’s 1806 poem, ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’, on the death of Nelson. The happy warrior is, essentially, a version of the cultural arbiter, ‘Whose high endeavours are an inward light / That makes the path before him always bright’ (Wordsworth 2008, 320). Such examples testify to the power the Romantic-Victorian narrative continues to hold over those engaged in governmental dialogues. Twenty-first-century perspectives on cultural

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policy have, of course, long since moved on from this Arnoldian ideal, but when we talk about historicising our understanding of cultural value, this powerful Romantic/Victorian model is often the narrative which we reach for, further reinforced by classic works such as Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, which specifically pinpoints the birth of modern culture as the Industrial Revolution, the early years of Romanticism. And yet we are now reading the ‘Romantic project’ itself in different ways and understanding Romantic culture as much more crowded and various than the traditional focus on a few canonical authors. Literary criticism of the period has begun to foreground community, sociability, and exchange rather than individual writers, the man set apart from others, in Wordsworth’s terms, ‘endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness’. Romanticism has been traditionally identified with the Wordsworthian or Shelleyan figure of ‘the lone poet, withdrawn into productive introspection, with individualism rather than collective activity’ (Russell and Tuite 2002, 4). But literary scholars and historians (e.g. Mee 2011) are now beginning to appreciate different models of conversation, and community in the period, some with their roots in much earlier eighteenth-century and even seventeenth-century models: the periodical, the collaborative work, the coffee-house, the tavern, the group of friends, the political meeting, and, to return to the focus of this chapter, the Society.5 This longer, broader view is helpful for our understanding of an institution such as the Peterborough Museum Society. Having ascertained that the Society, with its emphasis on the involvement of the community, does not necessarily match up with Romantic-Victorian narratives of cultural value and the transformative power of the arts, it is useful to set it in dialogue, instead, with some older models of sociability and cultural production. The enthusiasm of the Society and members such as Bodger for understanding the history, natural history, and archaeology of the locality built, I argue, on an even older tradition in Peterborough, the eighteenth-century convention of the learned Society or association, which flourished all over Britain in the period, ‘vector[s]’, as the historian Peter Clark has put it, for ‘new ideas, new values, new kinds of social alignment, and forms of national, regional and local identity’ 5 See, for example, Mee (2011), and the Leverhulme project Networks of Improvement: Literary Clubs and Societies c.1760–c.1840. https://www.york.ac.uk/eighteenth-century-studies/research/networksofimprovement/. Accessed 16 Aug 2015.

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(Clark 2000, ix). ‘If a British Enlightenment did exist’, he argues, ‘then one of its principal engines was the Georgian voluntary society’ (p. ix). This is a history which needs to be fully remembered and which goes some way towards providing a useful alternative model of cultural production and cultural participation particularly helpful in the case of provincial cities such as Peterborough.

3.4  Gentlemen’s Societies in the East Midlands Gentlemen’s Societies typically debated ideas, shared scientific experiments, conducted antiquarian research and excavation, and read recently published literature and periodicals. The emphasis was on mutual communication of scientific observation, although this in itself could, as Clark points out, carry certain cultural or social connotations. Commenting on the growth of learned societies in the East Midlands— Peterborough, Stamford, Boston, Lincoln, Wisbech, Market Overton, West Deepham, and Greetham—he notes that such societies were ‘an essential part of their new smart social world […] Such bodies not only celebrated urban revival but shone as beacons of urbane improvement to the neighbouring countryside’ (Clark 2000, 85). The parent of all these East Midlands groups was the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, founded in 1710, which counted among its early members Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, and Alexander Pope. It inspired one of its members, Timothy Neve, to found an equivalent Society in nearby Peterborough in 1730. By closely examining the early debates and ideals of such local institutions, a longer history of collective cultural participation may be traced, one which has bearing on the foundation of later organisations such as the Peterborough Museum Society, and which should be taken into account when exploring the cultural legacies of particular places. Spalding Gentleman’s Society was ‘instituted for Supporting mutual Benevolence, raising and preserving, & rendring of general Use a Publick Lending Library […] And the Improvement of the Members in All Arts and Sciences’ (Honeybone and Honeybone 2010, ix). The collective aspect of the endeavour is clear, although it owed its success to the drive and energy of one man, the antiquarian and barrister Maurice Johnson. He established the Society when only 22, recently returned from his legal training at the Inns of Court where he had been an eager participant in London coffee-house culture, friendly with John Gay, acquainted with literary luminaries such as Addison, Steele, and Pope.

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Johnson was determined to recreate the same atmosphere of conversation and mutual learning in provincial Spalding, ‘an endeavour new, and untried before’ (Moore 1852, 4). In the earliest Minute Book, Johnson made a marginal note recording his inspiration for the Society, ‘the Hint was taken and pursued from Conversations with Secretary Addyson, Sr Richard Steele, Laur. Euden [Eusden] now the Poet Laurat, Mr Alexander Pope the Poet, Col. Brett, Mr Jn. Gay & other Gentlemen at their Clubb at Buttons Coffee house in Covent Garden London by me M. Johnson’ (Honeybone and Honeybone 2010, xii). There is thus a direct lineage from London coffee-house culture to the provinces: moreover, provincial groups kept such early eighteenth-century traditions alive well into subsequent centuries. Indeed, Spalding Gentlemen’s Society continues to this day, maintaining a museum and regular meetings. The Peterborough Society directly modelled itself on Spalding: in May 1730, we see Timothy Neve requesting a copy of the Spalding Society’s rules on which to base those of Peterborough (Honeybone and Honeybone 2010, 55). Every member was to pay one shilling per meeting and three shillings per quarter. Power was collective. ‘Any Five Regular Members meeting within due hours and at the Society-room shall make a legal Society for doing or ordering anything material, but not fewer’.6 There was a system of balloting and democratic voting, and also, like Spalding, and like the subsequent incarnations of the Peterborough Natural History and Museum Societies, the intention to build up what they termed a ‘Museum’ of curiosities and books owned by the Society. On subscribing, each member was required to ‘present a book or books, of what value he thinks proper and therein his name & titles shall be written as a benefactor’ (PGS/1/1, fol. 2). The debt to Spalding was also evident in the list of honorary members, headed by Maurice Johnson, with other key Spalding names including Beaupré Bell and William Stukeley the antiquary. The Peterborough group sought out metropolitan as well as regional intellectual affiliations, as with the appointment of 2 June 1731, when it was ‘Agreed and ordered that Mr Andrew Motte of the City of London Gent and Deputy Professor of

6 From the opening page of the Minute Book 1730–1742, Peterborough Gentleman’s Society, fol. 1. Peterborough Archives Service, PGS/1/1, hereafter referenced in text. By kind permission of the Peterborough Archives Service.

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Astronomy in Gresham College, be admitted an Honourary Fellow of this Society’ (PGS/1/1, fol. 32). Serious intellectual work was done at both Spalding and Peterborough: detailed local historiography, topography, archaeology, and scientific experiment. A sample of the remarkable Minute Books from Peterborough shows the Society’s varied activities, as they met several times monthly, keeping up detailed minutes and records of conversations, items presented to the Society and letters received. The inaugural meeting featured a report of experiments with pressure and depth off the coast of Norway; this was followed in subsequent meetings by experiments with Latin verse forms and Greek palindromic sentences, mathematics, and philosophical speculation drawing on George Cheyne’s Newtonian works. Correspondents such as Johnson reported from the Royal Society’s proceedings in London, including ‘a acct. of a very strange and uncomon [sic] case well attested of a Woman being delivered of a Child per anum’ (PGS/1/1, fol. 23). Alongside this interest in larger contemporary debate and Royal Society proceedings, there was also a strong emphasis on local history and archaeology, such as a historical account of the foundation of the Church of St John Baptist, Peterborough with a list of vicars, and drawings of Roman coins found in an urn underground by a labourer making the new road from March to Wisbech. Like the later Natural History and Museum Societies, members also exhibited a keen curiosity in local botany and geology, noting, for example, in October 1735 a display of ‘curious petrifactions of shells [….] taken out of Mr Parker’s stone pits at the end of Westgate’, and investigating, like their later Natural History Society counterparts, curious local strata (PGS/1/1, fol. 125). Alongside this scientific and historical enquiry, both Peterborough and Spalding Gentlemen’s Societies shared an emphasis on conviviality, sociability, and friendship. If Spalding was founded in the name of ‘mutual Benevolence’, then Peterborough, following suit, was ‘instituted’, as the Minute Books comment, ‘for the improvement of Literature and promoting of Friendship and good Neighbourhood’ (PGS/1/1, fol. 1). Johnson was explicit about what might promote friendship and neighbourliness: ‘without a Cheerfull Glass and sober Pipe’, he commented, ‘we Englishmen can’t well keep up Conversation’ (Sweet 2004, 115). He always made sure Society meetings were supplied with ‘coffee, tea, chocolate, wine, cider, ale (and a chamberpot), as well as pipes, tobacco and snuff’ (Sweet 2004, 115).

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However, such conviviality had its limits. The Peterborough Minute Books also record fearsome quarrels, as ideals of community and shared knowledge break down. In 1744, there was a serious altercation over the ownership of the Society’s collections, with one senior member, the Rev. Marshall, laying claim to certain items and behaving, as recorded in the Minutes, ‘in an outrageous manner’. His ‘contentious behaviour’ ended with his expulsion from the Society: ‘he has broke into our Fundamental Rules & articles’, the members noted, and offended against the Society’s central principle of collective decision-making (PGS/1/1, Minute Book 1743–1809, March 6–27, 1745). There were obviously also other worries about the possible tensions of community, since both Spalding and Peterborough had a rule that political debate was not to be entertained in the Society meetings. Peterborough’s rules include the stricture that ‘No-one shall be allowed to talk Politicks in the Society room, neither shall a Political or Party paper be read there’, but ‘every member shall freely communicate to the Society whatever occurs to him worthy, as usefull, new, uncomon [sic] or curious in any art or Science; and shall endeavour to cultivate a correspondence with Gentlemen of Learning residing at a distance or even in foreign parts, about any thing he judges may be for the advantage or information of the Society’ (PGS/1/1, fol. 2). The emphasis is on as broad a remit of enquiry as possible, leading to mutual improvement. While the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society continues to survive, the Peterborough Gentlemen’s Society slowly declined in importance through the eighteenth century, until by the nineteenth century it had dwindled into a book club and lending library. It was finally dissolved and its collections given to the new Peterborough municipal library in 1899. However, its ideals found new life, I argue, in the foundation of the Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club in 1871. The active interest the later Society took in the former is demonstrated by the publication of a history of the Peterborough Gentlemen’s Society by the museum curator and Society secretary, Charles Dack, in 1899, in which he pays homage to the ideals of the Gentlemen’s Society at a time when the future of his own Society and its collections was being debated (Dack 1899). In the case of both the Gentlemen’s Society and the Natural History Society, the Minute Books reveal how an anthropological model of enquiry is being built up. Although not excluding classical or philosophical readings, the main focus, especially of the Society in its later incarnations, is on the local environment, exploring its particularities in detail, through mutual discussion. This model is essentially drawn

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from an eighteenth-century concept of intellectual discovery through exchange and conversation, as practised in the London coffee-houses frequented by Maurice Johnson in the early 1700s. No topic—with the exception of potentially fiery political discourse—is debarred from sustained enquiry, from caterpillars to astronomy, electrical experiments to local geology. This is a different vision of cultural enquiry from the ‘study of perfection’ put forward by Arnold. Rather than the ‘best that has been thought and written’, mediated by skilled arbiters, we see in Peterborough a long-standing interest in culture in its broadest sense— ideas, customs, social behaviours, and local environment—explored collectively, through shared enquiry. Both the Peterborough Gentlemen’s Society and the Natural History Society are shaped by their members’ interests in excavating—metaphorically and literally—everyday culture in their locality. This community involvement, it is important to point out, could have its limits. As we have seen, there could be conflict and quarrels within these Society communities—sometimes violent ones—about the nature and purpose of the meetings or ownership of resources. More broadly, and more seriously, these communities had unspoken boundaries of class and social status. In Peterborough, as elsewhere, the Museum Society, like the Gentlemen’s and Natural History Societies before it, was run largely by and for people with the education and leisure to participate in such pursuits, and the conversazione, as Alberti notes, was a phenomenon of ‘Victorian urban middle-class life’. While the museum collections themselves at Peterborough do seem to have exerted a wide social draw, the Society itself remained solidly bourgeois. And although different, the cultural practices represented by ‘Arnoldism’ and by the Museum Society might have looked equally impenetrable from below. I have argued in this chapter that historical and local specificity should nuance our understanding of cultural practices and policies; we must also bear in mind the importance of class. For example, Working Men’s Clubs posed—and to some extent, still pose—an important challenge to traditional views of cultural value and practice (see Cherrington 2009). Their growth through the later nineteenth century, and the struggle for self-governance many such clubs went through in the 1870s and 1880s, poses another significant challenge to the dominant Arnoldian cultural narratives and a reminder that ‘cultural policy is not to be viewed simply from a top-down perspective’ (Cherrington 2009, 188).

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3.5  The Place of History in Policy: Some Conclusions Taking account of practices within particular communities, then, allows a different narrative to emerge concerning value and participation: one which nuances our understanding of Romantic-Victorian values and which allows a longer historical perspective. We begin to see how eighteenth-century ideas of cultural exchange and conversation persist into the later nineteenth century and indeed survive into the present day. Academics and policy-makers alike need to consider the long histories of sociability, community, and exchange in particular areas and at particular times. Such an approach will help us get beyond the dominant national narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and appreciate a richer history of local cultural participation and practice, perhaps in ways which have not been officially recognised. It might also provide a springboard for future research into the roots of the different approaches to cultural policy-making in England between central government and its institutions and local government. This chapter has highlighted many issues around the importance of the local, including community ownership and self-determination, which map onto more recent concerns of local and national governance. The position of the arts sector within local government is a complex one: as Clive Gray (2002, 2016) has argued, it has traditionally been seen as a subsidiary concern, having to develop ‘attachments’ to other policy considerations in order to negotiate a place for itself. New emphasis on ‘bespoke, locally driven devolution’, as outlined in the 2015 Inquiry into Better Devolution, may change this (Devolution and the Union 2016, 5). Evidence given by Arts Council England to the Inquiry highlighted the need to ‘rethink how local government and the Arts Council collaborate’ (Arts Council England 2016, 2) on the devolution process: for example, the document suggests ways in which the Arts Council will focus on ‘areas of identified low engagement in the arts to boost participation by strengthening and growing community-led arts partnerships’ (p. 7). Such rethinking of local relationships, and strengthening of community ties, must, I argue, take into account the long history of the local, and allow provincial voices of the past, and present, their place in the ‘nationwide conversation’ demanded by the Inquiry (Devolution and the Union 2016, 5). I would like to close with an example of one local conversation with the past, by returning to Chris Porsz’s talk at the Museum Society. He began with the image of neighbours in Gladstone Street, the place where

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his parents, Polish immigrants, had settled in 1947, after enduring great wartime suffering. The picture, and its setting, seems to provide a key to the way in which his own experience as the child of immigrants has shaped his creative identity, growing up in the third wave New Town of Peterborough in the 1970s and 1980s and continuing to work long shifts as a paramedic in the city alongside his photography activities. Although now gaining a worldwide following, Porsz presented himself in the talk as humble, almost ambivalent, about the purpose of his art: ‘I am proud of my pictures of Peterborough although I never imagined I was creating a record of social history […] I feel guilty that my family has suffered for my “art” with me roaming the streets for hours trying to satisfy some creative urge’ (Porsz 2012, 133).7 Porsz does not present a transformative narrative about cultural value here, but rather the passion of an individual, engaging with a particular place, although through his focus on marginal figures and his foregrounding of his parents’ story, a subtle message about community, inclusion, and tolerance is put forward. In encouraging Peterborough’s communities to engage with one another and with their history, he is also continuing the aims of Bodger and the original Museum Society and even the Gentlemen’s Society of the early eighteenth century, with its ‘promoting of Friendship and good Neighbourhood’. It is in this context that we might place Porsz’s introductory picture, which he has called ‘Good Neighbours’: an echo across the centuries which reminds us of the complex ways in which local communities might create narratives about themselves and their cultural practices. We need to make space to remember such narratives and to allow the echoes of the past to be heard in the cultural policy of the present.

Bibliography Alberti, S. J. M. M. (2003). Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England. Journal of Victorian Culture, 8(2), 208–230. https://doi. org/10.3366/jvc.2003.8.2.208. All-Party Parliamentary Group on Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution in the United Kingdom. (2016). Devolution and the Union: A Higher Ambition. London: House of Commons. https://www.local.gov.uk/parliament/devolution-appg. Accessed 12 Sept 2019. 7 With particular thanks to Chris Porsz for his help, enthusiasm, and generous permission to use images. See also http://www.chrisporsz.com/. Accessed 11 May 2017.

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Arnold, M. (1993). Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings (S. Collini, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arts Council England. (2016). Written Evidence Submitted for the APPG for Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution in the UK’s Inquiry into Better Devolution for the Whole UK. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/ files/download-file/Written_evidence_submitted_for_the_APPG_devo.pdf. Accessed 12 Sept 2019. Bennett, O. (2005). Beyond Machinery: The Cultural Policies of Matthew Arnold. History of Political Economy, 37(3), 455–482. Bennett, O. (2007). Intellectuals, Romantics and Cultural Policy. In J. Ahearne & O. Bennett (Eds.), Intellectuals and Cultural Policy (pp. 3–19). London: Routledge. Buck, L. (2014, July 3). Folk Art Comes Full Circle at Tate Britain. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/38499/folk-art-comesfull-circle-at-tate-britain.html. Accessed 27 Mar 2015. Burnett Tylor, E. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (2 Vols.). London: John Murray. Cherrington, R. L. (2009). The Development of Working Men’s Clubs: A Case Study of Implicit Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(2), 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630802653798. Clark, P. (2000). British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dack, C. (1899). The Peterborough Gentleman’s Society. Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 5, 141–160. Fleming, T., & Erskine, A. (2011). Supporting Growth in the Arts Economy. Arts Council England. https://static.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ 1321264167-arts-council-creative_economy_final210711.pdf. Accessed 12 Sept 2019. Gilmore, A. (2017). The Park and the Commons: Vernacular Spaces for Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 34–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2017.1274358. Gove, M. (2012, June 11). Letter to Tim Oates. http://data.parliament.uk/ DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2012-0902/LetterfromSoStoTimOates.pdf. Accessed 1 Aug 2015. Gray, C. (2002). Local Government and the Arts. Local Government Studies, 28(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/714004133. Gray, C. (2016). Local Government and the Arts Revisited. Local Government Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2016.1269758. Honeybone, D., & Honeybone, M. (2010). The Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society 1710–1761. The Lincoln Record Society, 99. Suffolk: The Boydell Press.

66  F. JAMES Keynes, J. M. (1945, July 12). The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes. Listener, 34, 361. Reprinted in Arts Council of Great Britain, 1st Annual Report, 1945/1946, 20–23. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. Knell, S. (2009). The Road to Smith: How the Geological Society came to Possess English Geology. Geological Society London Special Publications, 317(1), 1–47. Mee, J. (2011). Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miles, A., & Ebrey, J. (2017). The Village in the City: Participation and Cultural Value on the Urban Periphery. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 58–69. https://doi. org/10.1080/09548963.2017.1274360. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.201 6.1204043. Minihan, J. (1977). The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain. New York: New York University Press. Moore, W. (1852). The Gentlemen’s Society at Spalding: Its Origin and Progress. London: Pickering. Myrone, M. (2009). Instituting Folk Art. Visual Culture in Britain, 10, 27–52. Myrone, M. (2014, June 4). First Look: ‘British Folk Art’ at Tate Britain. Apollo: The International Art Magazine. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/firstlook-british-folk-art-tate-britain/. Accessed 27 Mar 2015. Naylor, S. (2015). Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England. London and New York: Routledge. Peterborough Archives Service, PGS/1/1 [Non-paginated: consists of Peterborough Gentleman’s Society: Minute Book 1730–1742; Minute Book 1743–1809; “Peterboro Book Society”: Minute Book 1810–1830; Minute Book 1830–1899]. Peterborough Museum Archives, Minute Book I: Peterborough Natural History Society and Field Club, ‘Peterborough Natural History Society […] Design, Objects, and Management’, 1872 [Non-paginated]. Porsz, C. (2012). New England: The Culture and People of an English New Town During the 1970s and 1980s. Peterborough: Chris Porsz. Porsz, C. (2017). Street Photographer. http://www.chrisporsz.com/. Accessed 11 May 2017. Russell, G., & Tuite, C. (Eds.). (2002). Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, C. (1998). Creative Britain. London: Faber and Faber. Sweet, R. (2004). Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London and New York: Hambledon and London. Wordsworth, W. (1974). The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (W. J. B. Owen & J. Worthington Smyser, Eds., 3 Vols.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wordsworth, W. (2008). Major Works (S. Gill, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

From CEMA to the Arts Council: Cultural Authority, Participation and the Question of ‘Value’ in Early Post-war Britain Eleonora Belfiore

4.1  Introduction A key feature of the Understanding Everyday Participation project, which this edited collection originates from,1 is the commitment to interrogate the rhetoric of cultural participation prevalent within British post-war cultural policy, and the resulting centrality of preoccupations with ‘access’ to publicly funded cultural forms. The concern with widening access, whilst understandable on the part of organisations either distributing or in receipt of public resources, has tended to focus on

1 The Understanding Everyday Participation—Articulating Cultural Values project run between 2012 and 2018 and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (project reference AH/J005401/1). www.everydayparticipation.org.

E. Belfiore (*)  Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_4

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encouraging participation in formal, legitimate culture,2 whereby failure to participate has been recast as a negative state of disengagement and cultural disenfranchisement (Miles and Sullivan 2012). In this context, the aim of my contribution is to expose and explore the origins of these normative conceptions of desirable cultural participation (and therefore valuable cultural forms) which are at the heart of the administrative infrastructure for the promotion of culture and the public’s access to it (DCMS 2016; Henley 2016; Jancovich 2017). What follows will provide a critical account of the mechanisms through which this allocation of value to participation in legitimate cultural activities was established as well as contested. The chapter’s main contribution to current policy scholarship lies precisely in demonstrating the extent to which alternative regimes of cultural value centred on the importance of everyday participation remained vital and productive in the broader cultural sphere, notwithstanding their side-lining within funders’ official goals and policies. By doing so, the chapter offers a novel contribution to the development of a critical-historical examination of the wider context for contemporary political discourses around notions of ‘participation’ and ‘engagement’ and the way in which they have been articulated and embodied in cultural policies. The key focus of the historical analysis presented here is the period that encompasses the establishment of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940 and the institutionalisation of its mechanisms for arts funding through its Royal Charter incorporation following the end of the Second World War. In particular, I am interested in throwing light on the vigorous debates that, by 1946, were already taking place among British cultural leaders, politicians and educators on the vision that should guide the peacetime body for the financial support and development of the arts and culture in the country.

2 Here, culture and its appreciation are referred to as ‘legitimate’ in the sense Bourdieu gave to the word, to refer to ‘that which has been bestowed with the stamp of legitimacy at an institutional level. It is the taste that carries with it social prestige and reflects the interests of powerful groups’ (Stewart 2013, 76).

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4.2   Looking Backwards in Order to Look Forward As Robert Hutchison (1982a, 11) put it in his 1982 critical history of the Arts Council: ‘It is the residues of history that constitute the present and it is worth looking backwards in order to look forward’. The central thesis of this chapter is that the key undercurrent of tension between the two binaries of official policy goals—democratisation of culture and cultural democracy, on the one hand, and excellence and access, on the other—was already at play before the establishment of an arts council in Britain. Moreover, those tensions have remained live and have animated—whether explicitly so or more covertly, debates over the best ways to employ public resources for artistic and cultural development. It is a central contention of this chapter that a better understanding of this early history and the contemporary legacy of the key policy moment under discussion here is key to comprehending current cultural policy discourse in Britain. In particular, this history is crucial to interpreting the recent surge of popularity of the ‘participation agenda’ (Jancovich 2017), ‘everyday creativity’ (Wilson et al. 2017) and the new enthusiasm for ‘cultural democracy’ and ‘everyday participation’ that is a key development in British and international cultural policy rhetoric over the past five years or so (Bonet and Négrier 2018; Gross and Wilson 2018; Hadley and Belfiore 2018; Jeffers and Moriarty 2017; Matarasso 2019; Miles and Gibson 2016). The origin of a vision of publicly supported facilitation of ordinary forms of cultural expression and practice is usually ascribed to the influence of Raymond Williams’ (2016 [1958]) then radical declaration that ‘culture is ordinary’, its impact on 1960s and 1970s countercultural moments, and the inspiration it provided to the community arts movement and other radical cultural practices and activism at the time. In turn, the radical cultural politics of the countercultural movement provided inspiration for the ‘cultural rights’ campaign of the 1990s, which took its cue from UNESCO’s World Decade for Cultural Development, and the centrality of ‘culture’ to development (Gibson 2001, 2002). Its declared goal was ‘mobilising the forces of freedom of expression and creativity in the individual and the community, in the name of human rights, free will and independence of mind’ (Mayor 1988, 6). However, the key contribution this chapter makes to this otherwise well-rehearsed history is to focus on the antecedents to the 1960s’ focus on ‘ordinary’ culture. The main argument will be that the wartime, and its immediate

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aftermath, were a fundamental formative moment for these ideas and debates that will have a long influence over British (and indeed wider) cultural policy debates. Therefore, making sense of events at this time is crucial to fully making sense of the present policy moment, and the centrality of the ‘everyday participation’ agenda within it. 4.2.1   Cultural Value, Cultural Authority and the Formation of Cultural Institutions Democratisation of culture, in Tony Bennett’s words (2000, 5), focuses primarily on ‘striving to equalise conditions of access to an accepted standard of high culture’, especially among those groups who tend not to participate, or to participate less than others. A focus on cultural democracy, on the other hand, means ‘aiming for dispersed patterns of support based on an acceptance of a parity of esteem for the aesthetic values and tastes of different groups within culturally diverse societies’ (ibid.). This focus requires policies that strive for inclusion, diversity and access to the means of both cultural production and consumption, in the attempt to give the public itself the possibility of expressing themselves and creating their own culture—as opposed to merely consuming cultural products produced by creative professionals and provided by the market or subsidised cultural institutions (Kelly 1984, 101). The democratisation of excellence in the arts ostensibly prevailed in the institutionalisation of a public infrastructure for arts and culture, and the values of professionalism and metropolitan aesthetic values and priorities were eventually firmly embedded in CEMA’s (and later ACGB’s) goals and priorities. Nonetheless, the concern for cultural democracy and the belief in the primacy of everyday creativity were never extinguished nor completely silenced—in fact, quite the opposite. My aim is to show that the eventual prevailing of Keynesian views (and the resulting prioritising of the principles of professional values of artistic ‘excellence’ and of a metropolitan focus on flagship cultural organisations) was never a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, the debate, tensions and alternative views were robust enough, and animated a sufficient number of influential people to remain vital, albeit on the ‘losing’ side of the history of ACGB development. I will show that some key fault lines between different approaches to conceiving the value of culture and desirable forms of cultural participation that were already perceptible in the history of CEMA (having roots

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in the interwar debates around adult education) came to be consolidated as the arts council was formed in 1946. Inevitably, such an exploration will require the engagement with earlier public debates around culture, education and participation that informed the position of different actors involved in the shaping of the post-war arts subsidy bureaucracy. A key issue in this approach then becomes whose cultural values are embodied, promoted, validated and recognised through the practices of arts funding in a particular society and in a particular time in history. This is why ‘cultural authority’ is another pivotal lens for my analysis: starting from a focus on the social production of the aesthetic (Wolff 1981), this entails an approach to cultural value that centres on the study of the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated to artistic and cultural forms and practices, or denied to them, by those who hold the required cultural authority. Questions of aesthetic judgement and the democratic challenge of developing successful audience development strategies, so that the benefits of arts subsidy are fairly distributed across society, will always be central to decision-making processes in cultural policy. However, my argument here is that it is important that the policy tensions mentioned above should also be understood as reflections of questions of cultural authority and power (Belfiore 2018). This effectively entails looking closely at the 1940s, the formative period of the cultural funding infrastructure in Britain, and the decades preceding the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain— which were also, importantly, the time when mass media consumption boomed—in order to identify what cultural values and conceptions of valuable cultural production and participation were embedded in the new public body and therefore legitimated.

4.3   CEMA, the Adult Education Movement and the Value of Participation CEMA was established in 1940 ‘as an emergency war-time organisation’ (Evans and Glasgow 1949, 46) for the purpose of keeping musicians and actors in employment and to provide ‘solace’ to evacuees scattered across the country (Glasgow 1975, 261). Consequently, as Mary Glasgow (1975, 262) pointed out, ‘[t]here was a built-in conflict between the claims of the art and those of social service, and in the lifetime of C.E.M.A. it was never fully resolved’. This conflict was evident in

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CEMA’s own maxim ‘The Best for the Most’, of which she said: ‘It was a contradiction in terms, but it served, perhaps for that very reason’. The tension resulting from this ‘contradiction’, thus, emerged very early on in internal debates about the most appropriate purpose for the newly created wartime body—which lacked a clearly defined mandate (Leventhal 1990, 295)—and any future state patronage of arts and culture. This section of the chapter will explore further this conflict between ‘the claims of arts and those of social service’ (Glasgow 1975, 263), as this is the pivotal unresolved knot that British cultural policy is still tangled in, and that recent interest in everyday participation and creativity aims to address. In doing so, it will highlight and scrutinise the pivotal influence over embryonic cultural policy debates in interwar Britain of debates taking place within the adult education movement: this is where we first see appear some of the opposing views on, and valuations of, different forms of cultural engagement that are still active in British society and transpire in contemporary debates over cultural participation (Gibson 1999; McArthur 2013; Upchurch 2016). Central to this debate is The Final Report of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction that ran between 1918 and 1919 and which is widely considered one of the most influential documents in the history of adult education in Britain (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919]). In 1917, Lloyd George’s Reconstruction Committee established a special committee tasked with reviewing and reporting on adult education. The Committee, under the chairmanship of A.L. Smith of Balliol College, Oxford, produced three interim reports looking at particular aspects of adult education (one on the general conditions of provision of adult education; one on education in the army; and one focusing in particular on Libraries and Museums). The final report, usually referred to as The 1919 Report was presented to the Prime Minister in 1919 (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919]) and, in McArthur’s words (2013, 3), ‘argued powerfully for the integration of art practice into adult education, for the value of informal modes of learning and for the place of the arts in the development of individual citizens for a modern democracy’. At the heart of the Committee’s approach (and therefore the final report) was the assumption—ratified in the Committee’s terms of reference—that adult education should only ever be non-vocational. According to its recommendations, the scope of adult education as advocated in the report included ‘citizenship’ and even more notably, ‘music

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and languages’, ‘literature and drama’ alongside ‘natural sciences’, which marked the report as innovative in its thinking. One of the elements of originality of the 1919 Report was the unprecedented role it gave the arts within its vision for an adult education fit ‘to contribute to good citizenship by preparing men [sic] for the exercise of public spirit in their social relations’ in post-First World War reconstruction, and at a time of significant social change and political turbulence in Europe (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919], 57). The proposition that opens the 1919 Report is: That the main purpose of education is to fit a man [sic] for life, and therefore in a civilised community, to fit him for his place as a member of that community. (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919], 4)

As Harold Wiltshire (1980, 10) is keen to point out in his introductory essay to the University of Nottingham’s reprint of the 1919 Report, the document argues that adult education (and therefore its arts education component) has ‘an instrumental value, that it is good for something, that it has a product which is of value to society and for which the State should therefore pay’. It thus echoes arguments that will eventually become commonplace in both educational and cultural policy rhetoric (Belfiore 2013). Importantly for the discussion on hand, Wiltshire (1980, 14) notes that whenever the 1919 Report refers to the study of arts and crafts, this study ‘unequivocally involved their practice’, that is ‘the performance of music and plays’ and ‘the making of things’. This vision was predicated on the starting point that for the endeavour of adult education, ‘we require an educational method which begins at the opposite end to the method of the primer and the blackboard’ (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919], 3). The 1919 Report also made it clear that the notion that the adult education curriculum should include the arts was intimately connected to—and even dependent on—the existence of a wider arts and cultural ecology, and ‘libraries, museums, art galleries, music and drama festivals and the like … are all seen as the necessary soil in which educational interests can be nourished’ (Wiltshire 1980, 15). The 1919 Report, thus, puts forward a coherent and compelling argument for the role of arts practice in an adult curriculum that would support learners to be able to fully express and exercise their citizenship, both in a civic and cultural sense.

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Another feature of The 1919 Report which shaped the initial set-up and priorities of CEMA is the importance given to local provision. The 6th proposition put forward in the report and prominently displayed in the report’s introduction (one of only two sections printed in capital letters in the original) is clear in this respect in stating that ‘the opportunity for adult education should be spread uniformly and systematically over the whole community’ (p. 5, emphasis added). The 1919 Report did not stop at calling for a fair spread of educational and creative opportunities across the country; it went further in denouncing the wanton London bias of British cultural life, thus prefiguring later cultural policy debates and the so-called rebalancing issue, with the resultant call for a more equitable distribution of resources between London and the regions (Hutchison 1982b; Stark et al. 2013). It is one of the misfortunes of our national life that, outside Wales and Ireland, Great Britain is unduly influenced by the culture of London, and of a very insignificant fraction of London at that. As far as the mass of the people are concerned it has all but the best of it, the appearance of a shop-made article, which is manufactured for them by clever professionals and which has no intimate relation to their own lives. (Ministry of Reconstruction 1980 [1919], 90)

The 1919 Report went on to make the case for the importance of cultural opportunities where people live, and lauded the formation of local groups of amateur actors as the kind of development that, alongside ‘cheap and accessible’ good quality drama, functions as an important instrument of education (ibid.). Despite the innovative, bold and ambitious scope of the recommendations in The 1919 Report, its influence in shaping actual provision was limited. Its vision was overshadowed by economic and political instability due to ‘persistent economic crisis combined with serious labour unrest’, which led to a focus on enhancing the offer of training programmes targeted at unemployed adults in the 1930s (Field 2001, 5–6). Whilst the report might not have resulted in a dramatic change in the provision of adult liberal education opportunities, its intellectual significance and legacy belie the lack of immediate impact on the adult educational offer and has proven important beyond the sphere of education, as the history of early state patronage of the arts shows. McArthur (2013, 22) observes that ‘[i]n its rejection of the hierarchy of metropolitan and

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regional and the separation of amateur and professional, in its esteem for direct participation and in its conviction that … the goal of education was the development of the full person’ the values expressed in The 1919 Report prefigure the ethos that drove the key personalities involved in the establishment of CEMA in 1940—not to mention later cultural politics struggles that resulted in the community arts movement in the 1970s (Jeffers and Moriarty 2017). More specifically, the initiative of establishing a body to support the arts in wartime is consensually attributed to Dr. Thomas Jones, ex-Deputy Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of the Pilgrim Trust, a charitable body working for the promotion of culture. In the 1930s, Dr. Thomas Jones, together with W.E. Williams, General Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE), was responsible for championing the need for a mechanism to support and promote ‘cultural amenities’ in the areas that were receiving new influxes of people as a result of the evacuation of London and other areas at high risk of bombing (McArthur 2013, 9). In particular, Jones had been involved in setting up the highly successful scheme ‘Art for the People’, which toured visual arts exhibitions across the country, and was partly funded by the Pilgrim Trust alongside the Carnegie Trust and other private sponsors (Minihan 1977, 183). The initiative had been devised by W.E. Williams who, in 1934, had published the pamphlet The Auxiliaries of Adult Education, which reiterated the case made in The 1919 Report for the importance of informal education. As Evans and Glasgow (1949, 35) report, Jones ‘had been impressed by the work in circulating arts exhibitions of the British Institute of Adult Education and felt that something on the same lines might be done to salvage the arts under the first impact of the war’. Jones’s objective in setting up CEMA was, according to Evans and Glasgow (1949, 35): Above all … to assist the active interest in the arts professed by certain voluntary organisations: the music-making and play-reading practised by the National Council of Social Service centres, the Women’s Institutes and Townswomen’s Guilds, the activities of the British Federation of Music Festivals and the Rural Music Schools, the travelling exhibitions of pictures, accompanied by guide lecturers, which had developed under the initiative of the British Institute of Adult Education.

In other words, the objective of the initial impetus behind the institution of CEMA was to support a number of already established organisations

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that promoted precisely what, in today’s prevalent terminology, would be referred to as ‘everyday creativity’. A commitment to the promotion of participatory arts activities was, indeed, at the core of the Pilgrim Trust’s work, and this affected the direction and ethos of CEMA at the time of its creation. The Ninth Annual Report of the Pilgrim Trust, published in 1939 (the same year in which the Trust made possible the creation of CEMA by making available £25,000 worth of funding), argued that ‘the enjoyment of the arts is closely linked with their practice’, and that ordinary people should be able to experience the arts as practitioners, not just as passive consumers (Leventhal 1990, 295). It should therefore not come as a surprise that, in the first year of its operation, CEMA, whose policy was at that time shaped by men who had close ties to the adult education movement and its values—Sir Walford Davies, E.W. Williams and Thomas Jones—should have focused efforts on supporting amateur activities across the country. Mary Glasgow’s personal memoirs recall that T.J. (as Jones was customarily called by CEMA colleagues) ‘remained suspicious of the big concerns, orchestras, theatre, opera and ballet companies, and only reluctantly agreed to co-operate with them’ (Glasgow 1986, 188). She had previously observed that ‘[o]f the two purposes proclaimed [by CEMA], “helping artists and serving audiences”, there is no doubt that the second was uppermost in his mind’ (Glasgow 1975, 262), and it is therefore unsurprising that Dr. Jones’ understanding of cultural value and where it could be found should filter through to CEMA’s public language and its priorities.

4.4   CEMA and the Birth of a National Public Infrastructure for the Arts The CEMA years (1940–1945) are an especially interesting time in British cultural policy: because of the exceptional circumstances created by the wartime conditions, the pre-war systems of cultural production and distribution were upset and reconfigured in ways that were diametrically opposed to the original status quo ante, and much different to what would eventually become the post-war funding and policy priorities’ alignment. For the most part, CEMA funded existing bodies such as the National Council of Social Service (precursor of NCVO, the National Council of Voluntary Organisations), the British Federation of

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Music Festivals (an association of competitive musical festivals in Britain and the Commonwealth founded in 1921) and the BIAE (now NIACE, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) (Landstone 1953, 20). However, it also directly organised and funded a range of cultural activities around the country—including the famous ‘blitz concerts’ (Mortier 1996)—which eventually became the core undertakings to which the ACGB would dedicate itself. CEMA also funded tours of dramas productions in the North of England and in Wales, and a series of concerts in factory canteens that eventually became one of its main strands of activity and later expanded into supporting the national symphony orchestras (Evans and Glasgow 1949). It is important to note, though, that CEMA was not the only wartime agency providing accessible opportunities for cultural engagement in England at the time: in 1939, and after over a year of tireless work, Basil Dean had set up and received ministerial approval for the establishment of ENSA, the Entertainment National Service Association. ENSA too toured live performing arts productions throughout the country principally for the entertainment of the British troops. There was however a clear distinction between the two organisations, which points to the early institutionalisation of the separation between ‘arts’ and ‘entertainment’ not only as distinct areas of activities, but also as the respective official remits of different organisations. ENSA’s historian Merriman (2013, 38–39) draws out this distinction between the two bodies and its root in their catering to differing cultural tastes: CEMA differed from ENSA in that it was considered more upmarket than Dean’s outfit and catered for more highbrow audiences. The organization couldn’t sustain a large number of shows, and so concentrated more on the quality of production rather than competing with the prodigious output of ENSA. CEMA had a touch of Reithian philosophy about it and felt the need to educate as well as entertain.

The division of responsibilities between ENSA and CEMA is a significant illustration of the ways in which a distinction between cultural participation as leisure and entertainment on the one hand and as engagement with legitimate cultural pursuits on the other runs deep within British culture. However, this distinction predates the institution of both wartime bodies and is connected to the rise of mass culture rather than the war itself. The League for Audiences, for example, which Pick (2013, 197)

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refers to as ‘a powerful between-the-wars precursor of the Arts Council of Great Britain’, was formed in 1935 and ‘was directly and unequivo­ cally hostile to the radio, gramophone, and cinema’ (ibid.). As J.H. Alden explained in an article published in 1938, the greatest concern behind the institution of the League of Audiences was the perceived negative cultural impact of the mechanic reproduction of music and drama resulting from the growth of mass forms of media production: In former days, when the British public did not take music at all seriously, this lack of unity was not of great concern. Music-making was largely in the hands of the solo-playing amateur, trained by the teacher in private practice. But the agencies of gramophone and wireless have brought about the decline of the amateur – and the private teacher – through the ever-increasing-and-always-available music-making by professionals, singly or in combination. The standard of performance, being for the most part far higher, tends to discourage the amateur or make him [sic] lazy. (Alden 1938, 79)

To counteract this pernicious state of affairs, The League of Audiences ‘was formed to protect and promote actual and living performances of music and drama amid the overwhelming onrush of the mechanical’ (Alden 1938, 80). Alden explicitly rejects the notion that the availability, on the market, of musical recordings and access to filmed performance affected ‘access’ to the arts positively, suggesting that ‘[m]asterpieces of music are not “discovered” by machinery’ (p. 82). On the contrary, the increasing popularity of mass culture is seen as an entirely problematic phenomenon, with negative repercussions which extend from the quality of individual cultural experiences to the quality and health of democracy itself, presupposing a connection between the cultural and the civic that is a recurrent theme in European modernity. Alden’s article indeed closes with a long quotation from a piece that Herbert Sidebotham wrote for The Sunday Times under the pseudonym of ‘Scrutator’ that leaves no doubt as to the distrust that part of the English cultural establishment shared for ‘manufactured pleasures’: As the mechanics of life developed and invaded the arts, there was danger that our democracy would become merely the passive recipients of manufactured pleasures, instead of being the artificers of their own joy. Sport was in danger of becoming something to read about or watch, not to engage in; music of being something you turned on with a handle instead

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of making; and the vast silent audiences of the cinema took in but never assisted at a performance, and gave nothing back… (in Alden 1938, 83)

Here, we can see at work the distrust for mass culture and the dismissal of any aesthetic or cultural value it might possess that will eventually lead, within Anglo-Saxon academia to the development of Cultural Studies as an intellectual exercise that ‘radically disables forms of universalism held by traditional aesthetics’ and the hierarchies of cultural and aesthetic value that go with them (Frow 1995). What is of real interest here, though, is that the proliferation of mass-produced ­ cultural texts is seen to be a problem not because of their perceived status as ‘low’ culture. The League of Audiences acknowledged that access to music through records or the wireless led to the consumption of a wide range of musical genres. The problem they identified was not to do with the risk that mass culture might destabilise traditional aesthetic hierarchies: the concern was that the new widespread accessibility of music and drama might put people off amateur practice of those cultural forms. Whilst a concern for excellence and quality will eventually come into play as cultural provision becomes more thoroughly institutionalised via CEMA first, and the ACGB later, it is worth noting how encouraging and protecting everyday forms of artistic participation and creation (rather than attendance or consumption) occupied a prominent position within the concerns of both educationalists and the intelligentsia in interwar Britain. In its early days, CEMA too shared this focus. 4.4.1   CEMA: The Early Days The 1940 Memorandum in Support of an Application to the Treasury for Financial Assistance, which effectively instituted it, stated that the purpose of CEMA would be ‘the encouragement of music-making and play-acting by the people themselves’ (in Hutchison 1982a, 44). Using more contemporary terminology, participatory activities were at the core of CEMA’s mission, and consequently, the emphasis of its work was on local endeavours, and on promoting arts activity in small and remote towns and villages, where leisure opportunities were limited and morale was flagging (and where many dwellers of large metropolitan areas had been evacuated). Plenty of professional artists, musicians and performers were employed by CEMA to tour exhibitions, concerts and plays, but, at least initially, CEMA’s work was predicated on fluid boundaries

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between amateur and professional practitioners and on the support of already existing (and mainly voluntary-run) organisations (Hutchison 1982a; McArthur 2013; Upchurch 2016; Weingärtner 2012). The other main way in which CEMA supported the arts (and especially theatre) was by offering a guarantee against loss to those commercial producers who in normal circumstances would be organising their own concerts, performances, local music clubs and touring theatrical productions, so that they could afford to employ and pay adequate fees to professional artists of calibre (Evans and Glasgow 1949; Landstone 1953). In their jointly authored volume The Arts in England, which is effectively an official history of CEMA, Benjamin Ifor Evans and Mary Glasgow (1949, 2, 3) have this to say about its purpose: C.E.M.A., when it came into existence in 1940, had as its main purpose the provision of the arts to certain special sections of the people, living under abnormal conditions. Its interest was frankly in audiences, with an immediate object of relieving the tedium of over-work in civilian life under the exceptional war-time conditions.

They further observe that, even among those who had hopes that CEMA might act as the precursor of ‘some future permanent structure’ (Evans and Glasgow 1949, 24), audiences remained the key focus. Nevertheless, CEMA never saw cultural participation and its encouragement as a policy problem in quite the same way that Arts Council England and its sister bodies in the other UK nations do today. This is because CEMA never found attracting new or diverse audiences to its funded activities especially challenging. If anything, the real struggle for the organisation was keeping up with the demand for what they had on offer (Evans and Glasgow 1949, 38ff.). This is especially remarkable considering that a survey conducted by the League of Audiences in 1939 revealed that 92% of respondents had never been to the theatre, thus suggesting that the wartime years were actually a time of significant flourishing for non-commercial performing arts in Britain (Merriman 2013, 283). Yet, these statistics need to be considered against the broader backdrop of mass popular cultural consumption which was thriving in this period at an even greater rate: in wartime London, notwithstanding the significant new audiences attracted to the theatre, ‘[f]or one person who went to a theatre, one hundred patronised their local cinema’, with Gunga Din, Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Wizard of Oz proving especially popular with English audiences (Zeigler 2002, 448–449).

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In its first few months, CEMA only funded amateur work: it funded professional theatre for the first time in 1940 by supporting the Pilgrim Players (a Canterbury-based company) and the Old Vic, whose move to Burnley it provided financial assistance with (Landstone 1953, 20–21). The shape of this novel model of government subsidy of the arts was determined by the effects of wartime conditions: as bombings became more regular and aggressive, ‘London was becoming impossible as an organizing centre’ (Landstone 1953, 22). This is why describing the situation in 1941, theatre manager and dramatist—and eventually long-standing presence on the Drama panel—Charles Landstone (1953, 30) commented that ‘C.E.M.A., at that time, was unwilling to expend any money on London’. Thus, via a very pragmatic response to the realities of war, a new key rationale for state support of culture was being effectively established during wartime: the promotion of access to cultural participation beyond London and metropolitan areas (Landstone 1953, 20–21). As both the Pilgrim Players and the Old Vic were forced to move their operations to the provinces and to tour to the safer South Wales and North West England, they started to function as genuinely national—rather than purely metropolitan—theatre organisations: In this war-time effort there was laid down, for the first time, the principle that the best the arts have to offer is not the sole perquisite of big centres; the many in smaller centres have an equal right to this enjoyment. It is a principle which has been argued over, praised and derided, and proved right and equally proved wrong in practice, ever since. It was, nevertheless, the guiding principle of the Drama department of C.E.M.A. and the Arts Council during my ten years, and it one I shall never cease to defend. (Landstone 1953, 22)

In recalling these times in the 1950s, Landstone (ibid.) admitted, with a note of regret, that ‘[t]hese brave words, like so many other war-time aspirations, were not entirely fulfilled in the years to come; but some of the spirit has lingered on’.

4.5  The Retreat from Everyday Creativity: CEMA Under Keynes The year 1942 is crucial for the discussion in hand: this was when the Pilgrim’s Trust withdrew from funding CEMA, so that it became the sole responsibility of the Board of Education. This change in funding

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and organisational structure provided the opportunity to make significant changes to the way in which CEMA operated and to shift the emphasis of its work from what Weingärtner (2012) refers to as the ‘welfare approach’ to a new emphasis on aesthetic standards. Keynes’ chairmanship of CEMA, which he took up in the same year, is usually credited as the prime driver for this shift towards a ‘standards approach’ concerned primarily with upholding artistic standards of excellence. Nonetheless, Weingärtner (2012, 88) rightly points out that the determination on the part of the Board of Education to have Keynes as CEMA’s Chairman must be seen as an indication of widespread support for a new focus on artistic standards within the Board itself. Keynes’ views on the primacy of concerns for excellence within the professional arts were well known, and the Board’s endorsement of them makes this shift of emphasis within CEMA a more complex outcome than the result of one man’s will alone. It is worthy of note that the man that Mary Glasgow, in her then role as CEMA’s Secretary, had initially proposed for the role of Chairman was Thomas Jones. As we noted earlier, influenced by the thinking developed within the adult education movement, Jones was a committed believer in the importance of promoting active cultural participation, which he refused to see as intrinsically less valuable than or inferior to professional cultural production. In other words, the two men, Jones and Keynes, were the embodiment of the two radically different visions of valuable participation that are behind the distinction between democratisation of culture and cultural democracy. These are usually seen as contrasting goals for cultural policy and funding—whereby democratisation of culture entails ‘making the best of the arts available to more people’ and cultural democracy means ‘cultivating arts work at the grass roots and encouraging people to express themselves’ (Shaw 1980, 75). As McArthur (2013, 189) notes: Tom Jones’s vision of CEMA stemmed from a refusal to separate the world of the professional and the highest standards of execution from that of the local player or art club member. They formed not only an artistic continuum but also a social and ultimately a moral one. But if, for Jones, amateur participation was the ballast of democratic social purpose, for Keynes it was a dead weight to be jettisoned.

Keynes’ ‘elitist’ inclinations had been apparent from well before he took the helm of the newly established arts council (Upchurch 2011, 2016).

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Mary Glasgow (1975, 262) recalls a meeting with Keynes in the summer of 1940 in which he made no secret of his reservations on the priorities that drove CEMA: He began at once asking awkward questions with alarming courtesy. He wanted to know why the council was spending so much money on amateur effort. Why was it missing this obvious opportunity to support artistic ventures of standing? Could it not see how many important things were waiting to be done? It was standards that mattered, and the preservation of serious professional enterprise, not obscure concerts in village halls.

That Keynes was not alone or unsupported in his advocacy for artistic standards as key driver of CEMA’s activities is evidenced in the private correspondence and records of meetings between the key personalities involved in the running and funding of the Council: R.A. Butler, Benjamin Ifor Evans and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood. Weingärtner (2012, 90) cites minutes of an interview between Keynes and Butler, aimed at persuading the former to take on the Chairmanship of CEMA, which makes it clear that Keynes’ reformist agenda and his objection ‘to C.E.M.A. being a welfare organisation’ (ibid.), was not only known by those encouraging him to lead the organisation, but was in fact a crucial reason for his selection for the role. It is therefore unsurprising that one of the first objectives of the new Keynes-Glasgow CEMA leadership team should be to endeavour to reduce CEMA’s ties of dependence from the NCSS, which was ‘a symbol of the world of amateur arts that Keynes wished to diminish’ (McArthur 2013, 53), and to bring back control to the London office. This measure, aiming to avoid CEMA’s regional offices acquiring too much independence from the London headquarters, prefigures later tensions around the centralisation of arts budgets in the face of increasing devolution (Stark et al. 2013). Whilst the arrival of Keynes at CEMA did not mark the abrupt or immediate abandonment of the emergency work (factory concerts, tours of painting exhibitions and theatre performances in village halls) that it had been carrying out throughout the war years, it was obvious that ‘Keynes was appreciative, but this was not where his sympathies lay’ (Glasgow 1975, 263): What he [Keynes] did, as his consistent policy, was to guide the Council towards giving more attention to the arts as such. The old conflict between arts and social service went on, but now the bias was reversed… (ibid.)

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This change in feeling, and the now open hostility for anything that had the whiff of ‘welfare’ to it, is clear in this passage from a Memorandum written in 1945 by Drama Director Michael MacOwan: In wartime a play in a school hall was part of the strange new life we lived. In peace it smacks of amateurishness, or ‘welfare’, and is unlikely to increase the public’s respect for the theatre, or to increase its popularity. (cited in Storey 2017, 79)

As Storey (2017, 79) reports, he went on to ask: Should the ACGB now consider itself ‘a Council of Social Service or an Arts Council?’—a question that went on to have quite the revival in the late twentieth century under New Labour (Belfiore 2002; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015).

4.6   Cultural Authority: Its Exercise and Forms of Resistance In his The Politics of the Arts Council, Robert Hutchison (1982a, 68) observed that: ‘[o]ne person’s prestige value is another’s unjustified extravagance; an inspiration to some is a grotesque spectacle to others’. This is, to a degree, inevitable in a policy process that requires that, in the face of funding that will be always inadequate to support everything that is—in principle—worthy and valuable, decisions be made between competing options. In other words, every single funding decision is the result of an exercise of cultural authority: if limited funds require judgements to be made between what is to be funded and what is to be left to fend for itself in the cultural market, then who has the authority to make such judgements, and to have those judgements recognised as legitimate? Whose notions of ‘quality’, ‘standards’, ‘cultural value’, ‘artistic excellence’ shall be acceptable benchmarks to allocate (or deny) cultural value (and legitimation through funding) to this or that cultural activity? Suppose that within a given society one poses the question: ‘Which cultural practices and products are most valued?’ The answer is most likely to be: those of the dominant group and the past traditions with which it aligns itself. Social inequality is legitimated through culture. (Jordan and Weedon 1995, 5)

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What was at play, then, in the shift of policy and purpose by CEMA and later ACGB, and in the prioritising of ‘the arts as such’—to use Mary Glasgow’s (1975, 263) words? The answer is power: the power resulting from the possession of significant stocks of social, economic and cultural capital, and its cultural manifestation: cultural authority. It is worth noting also how, around the time period considered here, ‘the word standards has partly taken the place of the word taste’ (Hutchison 1982b, 69). Commenting on the early 1800s, and the debates surrounding the establishment of the National Gallery, Minihan (1977, 26) observes that ‘[m]uch of the preoccupation with taste reflected a profound anxiety about society’s future’, particularly around the need to control and civilise the working classes: It was this anxiety which made many of art’s patrons and supporters hail the arts as agents of refinement. Through artistic culture, they claimed the lower classes could be taught to share the values and aspirations of their social betters, to admire the great works of civilization embodying the universal principles of beauty and order. (Minihan 1977, 27)

A commitment to the development of sophisticated audiences through the widening of arts’ appreciation therefore acts as a handy substitute for the more radical option of addressing structural causes of socioeconomic disadvantage. Following its shift from an emphasis on fostering participation to one on widening access to professional arts, CEMA’s objective of creating a larger audience for the arts was both paramount and patently professed (Storey 2017). For example, the document setting out the conditions of association with CEMA, which theatre companies in receipt of funding needed to meet, openly set out the expectation that they would aim ‘to spread the knowledge and appreciation of all that is best in the theatre, and thus to bring into being permanent, educated audiences all over the country’ (in Weingärtner 2012, 94, emphasis added). Am I thus suggesting that CEMA, and later on ACGB, were instituted for a clear and concerted social engineering purpose by an elite intent on curbing the lower classes’ demands for better living conditions and a more just allocation of societal resources? Not quite. The argument here is, rather, that no such purposeful and explicit plotting was in fact necessary, for our great cultural institutions (as well as newer ones such as arts councils) are already very effective in preserving the

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prevailing relationships of power in society. This is a point that was forcefully made by Raymond Williams (1979, 160) in his searing critique of the Arts Council published in the late 70s, where he remarked that ‘[t]he true social process of bodies such as the Arts Council is one of administered consensus by co-option’ on the part of the powerful. As Jordan and Weedon (1995, 11) put it: The institutions which construct and reproduce cultural traditions and the national heritage work with gendered and racially inflected criteria of skills, craft(wo)manship and exceptional talent or genius. These are defined by excluding what is seen as ‘Other’ – for example, popular culture, much work by women, the work of Black and Asian writers and artists, and the so-called ‘primitive’ art of non-Western cultures. These institutions practice processes of inclusion and exclusion which tend to reflect broader social power relations. They privilege White, middle-class and male interests.

The purpose of the analysis presented thus far has been to show and evidence the process of gradual but firm ‘othering’ of amateur practice within the official discursive formations of ‘quality’, ‘standards’ and the definition of the legitimate scope of the focus of the UK arts council’s involvement in the support and financing of cultural activity. The exclusion of participatory activities from ‘valuable’ culture that the State institutions purport to promote in favour of canonical Liberal Humanist notions of ‘high culture’ is indeed tied to the different places their respective participants (the high art appreciator vs. the amateur) occupy in the social scale of British society, at least in the perception of cultural, economic and social capital-rich senior decision makers within the arts funding system (Jordan and Weedon 1995). However, it is important to note that even though, with the shift from CEMA to ACGB, the consolidation of a commitment to supporting the professional arts came to be enshrined in the machinery of arts funding, this did not mark an end to the debate. The ‘opposing view’, whilst on the losing front in terms of shaping the mission and vision of the ACGB, remained visible in public and media debates: over the years, many individuals and radical cultural groups (such as the countercultural and community arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s) have made resolute efforts to challenge, deconstruct and supplant dominant cultural constructions, meanings and values (Braden 1978; Kelly 1984). Their

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arguments, beliefs and their vision for the provision of opportunities for active engagement in the ‘making’ of art closely map onto the passionate rhetoric of The 1919 Report and are testament to the legacy of the values of the early twentieth-century adult education movement. Even within CEMA, the policy decision to withdraw support for people’s active participation in artistic creation, whilst clearly pushed by the upper echelons of the organisation, was not accepted without resistance. For example, in response to the progressive withdrawal of support to travelling musicians, CEMA’s own officer, English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, repeatedly spoke out in defence of both the scheme and the wider principle of the desirability of professional and amateur musicians working together. In 1943, Williams wrote to Mary Glasgow a personal letter that he himself described as ‘cantankerous’ (Williams 1943); in it, he lamented instructions coming from Glasgow herself requiring that Music Advisers should not themselves perform at CEMA concerts, and that ‘CEMA concerts must be made to pay’. This would have the consequence that concerts in remote rural villages, where the services of the travelling musicians would be especially culturally—as well as socially—valuable but financially unviable, would have to be discontinued. Williams was not bashful in complaining that such a policy would be an indication of ‘“window dressing” rather than of fostering the art, reducing CEMA to little more than a commercial concert agency’ (ibid.). Williams was also clear in his criticism of the broader policy direction taken by CEMA, of which this latest policy was but an expression. He reiterated these concerns vocally in an official paper entitled ‘CEMA and Rural Music’ (CEMA paper 176) where he made the case for the reinstatement of the travelling musicians’ scheme and remarked on the importance of fostering participation in music through the parallel support of the amateur and the professional, for if ‘the two branches of the art are hermetically segregated we should lose that vitality in English art which comes from making it creative from top to bottom’ (in Hutchison 1982b, 46). In a similar vein, in a broadcast talk reprinted in The Listener in July 1947 with the title ‘Killing Art by Kindness’, Gerard Hopkins offered a scorching critique of the recently established arts council, arguing that the main trouble with it was that, as a consequence of its treating art as a ‘good thing’ for society, it ended up promoting and financially supporting ‘a huge, monopolistic academy’:

88  E. BELFIORE For an academy is an authority which exists to exhibit what was once alive in art and is so no longer; to offer people the results of art rather than to encourage in them that attitude which produces art. It lays stress on art as something to be received, whereas really it is something to be done. (Hopkins 1947, 133)

He went on to argue that members of the public ‘do not want to be told what is beautiful; they want to be reassured that they too can make beauty’ (ibid.). His contention was that the ACGB hindered, rather than encouraged such reassurance by prescriptively telling the community what art is, and by catering to its assumed cultural needs. Hopkins also noted how the public had to resort to taking creative matters into their own hands: Some do find an outlet (though they would not call it art) in hobbies, and house pride, and the making of little gardens. […] At these things we are inclined to poke superior fun, whereas we should feel humbled by them, should have enough imaginative sympathy to realise that for many these sad trivialities are the only food supplied by modern life for the heart’s hunger for adventure. (Hopkins 1947, 133–134).

It is worthy of note that these are precisely the kind of everyday forms of cultural activities that the UEP project has observed and recorded, documenting the value and meaning that people attach to them: they certainly do not see them as ‘sad trivialities’. There are still quite clearly ‘symbolic boundaries’ (Lamont and Fournier 1992) between Hopkin’s taste and that of the people on whose behalf he critiques the ACGB for providing arts and culture for passive consumption.

4.7   Conclusion: The Post-war Cultural Value and Participation Debates—The Legacy The chapter has charted the origin and roots of tensions that began to emerge in the wartime era and became particularly intense in the years that saw the institutionalisation of what started off as an emergency wartime initiative, CEMA, into the beginning of a national infrastructure for the financial support and development of arts provision in Great Britain. The legacy and unresolved frictions of this intellectual history play out quite clearly in contemporary cultural policy debates and in the revival

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of interests in ordinary forms of cultural activity, ‘everyday creativity’ and ‘cultural democracy’ (64 million artists 2016, 2018; Hadley and Belfiore 2018; Wilson et al. 2017), not just on the part of researchers and practitioners, but also by the Arts Council itself (Dyer 2016). These tensions clustered around two main axes: (1) the ‘democratization of culture’ vs. cultural democracy axis, which can alternatively be characterised as the engagement vs. participation tension; and (2) the ‘excellence’ vs. ‘access’ axis, concerned with excellence, quality and ‘standards’—including hostility for commercial and popular culture—vs. prioritising accessibility, especially when trying to attract non-traditional audiences. These, in turn, generate two further oppositions between the professional and the amateur, and between the metropolis and the provinces. It is arguably between these four poles that British post-war cultural politics has played out, and cultural policies’ priorities have been articulated: it is precisely the tension between them that remains unresolved by the policy goal of democratising access to arts and culture. As Steven Hadley (2016) observes: The culture to be democratised is not a common, shared or popular culture, but the culture of an elite. A culture that needs to be democratised in order to justify the subsidy that has led to its creation.

This chapter has shown that cultural authority and the social, economic, political and cultural capital necessary for its exercise are crucial factors in the agonistic process of determining the meaning of cultural and social practices. Therefore, considerations over policy actors’ positionality and their access to sources of power and authority are key to understanding both past and current values embedded in cultural policy discourse. This passage from the ACGB’s Annual Report for 1960–1961 bears out the undercurrent of cultural snobbery and entitled privilege that marks the form of cultural authority embedded within the institution: The paramount trusteeship of the arts in Britain to-day is vested in that percentage of the population which rejects the assumption that sessions of bingo and capers on the Costa Brava are the be-all and end-all of our new leisure. (ACGB 1961, 9)

Needless to say, this ‘percentage of the population’ is that small proportion of upper- and middle-class people that did and still does make up

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a substantial proportion of senior Arts Council staff and arts administrators today (Banks 2017; Brook et al. 2018; Dubois 2015; Friedman and Laurison 2019; Le Roux et al. 2008; O’Brien et al. 2016). Similarly, CEMA’s initial commitment to concentrating efforts within the regions never made a comeback. As Jennie Lee made clear in her speech to the House of Commons in 1970: I have insisted there should be no cutting back on metropolitan standards in order to spread the available money more evenly throughout the country. That would be the worst possible disservice. (in Hutchison 1982a)

The powerful legacy of these lively and at times heated arguments is that current cultural policy debates are still very much stuck in the old tussle between democratisation of culture and cultural democracy for the title of most deserving goal of policy intervention and arts funding (Evrard 1997). In most of the West, post-war cultural policy has traditionally focused on democratisation, despite rhetorical concessions (and only minimal financial support) to cultural democracy. The continued privileged status of traditional, canonical and professionally produced cultural forms in the Western public subsidy of culture model demonstrates this. This persisting state of affairs calls for an approach to understanding ‘cultural value’ that centres on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated to artistic and cultural forms and practices, or denied to them, by certain groups in particular social contexts, and on challenging the resulting hierarchies of cultural authority. ‘Cultural democracy’ has made inroads in the rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, the work of the official cultural institutions and their support infrastructure. Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme (and the 21 projects it funds in areas with low cultural participation rates) is an attempt to introduce a different funding logic within the council, one that places participation—in the sense that early days CEMA understood it—within the scope of activities supported by the organisation (Gilmore 2013). Similarly, the growing popularity of creative cities titles (from the European Capital of Culture to UK Cities of Culture) is also part of the current interest in the potential (cultural, social and economic) of investing in the provision of a wider range of cultural experiences—as argued for instance in the 2019 final report by the Cultural Cities Enquiry, of which Arts Council England was one of the sponsors (Cultural Cities Enquiry 2019).

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However, we are still far from cultural democracy ideals being a mainstream rationale for cultural policy and an active principle in the allocation of substantial financial resources to the cultural and creative sectors. Despite the rhetorical surge in interest for ‘everyday creativity’, we have not witnessed its incorporation into arts funding mechanisms in any way that fundamentally questions the priorities and funding logics established in the early twentieth century and discussed here. As a result, the point that senior arts administrator Robert Hutchinson made in 1982a (p. 78) remains valid3: A progressive and comprehensive policy for the arts would have to face up to the fact that, in Richard Hoggart’s words, ‘most of the new money is going towards subsidising and improving the artistic pursuits of those who already know and enjoy the arts. To them that hath is being given’.

This chapter has shown that the ‘problem of participation’ is not a new development, because the notion of cultural value on which the post-war consensus over arts funding was based has never really been challenged in any serious way. Consequently, its guiding principles and implicit valuations (and consequent devaluation of what does not fall under accepted ideas of what ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ look like, and where they can be found) still remain the foundations of present-day funding logics in Britain. They certainly have not been contested in a way that has yet managed to move beyond the merely rhetorical and aspirational to a substantive reorganisation of the current arts funding infrastructure. In the light of this, it seems fitting to conclude this historical excursus with a sobering quote from cultural theorist John Fekete (1988, i): Not to put too fine a point on it, we live, breathe, and excrete values. No aspect of human life is unrelated to values, valuations, and validations. […] The history of cultures and social formations is unintelligible except in relation to a history of value orientations, value ideals, goods values, value responses and value judgements, and their objectivations, interplay and transformations.

The battle over cultural authority, therefore, goes on—under the weight of traditional liberal humanist aesthetic values, and the pressures towards 3 See

Belfiore (2016), Taylor (2016), Neelands et al. (2015).

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more inclusive and democratic versions of cultural value—thus remaining at the heart of contemporary cultural politics, with no sign of abating (Hadley and Belfiore 2018). As Jordan and Weedon (1995, 8) remind us, this should be expected, for even the most powerful cultural organisations ‘are contested spaces, since the values and interest that govern these institutions determine what is judged as valuable’.

References 64 million artists. (2016). Everyday Creativity. London: 64 million artists. 64 million artists. (2018). Cultural Democracy in Practice. London: 64 million artists. ACGB. (1961). Partners in Patronage: The 16th Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1960–1961. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. Alden, J. H. (1938). The League of Audiences. Music & Letters, 19(1), 79–83. Banks, M. (2017). Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality. London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers. Belfiore, E. (2002). Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does It Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 8(1), 91–106. Belfiore, E. (2013). The “Rhetoric of Gloom” vs. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock? In E. Belfiore & A. Upchurch (Eds.), Beyond Utility and Markets: On the Role of the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Belfiore, E. (2016). Cultural Policy Research in the Real World: Curating “Impact”, Facilitating “Enlightenment”. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 205–216. Belfiore, E. (2018). Whose Cultural Value? Representation, Power and Creative Industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10286632.2018.1495713. Bennett, T. (2000). Cultural Policy Beyond Aesthetics. Chicago: The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. Bonet, L., & Négrier, E. (2018). The Participative Turn in Cultural Policy: Paradigms, Models, Contexts. Poetics, 66, 64–73. Braden, S. (1978). Artists and People. London: Routledge. Brook, O., O’Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2018). There Was No Golden Age: Social Mobility into Cultural and Creative Occupations. SocArXiv. https://doi. org/10.31235/osf.io/7njy3. Cultural Cities Enquiry. (2019). Cultural Cities Enquiry: Enriching UK Cities Through Smart Investment in Culture. Manchester: Core Cities UK. DCMS. (2016). The Culture White Paper. London: Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

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Dubois, V. (2015). Culture as a Vocation: Sociology of Career Choices in Cultural Management. London: Routledge. Dyer, L. (2016). The Value of Everyday Creativity. Blog Post. Retrieved from https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/value-everyday-creativity. Evans, B. I., & Glasgow, M. (1949). The Arts in England. London: The Falcon Press. Evrard, Y. (1997). Democratizing Culture or Cultural Democracy? The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 27(3), 167–175. Fekete, J. (1988). Introductory Notes for a Postmodern Value Agenda. In J. Fekete (Ed.), Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture. New World Perspectives: Montréal. Field, J. (2001). Lifelong Education. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 20(1–2), 3–15. Friedman, S., & Laurison, D. (2019). The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged. Bristol: Policy Press. Frow, J. (1995). Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (p. 23). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gibson, L. (1997). Art, Citizenship and Government: “Art for the People” in New Deal America and the 1940s in England and Australia. Culture and Policy, 8(3), 41–56. Gibson, L. (1999). Art and Citizenship: Governmental Intersections. Brisbane: Griffith University. Gibson, L. (2001). The Uses of Art. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Gibson, L. (2002). Creative Industries and Cultural Development—Still a Janus Face? Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 102(1), 25–34. Gilmore, A. (2013). Cold Spots, Crap Towns and Cultural Deserts: The Role of Place and Geography in Cultural Participation and Creative Place-Making. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 86–96. Glasgow, M. (1975). The Concept of the Arts Council. In M. Keynes (Ed.), Essays on John Maynard Keynes (pp. 260–271). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glasgow, M. (1986). The Nineteen Hundreds: A Diary in Retrospect. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gross, J., & Wilson, N. (2018). Cultural Democracy: An Ecological and Capabilities Approach. International Journal of Cultural Policy. https://doi. org/10.1080/10286632.2018.1538363. Hadley, S. (2016, April 2). Democratising the Arts: A Never-Ending Task? Arts Professional. Retrieved from https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/ article/democratising-arts. Hadley, S., & Belfiore, E. (2018). Cultural Democracy and Cultural Policy. Cultural Trends, 27(3), 218–223.

94  E. BELFIORE Henley, D. (2016). The Arts Dividend: Why Investment in Culture Pays. London: Elliott and Thompson. Hesmondhalgh, D., Oakley, K., Lee, D., & Nisbett, M. (2015). Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour. London: Springer. Hopkins, G. (1947, July 24). Killing Art by Kindness. The Listener. How a Growing Popular Demand Has Been Met—The Work of C.E.M.A. (1942, August, 3). Times. Retrieved from http://find.galegroup.com. Hutchison, R. (1982a). The Politics of the Arts Council. London: Sinclair Browne. Hutchison, R. (1982b). A Hard Fact to Swallow: The Division of Arts Council Expenditure Between London and the English Regions (Working Paper). London: Policy Studies Institute. Jancovich, L. (2017). The Participation Myth. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(1), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1027698. Jeffers, A., & Moriarty, G. (Eds.). (2017). Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art. London: Bloomsbury. Jordan, G., & Weedon, C. (1995). Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World. Oxford: Blackwell. Kelly, O. (1984). Community, Arts and the State: Storming the Citadels. London: Comedia. Lamont, M., & Fournier, M. (Eds.). (1992). Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landstone, C. (1953). Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain. London: Elek. Le Roux, B., Rouanet, H., Savage, M., & Warde, A. (2008). Class and Cultural Division in the UK. Sociology, 42(6), 1049–1071. Leventhal, F. M. (1990). ‘The Best for the Most’: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime, 1939–1945. Twentieth Century British History, 1(3), 289–317. Matarasso, F. (2019). A Restless Art: How Participation Won, and Why It Matters. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Mayor, F. (1988). The World Decade for Cultural Development. The UNESCO Courier, XLI(11), 4–7. McArthur, E. (2013). Scotland, CEMA and the Arts Council, 1919–1967: Background, Politics and Visual Art Policy. Farnham: Ashgate. Merriman, A. (2013). Greasepaint & Cordite: How ENSA Entertained the Troops During World War II. London: Aurum Press Ltd. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157. Miles, A., & Sullivan, A. (2012). Understanding Participation in Culture and Sport: Mixing Methods, Reordering Knowledges. Cultural Trends, 21(4), 311–324.

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Minihan, J. (1977). The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain. New York: New York University Press. Ministry of Reconstruction. (1980 [1919]). The 1919 Report: The Final and Interim Reports of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction, 1918–1919 (Vol. 6). Department of Adult Education, University of Nottingham. Mortier, J. (1996). Les origines de l’Arts Council: l’etat britannique se decouvre une mission Culturelle a la faveur de la guerre. In D. Frison (Ed.), La Société Anglaise en Guerre (pp. 181–190). Paris: Ellipses. Neelands, J., Belfiore, E., Firth, C., Hart, N., Perrin, L., & Brock, S., et al. (2015). Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth (Final Report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value). Coventry: University of Warwick. O’Brien, D., Laurison, D., Miles, A., & Friedman, S. (2016). Are the Creative Industries Meritocratic? An Analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey. Cultural Trends, 25(2), 116–131. Pick, J. (2013). Building Jerusalem: Art, Industry and the British Millennium. London: Routledge. Shaw, R. (1980). Education and the Arts. In M. Ross (Ed.), The Arts and Personal Growth. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Stark, P., Gordon, R., & Powell, D. (2013). Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital: A Contribution to the Debate on National Policy for the Arts and Culture in England. Retrieved from http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/rocc.php. Stewart, S. (2013). A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Storey, T. (2017). ‘Village Hall Work Can Never Be “Theatre”’: Amateur Theatre and the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1945–1956. Contemporary Theatre Review, 27(1), 76–91. Taylor, M. (2016). Nonparticipation or Different Styles of Participation? Alternative Interpretations from Taking Part. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 169–181. Upchurch, A. R. (2011). Keynes’s Legacy: An Intellectual’s Influence Reflected in Arts Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 17(1), 69–80. Upchurch, A. R. (2016). The Origins of the Arts Council Movement: Philanthropy and Policy. London: Palgrave. Weingärtner, J. (2012). The Arts as a Weapon of War: Britain and the Shaping of National Morale in World War II. London: I.B. Tauris. Williams, R. (1979). The Arts Council. Political Quarterly, 50(2), 157–171. Williams, R. (2016 [1958]). Culture Is Ordinary. In R. Gable (Ed.), Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (pp. 58–99). London: Verso. Williams, R. V. (1943, July 31). Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Mary Glasgow. Retrieved from http://vaughanwilliams.uk/letter/vwl1795.

96  E. BELFIORE Wilson, N., Gross, J., & Bull, A. (2017). Towards Cultural Democracy: Promoting Cultural Capabilities for Everyone. London: King’s Cultural Institute. Wiltshire, H. (1980). A General Introduction to the Report. In Ministry of Reconstruction (1980 [1919]). The 1919 Report: The Final and Interim Reports of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction, 1918–1919 (Vol. 6). Department of Adult Education, University of Nottingham. Wolff, J. (1981). The Social Production of Art. London: Palgrave. Zeigler, P. (2002). London at War: 1939–1945. London: Pimlico.

CHAPTER 5

Enacting Community on Dartmoor: MED Theatre’s Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy (2015) and the Spatial Praxis of Community Performance Within a Conservation Zone Kerrie Schaefer

5.1  Introduction As a socially engaged arts practice, community theatre1 occupies a niche position in the cultural policy studies field, not least due to the difficulties involved in critically defining the term ‘community’. No longer

1 Community theatre was a part of the alternative theatre movement that emerged in the UK in the 1960s (see Kershaw 1991, 1992). Much of that ‘popular oppositional’ practice is now included within what is referred to as applied theatre and performance. In the USA, the term more commonly used is community-based theatre or community performance to differentiate it from amateur practice known as ‘community theatre’. In Australia, where I hail from, the term community arts or community cultural development includes community theatre, which is probably why I work across what are perhaps more separate fields of practice in the UK (see Jeffers and Moriarty 2017, 23).

K. Schaefer (*)  College of Humanities, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_5

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viewed in the UK as a grassroots movement of cultural activism (Braden 1978; Kelly 1984; The Shelton Trust2 1986), but as part of the p ­ ublicly subsidised cultural sector, community or participatory arts has been criticised, from within and without, for becoming a state instrumentality ‘with the status of ameliorative social work for what are pejoratively called disadvantaged groups’ (Watt 1991, 56), or for facilitating neoliberal government policies of ‘social inclusion’ (Merli 2002; Mirza 2006). Australian researchers in sociology and cultural development (Mulligan and Smith 2010; Wyatt et al. 2013) have observed a ‘turn to community’ in the arts, globally, and posit a close link between the ‘instrumentalisation of the arts’, wherein the arts are geared to the production of government determined ‘social impacts’, and Nicolas Rose’s notion of ‘governing through community’ in which ‘governance in a post-welfare state shifts from the “disciplinary” governing of society to a more collaborative and consensual mode’ (in Wyatt et al. 2013, 83). Whereas Kelly argued against the incorporation of community arts by state instrumentalities in the 1980s, the recent shift noted by Mulligan et al. appears to have confirmed community-based cultural practices as a technique of neo-liberal governance. Community is, perhaps, at its most ideologically slippery here offering the chimera of ‘solidarity’, or at least a loose sense of ‘togetherness’, while operating in hand with economic programmes producing precarious social conditions (Beck 1992; Adam et al. 2000; Standing 2011). In this chapter, I will examine these entrenched positions on community, culture and governance in an analysis of a community theatre on Dartmoor. Dartmoor is an area in the county of Devon in the SouthWest of England. Historian, Matthew Kelly, states that as ‘the largest of the five granite bosses formed 280 million years ago that intrude on Devon and Cornwall’ and ‘as the highest and largest upland in the south of England’, Dartmoor possesses ‘a particular if not quite unique geological history’ (2015, 1–2). Key features of the landscape are the many rocky outcrops known as tors. Kelly describes their survival as 2 The Shelton Trust was a national umbrella organisation for community artists formed in the 1980s after a re-structure of the Association for Community Artists devolved its operations to the regional level. As well as organising national conferences, the Shelton Trust published a regular magazine, Another Standard. The ‘Culture and Democracy Manifesto’ appeared in Another Standard in 1986 and was collectively authored by Trust members, including Owen Kelly (see Jeffers and Moriarty, 37).

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‘extraordinary’ because they ‘predate the last deluge and the last ice age’ (2015, 2). These granite protuberances give shape and form to Dartmoor’s distinctive landscape and are at least one of the material or ‘natural’ features recognised in its designation as a National Park in 1951.3 For some critics of post-war British conservation practice, however, the materiality of the granite does not signify an ancient—fixed and unchanging—‘natural’ landscape but, rather, the foundational matter of moorland dwelling. Dartmoor is thus re-figured as a living, cultural (Beeson 1991; Beeson and Greeves 1993; Greeves 2001) or ‘anthropic’ (Kelly 2015, 2) landscape. The chapter aims to enhance understanding of the nature of cultural participation in community theatre and to explore the value of this dynamic cultural practice in relation to the governance of a national park area and the self-determination of those dwelling on Dartmoor.4 In March 2015, MED Theatre performed the community play, Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy, a sequel to the company’s inaugural production, The Badgers (1980). With this production of Badgerland in parish halls (Belstone, Manaton, Mary Tavey and Moretonhampstead), MED Theatre realised 35 years of theatre-making by and for people living on Dartmoor. Taking the opportunity of a certain circularity in the company’s own performance history, I will explore how MED Theatre’s practice has evolved in relation to other practices (in real time and retrospectively), namely the community play movement (Jellicoe 1987) and rural (touring) community theatre (Kershaw 1978) and how the term ‘community’ is mobilised and is meaningful on Dartmoor. Central to this discussion are cultural and spatial theories of community continuous with the (unfinished)5 history of community 3 For more information on Dartmoor National Park (including maps), see the Authority webpage: http://www.dartmoor.gov.uk/index. 4 See Schaefer et al. (2017) for a broader discussion of rurality and cultural participation. 5 Anthropologist, Kate Crehan, noted in Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective (2011) that academics have not studied the history of community arts, leaving main accounts of the practice to practitioners (p. 80). Happily, that situation is changing. Crehan’s text on seminal community arts organisation, Free Form, was quickly followed by a chapter on select community arts practices within Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), Eugene van Erven’s Community Art Power: Essays from ICAF (2013a) and Community Arts Dialogues (2013b), Rimi Khan’s Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2015) and, recently, Jeffers and Moriarty’s Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art (2017) and François Matarasso’s A Restless Art: How Participation Won and Why It Matters (2019) (see https://arestlessart.com/).

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arts as a cultural practice struggling to open up spaces for democratic participation in the production of diverse meaning in society.

5.2   Cultural Policy Studies, Community Arts and Cultural Participation It is notable that Mulligan et al. are writing from Australia where community arts was, according to Hawkins (1993), the ‘official invention’ of a social-reformist government seeking to increase access to and participation in public cultural provision. Hawkins examines the discursive construction of ‘community’ within the Community Arts Programme of the Australia Council for the Arts (from its inception in 1973 to the end of the study timeframe in 1991).6 Her evaluation, including an extended analysis of community arts practices, reaches ambiguous—and contradictory—conclusions. On the one hand, Hawkins claims that the community arts programme led to a more equitable arts funding landscape producing ‘methods and rationales for disbursing grants that are more democratic than the search for excellence’ (1993, 167). Furthermore, Hawkins views the community arts programme as producing a shift from a concern with access and participation, based on a deficit model of cultural participation in which non-participation in public arts provision is construed as cultural lack, towards recognition of cultural difference and plurality: ‘Terms like cultural rights, cultural democracy and cultural diversity have gained ascendency, displacing ‘access and participation’ as the signs of a commitment to equity and social justice’ (1993, 158–159). In other words, the programme is ‘a significant example of the value of cultural participation as a resource for the expression and affirmation of social difference’ (1993, 167). Finally, Hawkins acknowledges that community artists developed a ‘significant body of skills in facilitating collaborative cultural production’ (1993, 159), including capabilities ‘to express plural authorship, to establish democratic mechanisms for skilled and unskilled creatives to work together, and to collapse the social distance between producers and consumers’ (1993, 159). On the other hand, Hawkins contends that community artists have been overly concerned with ‘political process and community 6 In 1987, the Community Arts Board was reformed as the Community Cultural Development (CCD) Committee. See McEwen (2008) for an extended discussion of CCD’s close links with government policy.

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development’ at the cost of developing a ‘dynamic aesthetic able to explore and critique the nature of the social order’ (1993, 164). This evaluation of community arts as good at building community and bad at making art is based on a tendency towards producing didactic art in opposition to both high art and commercial, mass culture. Following the (then) emerging ‘cultural industries approach’ which attends to the central place of cultural consumption in people’s everyday lives, Hawkins concludes that community arts is ‘a cultural programme whose moment has passed’ (1993, 166) within a larger argument for a radical overhaul of cultural policy, itself, aimed at dislodging art as a separate realm distinct from the diverse cultures of the everyday. According to Hawkins, community arts’ inability to shake off notions of cultural disadvantage, evident in its limited aesthetic offer, implicitly affirms the hegemony of high culture (1993, 166–167). In the UK, where the community arts movement developed more organically, perhaps, than in Australia, the attention of cultural policy studies turned to community arts practice somewhat later. Then the concern was to examine the apparently disproportionate effect of Matarasso’s probing study, Use or Ornament: The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (1997), on the development of cultural p ­ olicy under New Labour. Merli’s attention turned to Matarasso’s study after it had established ‘a near-consensus in Britain among cultural policymakers’ (2002, 107) and was adopted as the model for evaluating the social impact of the arts, despite the fact that participatory arts practices comprise a comparatively minor segment of the public cultural sector.7 Belfiore points to this mismatch noting that, ‘the provision of arts to audiences (as opposed to the active involvement of participants in an arts project) constitutes by far the largest proportion of the publicly funded cultural sector’ (2006, 31). She asserts that methods of social impact assessment should take into account these majority consumption-based practices (2006, 31). For cultural policy researchers, attachment to and elevation of participation and social impact provided evidence of the ongoing development of instrumental cultural policy in the UK. At the same time, the community and participatory arts sector (especially 7 Merli’s critique is in two parts: one problematises Matarasso’s lack of research methodology and the other is a moral/ethical critique related to the purported use of arts and culture to remediate the effects of social exclusion. It is this latter issue that I address here. For his own response, see Matarasso (2003).

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as it bled into more informal or everyday practices) remained underresearched and largely unknown. It seemed, nevertheless, open to critique, without the same rigorous analysis of practice as undertaken by Hawkins, for instance. According to Merli and others (see in Mirza 2006), participatory arts was an official invention concerned to use or apply culture in the remediation of the negative social effects of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ economic policy. Participatory artists, according to Merli, were the ‘new missionaries’ doling out benevolences to the poor in the form of participation in arts projects, without addressing the structural causes of poverty and deprivation (2002, 113). Community arts featured marginally in this critique. According to Merli (2002), participatory artists drew on the same (unspecified) tools as an earlier generation of community artists, but these were re-directed to achieve the government objective of social inclusion. Belfiore’s analysis of this phase in the development of instrumental cultural policy describes the incorporation of community arts terminology within mainstream cultural policy debate, although, as she notes, these keywords were re-defined and re-deployed by funding agencies in ways not in keeping with the ideological thrust of the earlier movement (2002, 7). It is precisely this appropriation, re-definition and re-direction of community arts in the UK that led theatre scholar, David Watt, to address the problem of definition of community in the Australian case. Watt asserts that because the development of community arts in Australia was “oddly and inextricably linked with the government agencies which funded it” (1991, 55), there had been little urgency to define community. Hawkins notes that the ambiguity of ‘community’ in the cultural policy field operated strategically and served to challenge core precepts of arts funding such as standards of artistic excellence and the place of the arts and culture in the representation of national unity and identity (1993, xviii, 11). However, as community arts made its mark, revealing artistic excellence to be a form of self-serving elitism and re-imagining pluralistic identities and values (Hawkins 1993, 10–17), the term became prone to appropriation by those seeking to reassert cultural dominance. This prompted Watt to unambiguously outline the critical project of community arts drawing on seminal texts from the UK movement: Owen Kelly’s Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels (1984) and Shelton Trust’s Culture and Democracy: The Manifesto (1986). Watt viewed such theoretical explication of community arts practice, as a ‘bulwark against both marginalisation as social work and against a similarly dangerous

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appropriation … [by] bastion[s] of the dominant culture’ (1991, 56). He also thought the project worthwhile given that, in Australia, community arts remained a government-funded cultural programme.

5.3  Return to ‘Community’: Articulating a Dynamic Definition An influential body of cultural theory (see, as a leading example, Young 1990) problematises the concept of ‘community’ for the way in which it territorialises social relations by constructing uniform groupings of self-identical subjects based on exclusion through difference. This notion of community is regarded as inherently violent because the symbolic boundaries of group membership are rigidly ‘policed’ in order to maintain the essential illusion of group coherence and uniformity. At the same time, there is reluctance to abandon the term ‘community’. Cultural geographer, Gillian Rose, asserts that ‘community’ remains one of ‘the most powerful terms through which collective identity can be named and collective action legitimated’ (1997a, 185). According to sociologist, Gerard Delanty (2003), ‘the persistence of community consists in its ability to communicate ways of belonging, especially in the context of an increasingly insecure world’ (p. 187). Writing earlier than Delanty, Anthony Cohen approached community as ‘a phenomenon of culture’ (Cohen 1985, 38) and offered a detailed analysis of the dynamics of boundary-marking that constitutes the symbolic expression of community as the ‘old structural bases of community boundaries’ are eroded (1985, 76). Cohen’s theory of community as symbolically constructed underpins theorising of community theatre (see Kershaw 1991, 1992; McConachie 1998/2001). Significant labour has gone into re-conceptualising community, including in community arts and theatre, and I will pick up on only one element of this discussion below through outlining the theoretical basis of the definition of ‘community’ in community arts. David Watt’s intervention in a cultural (policy) debate in Australia in the 1990s alights on the notion of community forwarded by Owen Kelly in his self-admittedly partial and critical account of the British community arts movement in the mid-1980s. Watt notes that in delineating between community arts as an agent of radical social change and as an instrumental tool, Kelly drew heavily on an earlier British intellectual tradition that he also adapted to his own argument. The notion of

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‘community’ that, Kelly argued, the collective working methods of community artists sought to create as ‘a target or goal, rather than a starting point’ (1984, 51) owes much to E.P. Thompson’s ‘culturalist’ notion of class as an active, conscious and relational process and to Raymond Williams’ class-based critique of a unitary, or singular, conception of culture. According to Kelly: [f]or a group of people to be defined as [a] living community it is not sufficient that they live, work and play in geographical proximity; nor that to an observer they have habits, goals and achievements in common … it is also necessary that members of a community acknowledge their membership, and that this acknowledgement plays a recognised part in shaping their actions. … Community grows as its members participate in, and shape, its growth; and it grows because of its member’s participation. (Kelly 1984, 49–50)

Watt notes the dynamism in this understanding of community: ‘the interactions within a group of people who choose to see themselves as a community continually alters the nature of that community so that it is always in a state of becoming and therefore growing and thus avoids the stasis of a ‘thing’ to be serviced’ (1991, 61). He asserts that this dynamic concept of community is developed further in Shelton Trust’s Manifesto which studiously avoids the ‘anachronistic [Williams-ian] notion of collectivism as exclusively working class’ shifting instead to the possibility of ‘conditional alliances of a wide range of social groups’ (1991, 63). The focus of the ‘post-Gramscian’ manifesto, therefore, moves away from ‘community’ and towards locating democratic ‘participation in the production of culture, and thus of social meaning’ as a critical point in countering the cultural hegemony of an economic system that now operates as ‘a method of ordering [a mode of] consciousness necessary to ever increasing production’ (in Watt 1991, 62–63). Thus, for Watt, the notion of dynamic community within a struggle for cultural democracy over hegemony is essential and necessary to understanding community cultural practices: Static notions of community are seen as impositions, usually categorisations by a dominant culture concerned to maintain itself as monolithic by exercising its power to define and thus subsume subgroups. Dynamic notions of community, on the other hand, allow the creation of purposive

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communities of interest which, by the process of self-definition, resist being thus subsumed … this autonomy introduces the possibility of internal negotiation as a basic mode of social interaction, and they are consequently potentially democratic and alterable. The commitment to democracy as a principle is then seen as leading to the possibility of broad alliances between autonomous groups working to undermine the dominant culture through an insistence on common access to the processes of creating meaning and value within the culture. (Watt 1991, 64)

Watt’s analysis goes a long way towards articulating a theoretical understanding of community arts (including theatre). While this analysis moves away from Williams’ ‘culturalist’ analysis of class-based social relationship, it remains within his cultural materialist project which was, according to Milner, ‘essentially politico-institutional’ and concerned primarily with how to ‘create and strengthen the institutions of political, economic and cultural democracy’ (2002, 179). Cultural geographer, Gillian Rose (1997a, b), extends this analysis by directly examining the way in which community arts workers intervene in the construction of social space by power, opening spaces for dynamic cultural processes in which dominant (and subordinating) narratives are actively resisted. Before I explore this connection, however, I will introduce the work of MED Theatre, a community theatre company established on Dartmoor. MED Theatre’s community-based theatre practice resists regimes of power/knowledge which would govern Dartmoor National Park as a ‘natural’ environment, conserving its area for users typically drawn from outside park boundaries, at the cost of the local knowledge, interests and enfranchisement of those who dwell within.

5.4   Creating a Community Theatre Practice on Dartmoor MED Theatre was not established, in the first instance, as a self-defined community theatre company. The company’s beginnings were informal as a group of friends living on Dartmoor came together to make theatre about their experience. The early plays, written by poet and primate ecologist, Mark Beeson, problematise the designation of Dartmoor as a National Park and the ‘preservationist’ policies of the park authority (see further detailed discussion below) (Beeson 2013). The Badgers (1980) is set on Dartmoor against a decade of controversy surrounding

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the re-emergence of Bovine Tuberculosis (TB). The play deals with the unsystematic, ad hoc response to the crisis by the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). Lacking scientific proof of transmission of the virus from badgers to bovines, the MAFF bowed to pressure from various interest groups and initiated a badger cull in affected areas (see Kelly 2014). Written in rhyming couplets after the Tudor comedy/farce Ralph Roister Doister (1553), The Badgers deals with the deeply troubled relationship between scientific understanding, powerful interest groups (farmers’ groups and the national press) and government policy formation, drawing direct parallels between the MAFF’s extermination of wildlife in order to preserve livestock, and the impact of government planning policy on Dartmoor’s human inhabitants. Rehearsed outdoors on a pile of granite rocks at Easdon on Dartmoor, torrential rain forced the performance of the play indoors. It took place (dir. Heather Todd) in Easdon barn with the audience ‘seated on hay bales’ while “packaging crates made up the stage” (Beeson 2015).8 The idea for a community theatre came to Beeson in a break from creative writing during a period of fieldwork on the Zomba Plateau in Malawi. Beeson was working for the Malawian forestry department as a primate ecologist attempting to resolve the problem of bark-stripping of pine trees by blue monkeys in plantations adjacent to their Afro-montane forest habitat. Close observation of primate behaviour inspired Beeson to ‘create and develop a community theatre organization in the Dartmoor National Park, where adults, teenagers and children could all work and play together in drama that dealt with issues around the manmade/natural interface’ (Dickenson 2003). On his return from Malawi, Beeson wrote his first community play, The Hedge, specifically for and about his home village of Manaton. The play won second prize in Ann Jellicoe’s Village Community Play Competition in 1982. An established playwright and literary manager with the Royal Court Theatre in London, Jellicoe relocated to the SouthWest of England where she began to articulate, through performance practice, the principles of the ‘community play’ (see Jellicoe 1987). After the popular success of her first community play, The Reckoning, in Lyme Regis in 1978, Jellicoe established the Colway Theatre Trust (CTT) in 1980 to

8 Images of the original production are available here: http://www.medtheatre.themoon. co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Article-Badgers-and-the-Scottish-Referendum.pdf.

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further develop the model.9 Jellicoe encouraged Beeson to produce The Hedge, which he did in 1984 with a community cast in Manaton Parish Hall. He then wrote and produced a further three community plays, Childe The Hunter (1986), The Swallows (1987) and The Green Woman (1988), known collectively as the Manaton plays because they were written specifically for the village and performed by a community cast in the parish hall. Manaton and East Dartmoor (MED) Community Theatre was formally constituted and registered as a charity to produce drama for and by people living on Dartmoor in 1989, with Beeson in the role of Artistic Director.10 While encouraged by Jellicoe, Beeson, with other members of MED Theatre, developed an independent model of community performance in parallel to that of CTT. Typically, the CTT community play process is led by a core team of theatre professionals, including a playwright, director, stage manager, designer and composer/musical director, who steer the community (people of the town or village) in its production of the play over a 24-month period of engagement. Despite opportunities for community members to be involved in the production of the play beyond performing—for example as painters, carpenters, costume and propmakers, musicians, accountants, caterers, drivers, printers, box office administrators, ushers and childminders—there are questions about the extent to which community participation is limited to supporting the activities of a professional group controlling the creative decision-making process. Kershaw describes the exchange between professionals and community members as a form of ‘barter’ and argues that the performance conventions of the CTT community play turn the balance of power back in the direction of non-professional, community participants. He notes that community plays (written by a commissioned playwright) tend to draw heavily on local culture and ‘history from below’ and that performances eschew formal theatrical style drawing instead on popular traditions of performance (1992, 191–195). In particular, the adoption of the 9 The popularity of the CTT community play model exceeded the bounds of the SouthWest of England. Kerhsaw notes that it even became possible to speak of an international community play movement (1992, 186). Claque Theatre (artistic director, Jon Oram) continues the CTT tradition of the community play. The community play is experiencing something of a practical and critical revival. See, for instance, Salford Community Theatre’s Love on the Dole and https://communitytheatreplaywright.wordpress.com/. 10 In addition to Beeson as Artistic Director, the company employs an Education team (Abby Stobart and Helen Gilbert), Company Development Officer (Gillian Webster) and an Artistic and Administrative Assistant (Suvi Rehell).

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mode of promenade performance in community venues simulates vernacular cultural traditions, such as the village fair or carnival, and lends an atmosphere of informal celebration to community plays. It was this two-pronged alignment of (political) play and popular celebration that, according to Kershaw, promoted ‘accessibility, involvement, identification: the keynotes of successful community theatre’ (1992, 193) and positioned community theatre as an effective (if small) part of a wider counter-cultural movement of ‘celebratory protest’ (1991, 16). For reasons that will be outlined in the section below, MED Theatre has been concerned to develop a more democratic model of community performance making that ensures that local Dartmoor people, themselves, rather than a group of external, professional elites, take a leading role in all aspects of performance making. I don’t have space here to offer more than a brief outline of the evolution of MED Theatre’s practice which includes community plays (since the 1980s), an educational arm (since the 1990s) and the young peoples’ programme (since the 2000s). Key to the company’s development has been the foundation of weekly ‘drama clubs’ for young people (ranging from 5–19 years old), in addition to the adult group that meets monthly.11 The teenage company, Wild Nights, established in 2004 with support from HLF Young Roots programme and the Dartmoor Sustainable Development Fund, manages all aspects of their own creative projects, utilising diverse art forms including playwriting, music, film and experimental dance drama. The annual community play, often strategically incorporated into funded programmes of work to offset low levels of resource available for its production, offers an opportunity for these inter-generational groups to come together, typically over the long, dark Winter months, to collectively make and perform a piece of theatre that tours Dartmoor in early Spring. Badgerland, however, was a discrete production taking place alongside various professional arts and cultural development activities: The Walk (2014–2015) supported by Arts Council England; Whitehorse Hill (2015), a community play performed in Bellever Forest by the company and young people from Postbridge and Princetown, supported by the Heritage Lottery funded Moor Than Meets The Eye Landscape Partnership; and Burrator’s War (2015), a young people’s film ­project commissioned by Daisi. Such a high level of activity by a small 11 Rising Lights (5–7 years); Bright Lights (8–10 years); Bright Nights (10–12 years); and Wild Nights Young Company (13–19 years).

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theatre company demonstrates its commitment to offer opportunities to Dartmoor residents to variously engage in cultural production processes. An historical reference point for MED Theatre in this respect is the work of Medium Fair, a professional (Exeter-based) performance ensemble focused on touring theatre to rural communities in the East Devon and Teignbridge area in the 1970s (see Kershaw 1978). Frustrated by the minimal contact afforded by a busy touring schedule, which discouraged villagers from ‘speaking or acting/doing for themselves’ and inspired by the development of modes of ‘collective creation’ in the community arts movement, Medium Fair initiated the innovative Village Visit Week programme travelling to fewer places for a lengthier period of creative/cultural engagement. Before visiting a village, the company researched the local area and its history, and developed relationships with relevant organisations and community groups. During the week-long visit, Medium Fair worked on a previously identified project in the village (such as a parish hall renovation or construction of a bus stop), created a performance drawn from their research into, usually, the history of the local area, and attempted to engage local people in creating their own performances drawing on similar research material. These professional and professionally supported performances were shown together in a celebratory event on the final (Saturday) night of the week. In his research into the history of theatre and performance on Dartmoor in 1997, Beeson credits Medium Fair with establishing community theatre on Dartmoor after the company’s visit to the village of Ilsington on the eastern edge of the National Park (see Dartmoor Resource: http://www. dartmoorresource.org.uk/). The connection drawn between a tradition of community theatre started on Dartmoor by Medium Fair and developed by MED Community Theatre serves to distinguish MED’s model of community theatre practice from CTT’s professionally driven one. Kershaw has noted that the community play movement ‘led to demands for more long-term participatory projects in single locations’ (1992, 182), and it is clear that MED Theatre views its work within a long history of performance, including community theatre, on Dartmoor. The shift from a professionally facilitated community play to community-generated theatre has involved the generation of new modes of performance. Leaving aside performances made for outdoors on the moor, MED typically performs in the round in communal spaces. On the floors of parish halls (leaving the proscenium stage for overflow audience seating and the placement of theatre technicians), the audience is seated in

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a square formation around a large, circular, painted canvas on the floor. Breaks in each ‘corner’ of the square of audience seating allow the performers to circulate on and off ‘stage’. After their turn in the central performance space, often utilising a simple, portable raised platform, the performers retire to the outer circle (where live musicians are also placed). It is a flexible performance arrangement creating a sense of flow from inner to outer circles with the audience held in the middle of alternating intensities of participatory performance from performing to audiencing to preparing (waiting in readiness) to perform again. These performance conventions are illuminating for the ways in which they reveal different concepts, practices and enactments of ‘community theatre’. According to Kershaw, the efficacy of the CTT community play depends on carefully balancing popular performance with the social(ist) critique typically embedded in the play (1992, 203). The reliance on a popular, participatory aesthetic to lend authenticity to the social critique contained in the play, ‘transcends social differences, at least temporarily’ and ‘reinforces an idealised notion of community as an unchanging unity’ (Woodruff in Kershaw 1992, 191). In contrast, Beeson is wary of the ‘use of participation to strengthen networks of community’, as in the CTT model of community play (see Kershaw 1992, 190). He characterises MED Theatre’s work as ‘provocative without antagonising to the point of building barriers’, and as a ‘catalyst for getting people to think in a social forum’ (Beeson and Stobart 2010). In other words, participation is not simulated to lend authenticity to a less popular cultural form (theatre) introducing radical ideas into a putatively conservative context. Rather, the performance with its various levels of participation serves to hold performers and audience in collective cogitation on social, ecological and other issues that the participants are already immersed in. Bruce McConachie, a North American community-based theatre academic and practitioner, asserts that community-based theatre is concerned more with ‘imagining and constructing the relationships of an ethical community for the future’ than ‘representing the realities of actual or historic communities’ (in 2001, 42). His description of the aesthetics and politics of community-based theatre as attuned to careful negotiation of symbolic boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, is most resonant with MED’s practice as it seeks to construct an ethical community of the future drawing for imagination (and authenticity) on Dartmoor’s history, ecology and folklore, thus highlighting its cultural wealth without fixing an essential identity in representation (pp. 42–43).

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Before venturing further in understanding MED’s community-based performance practice, it is necessary to explore what is meant by Dartmoor as a spatial concept that it is possible to be inside ‘of’ and, from that insider position, to produce performance ‘about’. I am going to explore notions of Dartmoor as both a dwelling place and a National Park entity. This will lead into discussion of the evolution of a community practice in response to power-ridden social relations that construct National Park boundaries in such a way as to leave those dwelling inside these externally instituted and governed borders feeling marginalised and powerless or democratically disenfranchised. Thus, it will be argued that the activation of the internalised margin that is MED Theatre’s community practice is not a reactionary or exclusionary gesture to reassert a pure, homogenous sense of place aka ‘community’, but a dynamic, critical and self-reflexive engagement with the spatial practices of power relations.

5.5  Dartmoor: Dwelling Place or ‘A Sort of National Property’12? The core principles of MED Theatre’s community performance practice are derived from grasping the tensions inherent in understanding Dartmoor as ‘a bounded political entity guided by distinct principles of land use’ (Dilsaver and Wyckoff 2005, 237) and as a dwelling place. The national park concept itself is grounded in processes of (new) nation-building in settler colonies and changing concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ promoted by Romantic artists (North American and British, e.g., Wordsworth) throughout the nineteenth century. It was first formalised with the founding of Yellowstone National Park in the USA in 1872. In the UK, the first national parks were established in the 1950s and their formation is linked to several factors including widespread industrialisation, the concomitant movement of populations from the countryside to cities and towns, the ongoing enclosure of common land into private ownership and a vigorous public campaign for rights of way and access to countryside. After the Kinder Scout mass trespass in the 12 William Wordsworth’s description of the Lake District as, ‘a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’ (A Guide Through the District of the Lakes 1810), is oft cited as envisioning the Development of National Parks in the UK.

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1930s, a voluntary organisation, the Standing Committee for National Parks, was established to lobby government to secure public access to open countryside. The creation of national parks in the UK was taken up in a national government planning process tied to post-war reconstruction. The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act enabled the designation of the Peak District as the first national park in England and Wales in 1951. The designation of Dartmoor as a National Park took place on 30 October 1951. The 1949 Act defined the purposes of national parks as: ‘(i) preserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the areas; and (ii) promoting public enjoyment thereof, and opportunities for open-air recreation and the study of nature thereby’ (pp. 1–2). Prior to the 1949 Act, the 1945 Dower report drew attention to the fact that much of the UK countryside was privately owned and needed to be protected as a working/living environment as well as a natural one. Dower recommended that the UK government provide a national land fund to buy land back into public ownership to prevent conflicts between the interests of nature conservation and, for instance, commercial agriculture, but none was established. Dower’s (1945) report foreshadowed some of the complex and competing conflicts of interests that have characterised national park administration ever since: private and public, nature and culture, work and leisure, dwelling and tourism, living culture and heritage, local and national, local and global. With respect to Dartmoor, cultural environmentalist and MED adult company member, Tom Greeves, asserts that, ‘significant damage, practically and philosophically, has been done in the past fifty years as a consequence of the designation of Dartmoor as national park’ (2001). Recalling the concept’s colonial heritage, he argues that national park designation leaves: little or no place for awareness of the thinking and approach of the indigenous peoples of the area in question whether native North Americans, who had used, named and respected the land without disrupting ecological damage, or the Dartmoor hill farmers, tinners, stonecutters and peat cutters who had created the landscape now suddenly labelled as ‘natural beauty’. (2001)

On Dartmoor, Greeves explains, the ‘natural’ or ‘wilderness’ ideology embedded in the national park concept led to a programme of destruction of man-made structures dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an attempt to ‘eliminate ‘eyesore’ or ‘disfigurement’ in the

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landscape’ (2001). Beeson has also written about programmatic attempts by Dartmoor National Park, from the 1970s through to the 1990s, to return the Dartmoor landscape to an eighteenth-century ideal of natural landscape. Robert Hewison cites Beeson’s argument in an address to the European Council critical of ‘the pastoral’ as an idealised vision of landscape and warning against an extension of heritage concepts and values from built to ‘natural’ environments: The term landscape specifies the ideal of any area’s appearance and can use any time reference. Once this is applied, human and non-human features can be eradicated, or prevented from developing, to conform to the ideal. Useful buildings have been demolished by the authorities on Dartmoor, because they date from a period after the early nineteenth century, the “ideal” for that area. The same authorities dis-courage the natural spread of trees on open hillsides, because during the ideal period hillsides were heath. (Beeson 1991, also cited in Hewison 1992)

Jamal and Everett (2007) have noted that natural area destinations are ‘politically, economically and culturally contested spaces’ (p. 67). Drawing on Frankfurt school critique of instrumental reason, and in particular Habermas’s ‘knowledge constitutes interest’ framework, they assert that: potential problems arise when scientific rationalism (where measurement, monitoring and production are dominant discourses) and economic rationalism (through increasing commodification, control, efficiency and productivity generating activity) intersect the life world of people in and around the protected areas. Without participatory opportunities in decision making and governance of the park’s economic and ecological well-being, practical knowledge (e.g. local and indigenous knowledge in this instance) risks becoming marginalised in park management. (Jamal and Everett 2007, 64)

MED Community Theatre was formed, partly, in response to just such a democratic deficit at the core of Dartmoor National Park administration. Through performance, the company sought to promote the interests and practical knowledge of those dwelling in the Dartmoor landscape and to assert the landscape as a living or ‘dwelled in’ (Ingold 2000) one, in opposition to (national) heritage discourses, which would stake claim to it. Both Beeson and Greeves assert that Dartmoor’s designation as a

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‘landscape of national importance’ implies a centrist (South Eastern), urban-based, elitist construction, which gives little consideration to ‘the quality of contemporary human culture in its area’ (Beeson 1991; Greeves 2001). In 1995, the Environment Act revised the 1949 Act and re-designated the purposes of National Parks as: ‘(i) the conservation and enhancement of the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of park areas; and (ii) the promotion of opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of their special qualities by the public’ (Section 61). In addition, the Act established freestanding park authorities and further stipulated that it was the explicit duty of these new authorities ‘to foster the economic and social well-being of local communities within the National Park’ (Section 62). However, while the newly established park authorities were now required to care for the well-being of local communities, they were also prohibited from ‘incurring significant expenditure in doing so’ (Section 62). MED Community Theatre has, since the company’s inception in the 1980s, been concerned with issues of ‘representation and local democracy’, an area acknowledged as a particular problem by (then) Chief Executive of the Dartmoor National Park Authority, Nick Atkinson (2001). MED has sought to create a space—barely recognised or acknowledged until after 1995—for local people dwelling in a nationally significant landscape to come together to consider how their lifeworlds intersect with and, indeed, exceed the bounded and governed space of the national park.

5.6  Spatial Dimensions of ‘Power’ and ‘Community’ in Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy13 It has been important to examine the ways in which the national park concept and preservationist practices of park authorities affect those living within the bounded and contested space of the park. Such an examination enables further, focused discussion of MED Theatre’s community-based practice in this context given the variable and contested notions of ‘community’ in circulation. Arguably, MED’s practice is dynamically formed in response to power structures driving a

13 for images of MED Theatre’s ‘Badgerland’ performed in a village hall on Dartmoor (2015), see: http://www.medtheatre.co.uk/badgerland/.

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wedge between conceptions of nature and culture establishing, in the process, a bounded zone of nature conservation which places the recreational pleasures of ‘outsiders’ above the cultural knowledge and practices of ‘insiders’. MED’s community practice enacts the struggles of a marginalised group to assert the ‘quality of its living c­ ulture’ (Beeson 1991) over ossified heritage constructions of a pastoral landscape. While Watt has foregrounded the dynamism of community-based cultural practices, Gillian Rose extends the critical concept of community to include an understanding of the production of space by power (and resistance). Rose’s ‘spatial-cultural’ analysis is based on community arts practitioners working in public housing estates on the urban fringes of Edinburgh. Her analysis focuses on how ‘community’ is dynamically activated as a spatial organisation of marginalised identity within a powerproduced space. While Rose’s analysis is engaged with community arts projects undertaken on the urban periphery, where city planning processes have progressively (re) located poor or deprived populations in public housing developments, there are similarities with Dartmoor in the construction of spatial zones such as centre and margin and the location of social relations in terms of inside and outside, top (down) and bottom (up) and so on. What is distinct in the case of Dartmoor, however, is that it is the central interior of Dartmoor that is made marginal to external power relations. According to Rose, the operationalisation of ‘community’ as ‘marginal’ serves to counter-pose a ‘community’ to this ‘spatiality of power’ and depends on a relational and constructed understanding of difference, not an essentialist one: ‘The marginalised community is nameable as such only because power has made it, not because of its inherent qualities’ (1997b, 8). She notes that community arts practitioners employ critical anti-essentialising tactics in their un-fixing of ‘community’: ‘the community so named is not essentialised because the qualities which are given to it in the community arts workers’ discourse are—none. Far from having an essence, these ‘marginalised’ communities are described through a discourse of lack. Their qualities are absent ones’ (1997b, 8). In the following analysis of Badgerland, I will explore the anti-essentialising tactics of MED Theatre as it engages in representing the ‘place’ and ‘community’ of Dartmoor. It will be argued that MED Theatre presents multiple images of real and imagined Dartmoor(s), the carnivalesque excess of which deeply unsettles the geography of lack.

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Badgerland is a community play written for an ensemble of over twenty performers. Mixing rhyming couplets (spoken by adult participants) and verse, as well as prose, the play re-stages the meeting of archaeologists, Tintin Mills and Roger Reaves, and a cete14 of badgers in The Badgers (1980). While the archaeologists are the same people some years on, the badgers in the sett they accidentally fall into, despite a now sophisticated technological armoury, are a different group: meles meles, we are informed, do not have a long lifespan. Thus, the re-activation of convivial social ties based on previous co-operation—in The Badgers (1980) the archaeologists and badgers had to co-operate to escape the sett before they were gassed by the men from MAFF—does not re-occur. These badgers, led by a badger called the Sow, are thoroughly political animals. Aware of trial culls in neighbouring counties and having caught wind of the Scottish Referendum for Independence, the badgers are fomenting political revolution on Dartmoor. Departing from The Badgers (1980), Badgerland has been written by Beeson for an inter-generational ensemble and includes the struggles of young people living on Dartmoor. In addition to the central archaeologist/badger narrative, the stories of Esmee, a teenager recently relocated with her family from London to Dartmoor, and Harriet, who is the daughter of working Dartmoor farmers, are also presented. Harriet and her friends try to introduce Esmee to the joys of badger watching on the farm, a pleasure curtailed by the discovery of Bovine TB in cattle on the farm, and an outbreak of phytophthora15 in a plantation of larch trees. The opening speech of the play is uttered by Esmee, the teenager relocated to Dartmoor: So this is my new home! All round me Moors stretch to the edge of the world, Bog after bog, a dreary wasteland Punctuated only by the dark Monstrosities of tors, sinister Silhouettes against a grim skyline,

14 Cete refers to the group name for badgers. Badgers live in a sett. Their scientific (Latin) name is meles meles. 15 A fungus-like infection that can kill trees and shrubs, Phytophthora, presents a considerable threat to natural ecosystems and forest-based industries, see: http://www.dartmoor. gov.uk/lookingafter/laf-naturalenv/laf-treeswoodlands/laf_pram16710.

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The loneliest place I’ve ever been. We’ve moved down to Devon from London – Oh dear. What were my parents thinking? There, I was happy: friends, lots to do, Everything on my doorstep. Birds would Sing from the trees in the well-kept parks I walked to school through. Here it’s a bus That takes me, roaring along the lanes With bullying voices. I hate them. Nothing to do, and if I had a Friend, which I don’t, I’d have to persuade Parents to drive for miles to see them – There’s no public transport. Primitive. (Badgerland 2015, 1)

Esmee’s bold opening speech juxtaposes Dartmoor to London, re-inscribing the Nation’s capital as the centre of cosmopolitan culture (green manicured parks replete with birdsong and purposeful pedestrians) in contrast to boring, bleak, ‘remote’ Devon. The speech instigates a centre versus margin spatial politics with London in the centre and Devon/Dartmoor on the periphery. It is a bald re-statement of the political economy of the UK where economic, political and cultural power is centralised in the city state of London (see Ertürk et al. 2011). But whereas Esmee’s parents, who relocated the family to Devon, might relish the contrast between city and countryside, for Esmee, the moorland itself is a ‘wasteland’: dreary, dark, sinister and grim. In many ways, Esmee’s sense of Dartmoor typifies the ways in which the dystopian— alienating, dangerous and polluted—urban landscape is depicted. This is the landscape that her parents probably left, made mobile through London capital, in search of the rural idyll. Esmee’s speech somewhat inverts the dichotomy asserting the countryside as a wasteland: ugly, strange, forbidding and, unlike the city, as primitive or un-developed. It also extends the analysis beyond a mere reversal of opposition between the urban and rural, city and countryside. While providing space for the perspective of a young person who perhaps hasn’t had a say in being relocated, what it also points to is substantial inequality in this spatial politics of centre and margin. As an incomer, all Esmee can see is a strange, rather ugly landscape which only compounds her sense of social isolation and loneliness exacerbated by a lack of public transport infrastructure which threatens her mobility, independence and connection to extended social networks. The issue then becomes not about

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how London and Dartmoor, city and countryside, urban and rural exist in complementary opposition but points to the inequality inherent in centre/marginal power relations, resource allocation and development planning. Esmee’s speech thus raises important questions concerning the development of Dartmoor’s infrastructure to service those living within the park. In another scene, a local ecologist, Giselle, addresses a public meeting in the village hall called to agitate against a recent proposal at national government level to re-route the coastal railway line across Dartmoor. Re-routing the railway across moorland will provide a safe inland route as an alternative to the existing line, which is threatened by coastal erosion, an effect of global warming. The ecologist is outraged that Dartmoor’s fragile ecology can be sacrificed to provide secure passage, a thoroughfare, for rail commuters across the moorland. For her, it reveals how tenuous the ‘protection’ afforded by national park status is and how readily local/specific ecological concerns are ignored when national and regional interests come into play. The ecologist is interrupted/heckled by a young man, Danny, who urges those gathered in the village hall to consider the damage that the lack of a viable rail route will wreak on the local/regional economy. Rejecting nimbyism, he suggests that the rail line needs to move from the coast and that Dartmoor should be considered as a possible alternative route. He further asserts that: …as for damage to Dartmoor’s ecology, if we still had the railway lines to Princetown and Moretonhampstead, think how many fewer cars there would be polluting the Dartmoor air with their greenhouse gases. And while we’re at it, we should straighten the lanes out, and widen the main roads where they suddenly go down to single track. (Badgerland 2015)

Danny’s interjections effectively close the meeting down as it becomes a squabble between, as it turns out, mother and son. The exchange, however, highlights the pressures between protection (heritage, ecological) and development planning with respect to Dartmoor National Park as an area of ‘natural beauty’ and ‘public enjoyment’. It also starts to build an unsettled picture of Dartmoor as a local, cohesive ‘community’ with the family unit of Giselle and Danny presenting a fractious image of familial dis-unity. Giselle and Danny’s debate reveals different and contested national, regional and local stakes in Dartmoor. Giselle asserts that Dartmoor

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is not respected as an ecologically unique place worthy of protection from development in the form of a national infrastructural project. She opposes this development for the way in which it locates Dartmoor as a transit corridor, a secure and speedy thoroughfare, destroying its special qualities in the process. She’d rather see Dartmoor as a bounded and protected ecological zone. This eco-fundamentalist position recalls some of the more problematic aspects of 1970s national park (protectionist) policy discussed earlier in this chapter. Danny’s arguments allude to the fact that Dartmoor has a history of working railways and that, since the closure of the lines in the 1960s, road traffic has increased leading to environmental pollution and safety issues with more cars using roads that were never built for the current amount of traffic. While roads on Dartmoor have not been developed, development has occurred just off Dartmoor with the building in the 1980s of the A30 and A38 roads around the circumferential edges of the park. These roads increase cars and traffic around and on Dartmoor. Danny’s speech highlights how it is impossible to enclose Dartmoor as a bounded, protected—pastoral or ecologically pure—landscape. Doing this increases development pressures on the edges of the park, which also come to bear on Dartmoor itself. The fall of the archaeologists into the badger sett introduces another spatial axis to the increasingly messy matrix of centre and margin, inside and outside. The opening up of the vertical and hierarchical axes disrupts the dominance of the human world for a ‘more-than-human’ worldview that takes into consideration the being (and all that entails) of other forms of animate life. The carnivalesque entry into and exploration of the ‘underground’ in terms of the disruptive and constructive potentialities of other animate life forms (including viral contagion), latent desires (self-determination, social connection) and radical ideas (political independence) gives lie to the notion that Dartmoor is a securely bounded, fixed entity. Dartmoor National Park boundaries are revealed to be thoroughly permeable. The satisfying resolution to Badgerland, because this is theatre and the play is a comedy, attempts to make the most of this mutability. All the different characters and their storylines come together out on the moor, and it suddenly occurs to them, via Esmee, that the solution to the Badgers underground insurrection and a proposed rail line across the surface of Dartmoor might be an infrastructure project to build an underground rail system (Badgerland 2015). This underground transport system would avoid sensitive ecological sites above

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ground and would engage the archaeologists in digging and documenting significant sites of human history below ground. The idea captures the imagination of the badgers too as they are promised some development, around historical human sites, in the form of houses and facilities. The hedgehogs, concerned for their survival as badger prey in an independent Badgerland, hope that this will end the badgers’ claims for political independence. For the younger humans, however, the notion of an underground reveals the desire for infrastructurally enabled connection on Dartmoor. The play ends as Esmee and Danny recite possible ‘tube’ stations, with the names of Dartmoor towns and villages rolling off the tongue: Esmee: … Bovey… Moreton… Princetown, Yelverton… Danny: Brilliant. And at Postbridge, Dousland, Widecombe, Leusdon, Hexworthy, Ashburton, Buckfastleigh, South Brent, Sheepstor, Meavy, Walkhampton, Mary Tavy, Peter Tavy, Lydford, Brent Tor, Cornwood, Shaugh Prior, Harford, Gidleigh, Throwleigh, Belstone, Sticklepath, Holne, Sourton, and even Chagford (Badgerland 2015).

5.7   Conclusion The objective of this chapter was to explicate the significance of the term ‘community’ in a self-defined community-based theatre practice on Dartmoor and, in so doing, to counter critical discourses of community cultural practices framed solely in terms of instrumental arts policy linked to neo-liberal forms of governance. MED Community Theatre was formed by people living on Dartmoor to creatively explore the ways in which the national park concept and preservationist policies overdetermined crucial aspects of their lives. It was noted that National Park policies and practices overlooked Dartmoor as a cultural landscape in attempting to instantiate a ‘natural’ (English heritage, pastoral) one. These policies and practices directly led to the feeling that those dwelling inside park boundaries were marginalised in relation to external— southern metropolitan, professional—powers governing the park in the leisure and recreational interests of the same urban elite. It has been argued that the activation of this marginalised identity by MED Theatre is not a reactionary gesture to reassert a unified image of a bounded ‘local’ Dartmoor ‘community’. Rather, MED’s activation of Dartmoor’s marginality engages dynamically with the spatial practices of power

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relations and is critically anti-essentialist when it comes to ‘community’. At one and the same time, in Badgerland, MED Theatre depicts Dartmoor as a ‘geography of lack’ and as an excessively uncontainable space. The bounded area of Dartmoor National Park is shown to be a governmental fiction traversed, horizontally and vertically, by various policies, people (tourists, incoming settlers and researchers), animals (badgers and hedgehogs), ideas, desires, debates and agents of biocontagion. In un-working marginality and community in this manner, MED Theatre creatively intervenes in the ongoing formation of Dartmoor as a dwelling place, opening space for the expression and affirmation of the inordinate richness of (more-than) human lives lived on the granite high plateau and countering discourses of containment within conservation management. These discourses would reduce Dartmoor to a natural landscape re-inscribing a dichotomy between natural and cultural worlds that cannot be upheld in everyday life. Given that this discussion of a community-based theatre company exceeds the discourse of instrumentalism that frames and contains arts policy and practice in the UK, a concluding comment on culture and power is warranted. The official adoption of participation and social impact as central principles of public arts subsidy in the UK may derive from a desire to appear to operate a less elitist and more democratic (participatory) system of arts funding and/or an attempt to align cultural policy more closely with central government agendas (and funding streams) by demonstrating the efficiency and efficacy of the arts in other—economic and social—policy fields. In any case, the knotty issue of the ‘instrumentalisation of the arts’ has emerged and is difficult to unravel. The current predicament, however, serves neither established nor community-based arts and cultural practices and especially not the latter, which is reduced to and evaluated (by policymakers, peers and academic researchers) on the basis of misappropriated aims, objectives and values. If community-based cultural practices have anything to contribute to the politics of culture, rather than increasingly divisive cultural politics, it is that material processes of cultural re-production cannot be separated from socio-economic relations. In other words, the ‘social impact of participation in the arts’ is a ‘straw man’ as society and culture are, pace Williams (1958) and Bourdieu (1977, 1984), already co-implicated in complex and complicated ways. Critical attention given to the place of participation and social impact in cultural policy directs focus away from more fundamental problems of culture and power:

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firstly, the maintenance of elitist views of culture—as has been argued, the diversion of community arts to address cultural deficit re-affirms the hegemony of high art and, secondly, the neglect of the centrality of the market and mass culture in everyday life (see Hawkins 1993, 164–167). Critical energy should worry these loose threads of the instrumental cultural policy knot. First, it needs to be recognised that community cultural practices are based on core values of collective dynamism and cultural democracy (including cultural difference and cultural diversity) and that these remain relevant and potent in cultural practice and policy. Second, the central place of mass culture in everyday experience must be acknowledged and public intervention in the cultural sphere should, therefore, extend to commercial culture, especially the regulation of diversity of ownership, and in supporting access to new technologies. These arguments for the democratic reform of cultural policy are not new, but their re-animation is critical at a time when public ‘investment’ in arts and culture establishes market-like conditions within a narrow field. While industrial constraints intensify competition between and commodification of public arts and culture, the commercial sector, and a significant section of everyday cultural activity, remains at risk of monopolistic and homogenising forces. I’d like to thank two anonymous readers and the editors, Lisanne Gibson and Eleonora Belfiore, for insightful comments. I’d also like to thank Mark Beeson and Dr. Tom Greeves for comments on an earlier draft of the chapter.

Bibliography Adam, B., Beck, U., & Van Loon, J. (Eds.). (2000). The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. London, Thousand Oaks, and Delhi: Sage. Atkinson, N. (2001). Things Can Only Get Better. Available online at: http://www.dartmoorsociety.com/files/debates/natpark.html#things%20 better. Accessed 15 Apr 2015. Beck, U. (1992). The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London, Thousand Oaks, and Delhi: Sage. Beeson, M. (1991, March 28). A Superficial View of Landscape. The Independent. Beeson, M. (1998). A Study of John Ford: John Ford and Dartmoor. Available online at: http://www.dartmoorresource.org.uk/performance/theatre-ondartmoor/theatre-history-of/298-a-study-of-john-ford. Accessed 15 Aug 2016. Beeson, M. (2013, February 22). Interviewed by: Schaefer, K.

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Beeson, M. (2015). Badgers and the Scottish Referendum. Available online at: http://www.medtheatre.themoon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ Article-Badgers-and-the-Scottish-Referendum.pdf. Accessed 16 May 2015. Beeson, M., & Greeves, T. (1993). The Image of Dartmoor. Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, 125, 127–154. Beeson, M., & Stobart, A. (2010, November 16). MED Theatre. Lecture and Workshop Presented at the University of Exeter. Belfiore, E. (2002). Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does It Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 8(1), 91–106. Belfiore, E. (2006). The Social Impacts of the Arts—Myth or Reality? In M. Mirza (Ed.), Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? (pp. 20–37). London: Policy Exchange Limited. Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braden, S. (1978). Artists and People. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cohen, A. (1985). The Symbolic Construction of Community. Chichester: Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock. Crehan, K. (2011). Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford and New York: Berg. Delanty, G. (2003). Community. London and New York: Routledge. Dickenson, S. (2003). MED Theatre. Available online at: http://www.dartmoorresource.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=266. Accessed 16 May 2015. Dilsaver, L. M., & Wyckoff, W. (2005). The Political Geography of National Parks. Pacific Historical Review, 74(2), 237–266. Dower, J. (1945). National Parks in England and Wales. London, UK: HMSO. Environment Act. (1995). Chapter 25 Part III National Parks. Available online at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/25/part/III. Accessed 15 Apr 2015. Ertürk, I., Froud, J., Johal, S., Leaver, A., Moran, M., & Williams, K. (2011). City State Against the National Settlement: UK Economic Policy and Politics After the Financial Crisis (Working Paper No. 101). University of Manchester: CRESC. Available online at: http://www.cresc.ac.uk/medialibrary/workingpapers/wp101.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2014. Greeves, T. (2001). Twas Purty to Hear The Jumpers Going’—Dartmoor National Park: A Culture Misplaced. Available online at: http://www.dartmoorsociety. com/files/debates/natpark.html#purty. Accessed 15 Apr 2015.

124  K. SCHAEFER Hawkins, G. (1993). From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Hewison, R. (1992). The Future of the Pastoral, Management of Public Access to the Heritage Landscape Architectural Heritage, No. 24 (pp. 49–54). Strasbourg: Council of Europe Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jamal, T. B., & Everett, J. (2007). Resisting Rationalisation in the Natural and Academic Life-World: Critical Tourism Research or Hermeneutic Charity? In I. Ateljevic, A. Pritchard, & N. Morgan (Eds.), The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies: Innovative Research Methodologies (pp. 57–76). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Jeffers, A., & Moriarty, G. (Eds.). (2017). Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Jellicoe, A. (1987). Community Plays: How to Put Them On. London: Methuen. Khan, R. (2015). Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, O. (1984). Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels. London: Comedia Publishing Group. Kelly, M. (2014, July 3). What the 70s Can Tell Us About Culling Badgers. The Guardian. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/03/what-the-70s-can-tell-us-about-culling-badgers-gassing. Accessed 18 July 2016. Kelly, M. (2015). Quartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor: A British Landscape in Modern Times. London: Jonathan Cape. Kershaw, B. (1978). Theatre Art and Community Action: The Achievement of Medium Fair. Theatre Quarterly, 8(30), 65–91. Kershaw, B. (1991). Theatre and Community: Alternative and Community Theatre in Britain: 1960–1985. An Investigation into Cultural History and Performance Efficacy. Ph.D. thesis, University of Exeter, Exeter. Kershaw, B. (1992). The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. London: Routledge. Matarasso, F. (1997). Use or Ornament: The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. London: Comedia. Matarasso, F. (2003). Smoke and Mirrors: A Response to Paola Merli’s “Evaluating the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Activities”, IJCP, 2002, vol. 8(1). International Journal of Cultural Policy, 9(3), 337–346. Matarasso, F. (2019). A Restless Art: How Participation Won and Why It Matters. Lisbon and London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. https://arestlessart. com/. McConachie, B. (2001). Approaching the “Structure of Feeling” in Grassroots Theater. In S. C. Haedicke & T. Nellhaus (Eds.), Performing Democracy:

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International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. McEwen, C. (2008). Investing in Play: Expectations, Dependencies and Power in Australian Practices of Community Cultural Development. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, NSW. MED Theatre. (2015). Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy. Playscript. Available online at: http://www.medtheatre.themoon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/ 01/Badgers-8.pdf. Accessed 20 Apr 2015. Merli, P. (2002). Evaluating the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Activities: A Critical Review of François Matarasso’s Use or Ornament? International Journal of Cultural Policy, 8(1), 107–118. Milner, A. (2002). Re-imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Mirza, M. (Ed.). (2006). Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? London: Policy Exchange. Mulligan, M., & Smith, P. (2010). Art, Governance and the Turn to Community: Putting Art at the Heart of Local Government. Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University. Available online at: http://mams.rmit.edu.au/fc1d0uu0zhpm1.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2015. National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 Chapter 97 12, 13, 14 Geo 6. Available online at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/1213-14/97/enacted. Accessed 15 May 2015. Pitts, G., and Watt, D. (2001). The Imaginary Conference. Artwork Magazine, Issue 50. Available online at: http://www.ccd.net/pdf/art50_imaginary_ conference.pdf. Accessed 15 May 2015. Rose, G. (1997a). Performing Inoperative Community: The Space and Resistance of Some Community Arts Projects. In S. Pile & M. Keith (Eds.), Geographies of Resistance (pp. 184–202). London and New York: Routledge. Rose, G. (1997b). Spatialities of ‘Community’, Power and Change: The Imagined Geographies of Community Arts Projects. Cultural Studies, 11(1), 1–16. Schaefer, K., Edwards, D., & Milling, J. (2017). Performing Moretonhampstead: Rurality, Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 47–57. The Shelton Trust. (1986). Culture and Democracy: The Manifesto. London: Comedia. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. van Erven, E. (2013a). Community Art Power: Essays from ICAF 2011. Rotterdam: Rotterdams Wijktheater. van Erven, E. (2013b). Community Arts Dialogues. Utrecht: Treaty of Utrecht Foundation.

126  K. SCHAEFER Watt, D. (1991). Interrogating ‘Community’: Social Welfare Versus Cultural Democracy. In V. Binns (Ed.), Community and the Arts: History, Theory, Practice: Australian Perspectives (pp. 55–66). Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press. Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Wyatt, D., MacDowell, L., & Mulligan, M. (2013). Critical Introduction: The Turn to Community in the Arts. Journal of Arts and Communities, 5(2–3), 81–91. Young, I. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

PART II

Culture and Governance

CHAPTER 6

Histories of Public Parks in Manchester and Salford and Their Role in Cultural Policies for Everyday Participation Abigail Gilmore and Patrick Doyle

6.1  Introduction This chapter considers the establishment of public parks in England, and their role in cultural policy formation and everyday participation in the urban context. It provides an historical overview from the 1830s to the mid-twentieth century, drawing on archival research which focuses on Queen’s Park, Phillips Park and Cheetham Park in Manchester and Peel Park in Salford.1 These early public parks were at first viewed as 1 These parks are close by or within the fieldwork sites of the Manchester–Salford case study for AHRC Connected Communities’ Understanding Everyday Participation— Articulating Cultural Values research.

A. Gilmore (*)  Institute for Cultural Practices, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. Doyle  History, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_6

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disciplining spaces for moral regulation and ‘improvement’ by local legislators, but the strategies and objectives for using parks have changed over time. Over the period we examine, the cultural policies implemented through park administration were contingent on social and economic factors. In addition, the tastes and views of particular individuals involved in park administration had a powerful influence on the ways in which various policies were pursued, albeit in constant negotiation with the publics who were involved in campaigning for and using parks. The chapter explores how new administrative practices both regulated behaviour and provided opportunities for participation, popular entertainment, education and taste formation. It considers the management of parks and their users through their design and their provision of live music, sports and recreation, and visual arts and education and connects these to the production of civic identity and everyday local governance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, in the context of current local cultural policy and management strategies for public parks, the chapter asks what can be learned from the past about parks and their contribution to the cultural policies and everyday participation within contemporary cities.

6.2  How Parks Came to Be in Manchester and Salford The policy rationale for public parks was established in these newly industrialised ‘shock cities’ (Briggs 1963; Jerram 2011) in response to middle-class anxieties about the impact of the urban condition on the morality and health of the working population (Sigsworth and Worboys 1994; Wyborn 1995). During the nineteenth century, the accelerated process of urbanisation brought about by the industrial revolution produced a profound demographic and environmental impact on British towns and cities (Barker 2004) and particularly in the north-west of England, with Manchester experiencing a rapid population expansion from 75,000 people in 1800 to 2,117,000 in 1900 (Jerram 2011, 2). The birth of the public park coincided with the movement of wealthier classes to the suburbs, enclosing former agricultural land, and with a new urban interest in access to open spaces, the right to roam and to escape the squalor of the city. This had its roots in the Romantic Movement of the late eighteenth century, which in early nineteenth century became a feature of urban rather than rural concern (Holden 2012; Howkins 2011). Eighteenth-century planners in European capitals

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such as Paris and London had created parks to provide ‘the lungs of the city’ (Sennett 1994, 325), but access to these enclosed parks was only for the privileged few. In February 1833, a House of Commons Select Committee considered how to improve access to open space in order to promote health and comfort (HCPP 1833, 2). The Committee’s report informed national strategy to tackle the case of manufacturing centres, by providing Public Walks and Open Places which ‘would much conduce to the comfort, health and content of the classes in question… [and] Public walks may be gradually established in the neighbourhood of every populous Town in the Kingdom’ (HCPP 1833, 3). This report established the moral case for parks, gathering together a series of economic and public health arguments in favour of the creation of freely accessible open urban spaces.2 A coalition of local government and civil society produced a loose alliance of local labour and the middle class under the leadership of the Manchester Corporation’s specially organised Parks Committee. Throughout the 1840s, this movement applied pressure on central government to provide funding for land purchase. Public meetings, memoranda and private meetings with national leaders eventually drew the desired results. A meeting held at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in April 1845 attracted working-class support of the Manchester Corporation’s lobbying of local MPs and central government,3 in a campaign which sought to ‘obtain the pecuniary aid both of town and government’ to purchase a practical antidote for ‘great public evils’ (Manchester Guardian, 4 April 1845). The movement made a national breakthrough

2 Dr. JP Key, a physician living in Manchester wrote to the Select Committee, stating that the lack of leisure facilities left the ‘labouring population of Manchester… without any season of recreation, and is ignorant of all amusements, excepting that very small portion which frequents the theatre. Healthful exercise in the open air is seldom or never taken by the artizans of this town, and their health certainly suffers from this deprivation…The reason of this state of the people is, that all scenes of interest are remote from the town, and that the walks which can be enjoyed by the poor are chiefly the turnpike roads, alternately dusty or muddy. Were parks provided, recreation would be taken with avidity, and one of the first results would be a better use of the Sunday, and a substitution of innocent amusements at all other times, for the debasing pleasures now in vogue’ (HCPP 1833, 3–11). 3 The delegates of this meeting are described as comprising ‘chiefly of workmen in the manufactories, &c., of Manchester and Salford’ ‘Public Parks, Walks, &c., in Manchester— Aggregate Meeting of the Working Classes’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 14 September 1844, p. 2.

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when Prime Minister Robert Peel made a gift of £1000 for the fund raising effort which led to the naming of the Salford park after the prime minister (Bailey 1978, 39). A total of £32,000 was raised through public subscriptions and a further £3000 of a government grant was added to the Manchester Parks Committee’s fund (Simon 1938, 304–305). Consequently, in 22 August 1846, the UK’s first three public municipal parks formally opened: Queen’s and Phillips Parks (in North Manchester) and Peel Park (in Salford), each located close to large areas of working-class housing (Davies 1992; Anderson 1926).

6.3  Rural, Natural and Romantic Implicit in these early discussions was the understanding that nature and cities stood in opposition to one another, a duality recognised in contemporaneous cultural production including art, literature and poetry (Maidment 1985). The penetration of the urban environment by nature was seen as necessary to counteract the degradation and pollution of the industrial city. To achieve this, the Manchester Parks Committee was tasked with providing an ordered version of nature and commissioned a Yorkshire horticulturalist, Joshua Major, for the design of all three parks. Briefed to design neighbourhood parks ‘within easy walking distance for the majority of the city’s population’ (Baldwin 2004), Major’s landscaping aimed to provide relief to those ‘whose occupations compel them to dwell in a smoky and impure atmosphere’ (Baldwin 2004). Parks, Major argued, ‘ought to be of sufficient extent to afford a spacious promenade, to have a great variety of pleasure ground, and to present… a judicious collection of attractive kinds of trees, shrubs, and flowers, varied with lawn, arranged in the best possible manner and most attractive style’ (Major 1852, 193). His displays of rhododendrons and evergreen plants were described as ‘highly satisfactory…[they] afforded much gratification and pleasure to the large and increasing numbers of visitors to the Parks’ (Salford Parks Committee 1888, 28). Every July from the 1880s to the mid-1920s, Salford’s ‘Annual Exhibition of Flowers and Plants’ in Peel Park attracted large crowds of up to 5000 people (Salford Parks Committee 1887, 1923). Later on, plants were sold ‘with a view to fostering the love for plants and flowers’ (Salford Parks Committee 1923, 24) but also as a source of revenue. Joshua Major’s ‘Northern school’ of park design set a precedent for later schemes in Britain and inspired the famous American landscaper,

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Frederick Law Olmsted, who saw the English park as a marker of civilised society. Major’s moralising tendencies were revealed in his design choices; for example, he advocated planting around water features to provide the ‘intricacy and variety’ which should stimulate the viewer, but stressed that this stimulation should not go any farther: ‘I would, by no means, allow the indecent practice of open bathing in these waters; provision ought to be made for that purpose elsewhere’ (Major 1852, 193). Whilst the park was a space where nature could be exposed in its verdant glory to the spectator, Major warned against spectators exposing themselves to nature. The new parks contributed to emerging forms of cultural tourism, and hand guides to the city published for visitors to the Manchester’s Arts Treasures Exhibition of 1857 highlighted their appeal. Queen’s Park is described in The Pictorial Guide to Manchester as ‘a fine welltimbered and romantic retreat’ (Heywood 1857a, 53) and the Stranger’s Guide points to its ‘ornamental lake or pond in the park, besides a romantic shady dell’ (The Stranger’s Guide 1857b, 37). Phillips Park is described in Bradshaw’s Illustrated Guide to Manchester as: [of] the three, perhaps…the most beautifully laid out, resembling more the pleasure grounds of some noble earl than the daily walking and sporting place of Manchester operatives. Its hill and dales approach romantic, and the visitor not only thinks of himself in the country but in one of her most favourite and pleasing retreats. (Bullock 1857, 21)

The romantic ideals and virtuous discourse attached to nature became deeply rooted in the public imagination of Manchester’s parks. They held the promise that access to the natural world could offset the harsh conditions of the working week and also demonstrate the potential civility of the city’s working classes: Let not the reader imagine that these horticultural and botanical displays are useless to a population of spinners and weavers, for he should know that there are scores of these men who would think nothing of walking 30 or 40 miles, after their week’s toil at the loom, with their dinner in their pockets, to seek on the mountains or in the woods a scarce plant or favourite insect. There is no want of botanists and entomologists amongst the spinners of Manchester – real men of the loom who linger over a new specimen with pure scientific delight. (Bullock 1857, 21)

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Between 1885 until the outbreak of the First World War, more public parks were established than in any other period before or since through popular campaigning for active recreation and sports (Jordan 1994). The concern with the physical fitness of the British population saw a new type of administration of the parks in Manchester and ‘much of the stiff and formal layout of the mid-Victorian age completely disappeared’ (Pettigrew 1937, viii). However, the ideals of nature persisted; in his introduction to the work of the Manchester Parks Committee in 1926, Alderman Tom Fox proposed the park should be: a place where children can romp and play to their hearts’ content, where healthy exercise in the open air can be obtained by all, where those with jaded nerves can find relief from the turmoil and harassment of town life, where a love for the beautiful in nature can be fostered and encouraged, where the intense pleasure of listening to the joyous notes of our British song birds can be freely indulged in, and where those who, having borne the heat and burden of the day and turned their faces to the setting sun, may find some measure of rest and quiet in the evening of their days. (Anderson 1926, 112)

The expansion of parks in Salford and Manchester did not happen evenly or without problems. Land purchase was often protracted as municipal authorities dealt with landowners who sought to extract a decent price for the property (Offer 1981, 338–340), for example, Manchester Corporation’s acquisition of land for Cheetham Park in 1885 followed a drawn-out and controversial process. Heaton Park was bought from Lord Wilton in 1902. The purchase not only expanded Manchester’s portfolio of public parks, which had fallen behind other cities in terms of provision (O’Reilly 2009, 34) but also the city itself, as the land lay outside of existing local authority boundaries and so had to be incorporated. The park was four miles north of the city, however, away from main concentrations of population and the rationale of public parks for public health was undermined by consequent inequality of access. Trams were provided from the city centre to bring visitors to the park, but this cost money, as did the activities on offer, such as trips on the boating lake, bowling and refreshments (O’Reilly 2013, 142). Similarly, the gift of the Wythenshawe estate by the Simon family in 1926 several miles south of the city further placed another resource beyond the reach of many of Manchester and Salford’s inhabitants.

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Almost 100 years after the opening of the first municipal parks in Manchester and despite these land acquisitions, the priority for local government provision in the area of open space policy remained strikingly similar to the original lobbying that characterised the campaign for the Peel, Queen’s and Philips parks. The 1945 Manchester Plan, a blueprint for post-war reconstruction and development, asserted the need for more provision of inner city green space, as ‘an attempt should be made to bring the countryside into the city’ (Nicholas 1945, 109).

6.4  Managing Park Users The opening up of these popular new public spaces prompted questions about what constituted proper usage, behaviour and regulation. The new role of park administrator emerged, reflecting a wider trend in local government that saw a professional civil service gain in administrative competence. By the early twentieth century, park administrators carved out a professional niche as rational recreationists who implemented strategies for the layout and regulation of public space regulation (Cunningham 2014), united in the liberal political project of ‘improvement’ (Joyce 2003; HCPP 1833). Attempts to regulate the moral behaviour of the public can be identified in the discussions concerning park administration but at the same time such strategies were undermined by ways in which people actually utilised the space exposing the limitations of attempts to govern behaviour and exert social control (Stedman Jones 1983). Park administrators began to monitor the ways local inhabitants, and in particular the working class, made use of these new spaces. In 1847, the Salford Parks Committee conducted a census of Peel Park during the middle of the summer to record how many people entered the grounds, through which entrance and at which times of day and the week (see Table 6.1). These statistics showed ‘better than any other evidence, the use made by the public of this means of healthful enjoyment and recreation’ (Salford Parks Committee 1847, 59). Complaints and conflicts over the use of space were also recorded, highlighting the competing claims for these new spaces; for example, in Peel Park, local cricketers transgressed park rules by playing games in plots not reserved for the purpose, leading to ‘annoyance and danger…[and] disfigurement and damage done by it to the grass and plantations’ (Salford Parks Committee 1852). Parks were in principle democratic spaces, freely open to all local inhabitants, but from the

136  A. GILMORE AND P. DOYLE Table 6.1  An audit of Peel Park visitor numbers, summer 1847 Time 5.30–8.00 a.m. 8.00 a.m.– 12.00 p.m. 12.00– 4.00 p.m. 4.00– 6.00 p.m. 6.00– 9.00 p.m. Walness gate Total

Friday

Saturday Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

140

100

140

100

120

100

140

380

592

860

440

340

240

300

751

920

740

960

820

580

820

330

1200

900

560

400

300

380

1094

1780

3980

2200

1480

1080

1340

365

575

860

632

410

340

280

3060

5167

7480

4892

3570

2640

3260

(Source Salford Parks Committee 1847)

moment of institution they were also infused with the politics of class. As Joyce (2003) has argued, they served a purpose in the imaginations of the administrators to recreate the public self through the recreation of the body. Walking through the park became a central mechanism for regulating working-class recreation and instigating co-mingling with the middle classes, as described bucolically in Bradshaw’s Illustrated Guide to Manchester: It is interesting to see the happy tradesman and his wife, with his little family by his side, the contented weaver and the Manchester clerk and salesmen, with their entire household perambulating these grounds with all the hilarity and importance of country squires. (Bullock 1857, 22)

Early photographs highlight how people were conscious of the potential to demonstrate their respectability through a visit to the park. For example, Image 1 depicts the Weir family enjoying a visit to Peel Park in the early 1900s where both adults and children used the occasion to pose for a photograph dressed in formal clothing. This reflects the desire evident in Britain from 1890s when a combination of rising wages and falling prices allowed people from the working and middle classes to display their aspirations by dressing ‘above’ their class (Gibson-Brydon 2016, 116–117). The park provided a popular and frequented space through

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Fig. 6.1  The Weir family in Peel Park, photographer unknown, reproduced with permission, reference PFOO197 © Salford Local History Archives

which individuals and families advertised these aspirational credentials (Fig. 6.1). Activities that interfered with the purity of walking were banned, including gambling, alcohol consumption and wearing dirty attire. These restrictions encouraged working-class visitors to emulate the codes and actions of social superiors with whom they could interact, at the same time policing their own behaviour and distracting them from other temptations (such as the music hall and the ale house). In 1848, the

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Salford Parks Committee took pride that whilst some rare acts of vandalism occurred, through the provision of open space: hundreds and thousands of our population are saved from the vices and snares which other less moral places of amusement and recreation hold out. (Salford Parks Committee 1848, 68)

Walkers could resist intended rational order, however, as they created their own walkways through the park revealing the limitations of the landscaper.4 Their behaviour began to be regulated through other means; for example, park employees became the eyes of the Committee and gardeners were employed as moral guardians. The Queen’s Park Sub-Committee ordered notices in the Bowling Green stating ‘profane and improper language is strictly prohibited’ and empowered the park’s gardener ‘to carry this instruction into effect’ (Queens Park SubCommittee 1887). Park rules were displayed on notice boards, although in larger parks the scale of opportunity and features such as woodland meant surveillance was harder to achieve and rendered the enforcement of these rules by park keepers impractical (O’Reilly 2013). As methodologies for park management evolved, the spatial division of parks created by different types of recreation facilities corresponded with the idea of ‘temporal zoning’, where park keepers could assign their watch according the types of interests and leisure time visitors possessed, which also informed when they were likely to visit (O’Reilly 2013, 141).

6.5   Cultural Strategies, Music and Taste-Making In a wide-ranging review of British working-class living standards, published at the end of the nineteenth century in the Manchester Guardian, Fabian and socialist reformer Sidney Webb singled out the transformative influence of local municipal government. Manchester and Salford led the way through their provision of ‘public parks, public picture galleries, and public schools, the supply of free music by municipal bands, the enormous development of the services of water, light, and transit in all 4 Joshua Major noted that the Park Committee ignored his recommendation to erect an inner fence to preserve order by ‘preventing the formation of tracks… to gain the shortest access to any particular spot’ and thus ‘the boldness and freedom of the whole has been to a great extent destroyed’ (Major 1852, 194).

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our great cities’ (Webb, Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1901). Parks joined a range of cultural institutions, such as museums and libraries in Manchester (Savage and Wolff 2013) which facilitated governmental strategies of discipline and surveillance, through their prescription of bodily comportment, exhibition design and architectural devices and their effects on the public body (Bennett 2013). These prescriptions were not always adopted, however, particularly by those unused to the conventions for looking and behaving in enclosed spaces such as the museum. For example, logic of practice for the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857 dictated a long, linear route through the massive displays of fine arts, which was ‘unfamiliar, tiring and, frankly, uninviting – and all the more so, when compared with more exhilarating spectacles on offer in the city’ (Rees Leahy 2012, 57). Charles Dickens, observing Sheffield mill workers’ participation in the exhibition, suggesting it demanded too much of visitors who in the context of their everyday lives, wanted ‘more amusement, and particularly something in motion…the thing is too still after their lives of machinery; the art flows over their heads in consequence’ (Dickens, cited in Rees Leahy 2012, 57). This ‘gulf’ between the ‘intentions of organisers and the interests and capacities of at least some of its consumers’ (Rees Leahy 2012, 59) led to visitors incorporating their own practices into visiting the exhibition, including the accompaniment of a fife and drum band, in the case of a visiting group of workers from Saltaire who incorporated the familiar terms of processual walking from Whit Walks into their participation. The new parks similarly presented routes and strategies to shape appropriate behaviour, which were adopted and adapted by their new visitors. The alternative pleasures of Victorian music hall connected leisure and spectacle in the everyday within a ‘dangerously unpoliced frontier territory where the new work disciplines of the factory would dissolve and the moral disciplines of their own culture might crumble’ (Bailey 2011, 120). To compete with music hall whilst incorporating the governmental properties of public institutions, parks needed to create spaces for both rational recreation and exhilaration. Parks became battlegrounds to win the attention of the working classes away from the expanding commercial entertainment cultures of modernity, replacing the street as a location for (managing) working-class leisure, and by the start of the twentieth century, there was increased governmental emphasis on creating popular activities permeated with the familiar ethos of ‘improvement’ (Davies 1992, 141).

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The cultural strategies of parks therefore moved beyond the management of public behaviour within green spaces to proactively encourage particular types of participation, understood in contemporary terms as audience development programmes, which aimed to both educate and entertain, and to draw different kinds of visitors together. During the Great War, the appointment of gardener William Pettigrew as Manchester’s new Chief Parks Superintendent marked a new approach to park administration. Pettigrew consciously led a new generation of park attendants with the principle of ‘fair balance’, which strove to compromise between the park as the pastoral space of the Victorian era and as a site with mass appeal through the provision of entertainment by means of the introduction of music programming. This was met with resistance from those who resented the competition with resources for garden maintenance. Pettigrew made the case that the role of the modern park attendant was to ‘look beyond horticultural considerations’ and ‘provide within reason for the tastes of all classes of the community’ (Pettigrew 1937, 116–117). William Jevons, lecturer in political economy at Owen’s College (the antecedent to the University of Manchester), argued that successful social reform required ongoing scrutiny, effort and legislation to address the complex and varied ways people lived. He despised the music-hall culture imported from London, but felt that music, in its proper (public) place, offered ‘the most practicable and immediately efficacious’ ­ instrument of reform: art galleries, public libraries and theatres achieved admirable results, but lacked the immediate impact of music (Jevons 1883, 1). Music could also lure people into the park and into contact with nature, bringing ‘all Heaven before our eyes’ (Jevons 1883, 10). It was not just nature on show, however, but the audiences themselves, as the provision of musical concerts were also a joint venture between the Parks Committee and the Police Chief Constable, who assigned constables to each park during band performances in order to observe the crowds at these concerts (Parks and Cemeteries Committee, 6 May 1892). A nascent if unstable live music industry was stimulated, subsidised by both Parks Committees and the musicians themselves. Parks Committees advertised for bands to perform across the municipality in the local press and potential bands were requested to give their services for free (Music in the Parks Sub-Committee, 21 April 1892). Applications came from mainly local brass bands to play in the various parks and spaces on Saturdays, some of whom also promoted evangelical and temperance

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causes. Bands could expect to see their music popularised leading to paid engagements and also be rewarded by the impact of their public performances on the standard of local music: ‘there will at the same time be a pleasant reflection that each performer has done his share by taking part in a good work and giving pleasure and enjoyment to his fellow-citizens’ (Manchester Guardian, ‘Music in the Parks’, 27 April 1892). In 1899, the Manchester Parks Committee appointed a Musical Adviser to oversee public concerts (Pettigrew 1929, 36), and by the end of the nineteenth century, annual expenditure on music in parks grew from £160 in 1894 to £4000 in 1914 (Leech 1929, 143), with around 700 band-music and concert programmes taking place every summer (Leech 1927, 103). The transformative role of the Park Committee’s music programming and its influence on the public was recognised: Audiences have been no mere casual idlers in the parks, but have been apparently intent on the music…. park music has revealed itself as a thoroughly popular movement, no longer to be treated as negligible… while in other ways the City Council is only as yet toying with the idea of principal music, and is still half affrighted at the thought of it, the Parks Committee finds itself hailed as the general impresarios of the populace for out-ofdoor music. (‘Music in the Parks of Manchester’, Manchester Guardian, 8 June 1914)

This role included cultural intermediation through the selection and regulation of musical repertoire. Whilst recognising the necessity of the ‘lighter side’ of music, Alderman Melland maintained a close watch on behalf of the Manchester Parks Committee on music playlists and took ‘care to ensure as far as possible that all the music has a real value’, featuring Bizet, Brahms and Mozart (Leech 1930, 122). Park administrators were directly involved in the demarcation between popular and elite tastes, a position rationalised by William Pettigrew as the duty of the local authority was to be inclusive but also to encourage ‘people who prefer a light type of music should be encouraged to seek it in the open air rather than find it in Music Halls’ (Manchester Parks Committee, 3 December 1920). Whilst in Victorian England, music in public parks concerned the transformation of tastes and spaces for leisure culture, the Edwardian period placed greater emphasis on more active forms of leisure, and music’s purpose became in part the encouragement of health benefits

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associated with exercise through dancing.5 Such policies were designed to increase ‘National Efficiency’ by improving the social, economic and physical condition of the British population, particularly revealed during the Boer War (O’Reilly 2013; Searle 1971). After the First World War, costume concerts and dances became a common sight in public parks, and William Pettigrew advised the Parks Committee to embrace this attraction that otherwise they ‘may feel inclined to taboo’ (Manchester Parks Committee, 3 December 1920). By the 1920s, the creation of bandstands and enclosed dance areas provided locals with a new pastime, and an important new form of revenue for the parks. Peel Park attracted 10,000 paying customers during the summer, and whilst traditional brass bands still performed, new bands with names such as The Excelsiors, The Harmonies and The So and So’s reflected a new style of popular park entertainment (Salford Parks Committee 1925, 21). These facilities were expensive to construct, but helped to diversify audiences and encourage social mixing, drawing in teenagers as an alternative to commercial dance halls (Davies 1992, 140). Their popularity changed national policy, incentivising provision in parks across Britain and empowering local authorities to invoke a penny rate on the expenses incurred through hiring bands under the Public Health Act, 1925. Concert enclosures also provided an income stream as parks became ‘playgrounds that pay for themselves’: evening performances of dance music could command three old pennies6 for entry into enclosures around the bandstands (Davies 1992, 140) although visitors who didn’t pay were allowed to observe from outside. On 27 June 1923, 824 paying spectators attended the dancing area at Peel Park, whilst an estimated 7000 to 8000 spectators watched from the sidelines (‘In the Salford 5 There was public debate about the social desirability of this activity. At a meeting of the Manchester Health Society in February 1906, one speaker criticised the type of dancing that occurred in the Belle Vue dancehall, drawing ‘a picture of Irish girls dancing with rare spirit and abandon… and threw out the suggestion that in Manchester it might be worthwhile to have open-air dancing in some of the parks – of course under fairly strict regulation.’ Another critic proposed dancing as ‘violent physical exercise that destroyed opportunities for rational interchange of ideas’ (‘About Dancing: Health Society Discussion’, Manchester Guardian, 9 February 1906). 6 Three old pennies, or 3d, are equivalent to around 70 pence in current value. Average wages for ordinary workers in the coal, cotton and woollen textile industry were l6s. l0½d per ‘man-shift’ in 1925 suggesting this was relatively affordable entertainment (Hansard 1925).

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Fig. 6.2  LS Lowry, Bandstand, Peel Park, Salford 1925 © The Lowry Collection, Salford. Reproduced with permission from The Lowry Collection

Parks’, Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1923). Whilst this presented lost income, it presented further opportunity for mass surveillance (Fig. 6.2). Music programming was therefore underpinned by a number of shifting and sometimes competing policy rationales. It corrected market failure and presented an important medium through which new values might be inculcated. In 1925, the Manchester Parks Committee set aside £3400 for its music budget, to ensure a popular musical education might continue ‘without the handicap of having an eye always on the box office’ (‘Better Music for Manchester Parks’, Manchester Guardian, 7 October 1925). By the end of the decade, however, dwindling gate receipts in Salford caused concern. Over the dance season of 1925, over 14,000 individuals paid to attend the dance concerts (‘Recreation in Salford Parks’, Manchester Guardian, 11 December 1925) but by October 1928, officials were concerned that ‘the receipts do not justify the experiment being continued’ (‘Sunday Music in the Parks: Experiences in Salford’, Manchester Guardian, n.d.). Attendances declined further in the 1930s (Parks Superintendent, Annual Report 1934, 28) although concerts

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were still subsidised as a form of ‘rational entertainment’; for example, an annual series of concerts was held in Queen’s Park Art Gallery specifically for the unemployed. Organised by Mme Sophie de Konshena, these concerts aimed to ‘entertain and cheer those who wait for better times, but [also to] train their music taste in a real sense’ (W.W.R., ‘Concerts for the Unemployed’, Manchester Guardian, 9 April 1937). By the end of the 1930s, budget constraints on local authorities, combined with poor receipts for concerts and the onset of radio through new wireless technology meant that music in parks became less prominent and funding shifted to the provision of sports facilities.

6.6  Institutions for Learning and Self-Organisation Parks offered other amenities catering for civic improvement and rational recreation aside from bandstands, sports pitches, gymnasia and bowling greens. Both Queen’s Park and Peel Park housed an art gallery and museum (Peel Park also hosted a public library), and as early as 1852, the Salford Parks Committee highlighted their role in ‘mental cultivation’, which they claimed ‘no doubt has had the effect of thinning, to a considerable extent, those places of entertainment whose results are debilitating to the body, and demoralizing to the mind, and which are prolific sources of pauperism and crime’ (Salford Parks Committee 1852, 81). Free public access to the art collections stored in each museum was maintained from the late nineteenth century onwards (Queens Park Art Museum Sub-Committee, 26 September 1884). Queen’s Park Museum and Art Gallery was built on the site of Hendham Hall, enclosed by the purchase of the park and demolished in 1880s. This incorporation of art as ‘social work’ prefigured the establishment of the Manchester Art Museum in Ancoats by Thomas Horsfall, who campaigned for such a facility in the city, influenced by Ruskin and Morris, and was part of broader network of philanthropists who wished to cultivate ‘cultural progress and social peace’ amongst the working class, through institutions which included the City Gallery and the Whitworth Institute (Harrison 1985, 126).7 7 Queen’s Park Art Gallery housed the Art Museum Committee collection on opening for two years, until the relationship between the Art Museum Committee and the Parks Committee broke down. Horsfall was also central to the establishment of the Manchester University Settlement, the first outside of London in 1895. The settlement was inextricably

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Museum buildings allowed for indoor programmes and extended the parks’ use for learning year-round. Over 1892, biweekly events in Queens Park including lectures and indoor concerts attracted on average of 265 paying attendees (Queen’s Park Sub-Committee, 24 January 1890). These continued in the twentieth century and became incorporated into school curriculum with 650 pupils from local school groups attending the ‘lantern lectures’ at the Gallery during the winter of 1929– 30 (Leech 1930, 28).8 Education in the park was also self-organised: in the early twentieth century, a shelter within Queen’s Park was appropriated by ‘retired elders… who meet daily during the summer to discuss and criticise the affairs of the city and the nation’ (Manchester Parks and Cemeteries Committee 1915, 106). Acquiring the name of the ‘Queen’s Park Parliament’, this informal meeting group grew into a fully fledged institution with the support of the Parks Committee who built them a more permanent structure reserved specifically for the use of the ‘Parliament’ in 1920. There was however some inter-generational conflict and competition over the space: James Johnston wrote to the Park Committee ‘that the shelter for old men in Queen’s Park, in which they can meet, talk, and smoke, is monopolised, to a large extent, by young men, especially on Saturday afternoons, and that they entice young girls to the shelter by throwing coppers to them’ (Queen’s Park Sub-Committee, 25 February 1921). Park Committee minutes also reveal concerns over alternative forms of participation such as gambling (Queen’s Park Sub-Committee, 12 December 1926 and 1 April 1927). In 1921, the ‘Parliament’ was permitted to advertise their own nightly events of meetings, debates and concerts (Manchester Parks Committee, 14 January 1921) which drew ‘many of Manchester’s leading citizens’ from Manchester public life including MPs, councillors and university lecturers and frequent crowds of up to 200 members (Letter from John Whelan to Queen’s Park SubCommittee, 22 September 1928).

linked to the Art Museum, providing informal education and civic engagement and sharing joint programming with University lecturers and resources with the Art Museum (Eagles 2009). 8 The role of the museum in school visits continues to be remarked on in the childhood memories of the 1950s and 1960s North Manchester residents (Manchester Forum, n.d.).

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6.7   Parks and Policy: Then and Now The introduction of parks into the northern cityscape brought a new space where people practiced culture in a wide variety of ways. Through parks, governments ‘elaborated and deployed the most powerful of cultural constructions: nature and history’ against a backdrop of ‘social, geographical, and ecological disruption’ (Carr 2013, 4). Manchester’s public parks movement empowered local government through concomitant design and implementation of spatial policies that aimed to influence public behaviour and morality. The public park offered locals an escape from everyday lives and work, but also provided a site where successive local politicians practiced social experimentation and the development of governmental techniques. However, local citizens also claimed ownership over the parks, and their occupation, use and interpretation of the park also shaped everyday participation practices in the city. Following De Certeau (1984) the acts of walking, dancing, vandalism, illicit meetings and everyday assemblage can be considered as tactics which interfered with and resisted the strategies aimed at social improvement. Parks were (and are) pluralistic spaces, at once sites of education, religious inspiration, entertainment and physical recreation. Improvement was a consistent theme for rationalising public support and subsidy, but one constrained by finances and in constant negotiation with the communities which formed around their use. As part of the cities’ cultural ecosystems, they also contributed to the creative and knowledge economies of the day, interacting and shaping popular music and classical concert repertoires and forming part of the infrastructure for engaging communities in art and education within their own neighbourhoods. They were part of a developing web of provision which included other institutions established in the second half of the nineteenth century for social reform through cultural participation, such as art galleries, museums, libraries and university settlements. Their management rendered new forms of knowledge developed by ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Roberts and King 1991) who were prepared to establish guidelines and negotiate new policy directions, such as William Pettigrew, whose textbooks on park administration succeeded those of Joshua Major in laying down the ground rules for the diversification of parks and their shift from the pastoral to more active spaces from the late nineteenth century. So what roles do parks play in cultural policy and the management of the ‘public body’ today? Our research on understanding everyday

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participation shows the multiple, complex ways in which parks and green spaces continue to provide public spaces for everyday participation; they are the sites of family routines, social occasions, childhood memories, informal sports and leisure, contemplation, community enactment, isolation, escape, rule breaking and ritual performances (Edwards 2014; Gilmore 2017). The spaces for participation which parks continued to provide, and the values derived from access to open air, physical recreation, sports, people watching and social interaction with other local communities are still incorporated into local government strategies and cultural policies, for example, through community funds for family fun days, and public health initiatives such as community sports and open-air gymnasiums. There is no longer much subsidy of open-air concerts in local parks, however, as commercial live music festivals have changed the market and expectations of consumers and free concerts are costly and difficult to manage.9 Parks may offset the privatisation of sports and leisure facilities to some extent, however, shifts in the temporal rhythms of leisure time and movement about urban spaces from work and school to home and back via private transport mean that parks no longer intercede in the same ways into everyday routines for sport and exercise. Parks and green spaces in Manchester and Salford are owned and managed by their local authorities but like other parks nationally are threatened by post-crash austerity and funding cuts as they struggle to prioritise maintenance costs, let alone funds for programming, in competition with other culture budgets for libraries, leisure centres and museums (Thomas 2015). They have a wider range of stakeholders and potential funders, however: research reports explore new business models for park management and ownership commissioned by national agencies in an effort to support and protect public spaces (Heritage Lottery Fund 2013; Heritage Lottery Fund/NESTA 2013; National Trust 2015). In Manchester in 2016, a new Parks Strategy put out for consultation proposes a hierarchical model for understanding and valuing the 140 plus parks and green spaces as destination, community and local parks, with a shared strategic objectives: 9 Heaton Park hosts an annual commercial festival ‘Park Life’ in June which not only covers its costs but provides a significant contribution to public funds for managing Manchester’s parks. Despite this income stream, the City Council has to provide traffic management and community liaison support to manage the large numbers of festival visitors as well as the relationship with local residential communities.

148  A. GILMORE AND P. DOYLE Creating world-class green spaces to meet, relax and play. Our distinctive parks will improve wellbeing and provide focal points for vibrant neighbourhoods. Bringing communities together, providing new opportunities for learning, sport, culture and events for Mancunians. Thriving parks are the heart and lungs of our growing city. (Manchester City Council 2016)

This vision echoes the themes of past park administration, but with contemporary distinctions which reveal the policy rationales and attachments (Gray 2007) for culture and heritage under neo-liberalism. The discourses of moral improvement through recreation, entertainment and leisure in the open air, are translated into ‘improved social cohesion’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘wellbeing, health and happiness’ (Heritage Lottery Fund 2014, 11). As ‘soft locational factors’ promoting economic development and competitiveness of cities, parks are still considered to be instrumental to the management and containment of workers and their families in cities, as well as supporting tourism, and their offer of access to nature has become even more central within the green infrastructure of cities as part of ‘environmental services’ (Heritage Lottery Fund 2014, 13). As the sites of the formation of new policy practices, parks historically enabled local authorities to be arbiters of everyday cultural participation, aimed at social improvement, moral regulation and the cultivation of particular tastes. The mandate for the latter has arguably passed to the stewardship of arts and cultural institutions in return for public funding. Parks feature rarely within these organisations’ mission statements, although there has been a renewed interest in artist-led participatory work and community engagement programmes by cultural institutions in parks (Gilmore 2017). In Manchester and Salford, the future of parks depends on the demonstration of their contribution to these wide-ranging policy objectives, otherwise they face further decline, closure and transfer to private interests, and their value as public spaces for participation, negotiation and resistance will be lost.

Bibliography Anderson, M. (1926). How Manchester Is Managed: A Record of Municipal Activity. Manchester: Manchester City Council. [Anon.]. (1857a). The Pictorial Guide to Manchester and Companion to the Arts Treasures Exhibition. Manchester: Abel Heywood.

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[Anon.]. (1857b). The Stranger’s Complete Guide to Manchester Containing a Map of the Environs, Illustrated with Seven Steel Engravings. Manchester: John Heywood. Bailey, P. (1978). Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bailey, P. (2011). Entertainmentality!: Liberalizing Modern Pleasure in the Victorian Leisure Industry. In S. Gunn & J. Vernon (Eds.), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (pp. 119–133). Berkeley: University of California Press. Baldwin, D. (2004). Major, Joshua (1786–1866), Landscape Gardener and Designer. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www. oxforddnb.com/index/17/101017845/. Accessed 30 Apr 2017. Barker, H. (2004). ‘Smoke Cities’: Northern Industrial Towns in Late Georgian England. Urban History, 31(2), 175–190. Bennett, T. (2013). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Briggs, A. (1963). Victorian Cities. London: Odhams Press. Bullock, T. A. (1857). Bradshaw’s Illustrated Guide to Manchester. London: W.J. Adams. Carr, E. (2013). Introduction. In E. Carr, S. Eyring, & R. Guy Wilson (Eds.), Public Nature: Scenery, History and Park Design (pp. 1–9). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. City of Salford. (1934, March 31). Parks Department: Annual Report of the Parks Superintendent for the Financial Year Ended. Cunningham, H. (2014). Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England Since 1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davies, A. (1992). Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–39. Buckingham: Open University Press. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eagles, S. (2009). Thomas Coglan Horsfall, and Manchester Art Museum and University Settlement. The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education. http://www. infed.org/settlements/manchester_art_museum_and_university_settlement. htm. Accessed 26 June 2016. Edwards, D. (2014). Ethnography Report for Manchester-Salford Cultural Ecosystem. Unpublished Report for AHRC Understanding Everyday Participation— Articulating Cultural Values. Gibson-Brydon, T. R. C. (2016). The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-ButRespectable. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Gilmore, A. (2017). The Park, the Museum and the Commons: Vernacular Spaces and Social Infrastructure for Everyday Participation. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 34–46.

150  A. GILMORE AND P. DOYLE Gray, C. (2007). Commodification and Instrumentality in Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13(2), 203–215. Harrison, M. (1985). Art and Philanthropy: T. C. Horsfall and the Manchester Art Museum. In A. J. Kidd & K. W. Roberts (Eds.), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Production and Social Policy in Victorian Manchester (pp. 120–147). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hansard 1803–2005, Written Answers (Commons) ‘Average Weekly Wages’. HC Deb 30 July 1925 vol 187 cc671-3W. http://hansard.millbanksystems. com/written_answers/1925/jul/30/average-weekly-wages. Accessed 30 Apr 2017. Heritage Lottery Fund. (2013, December). Parks for People Application Guidance. London: Heritage Lottery Fund. Heritage Lottery Fund. (2014). State of UK Public Parks 2014: Renaissance or Risk?. London: Heritage Lottery Fund. Heritage Lottery Fund/NESTA. (2013). Rethinking Parks—Exploring New Business Models for Parks in 21st Century. Written by Peter Neal. London: Heritage Lottery Fund/NESTA. Holden, A. (2012). Protected Areas and Tourism. In A. Holden & D. Fennell (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Environment (pp. 276–284). London: Routledge. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. (1833). Report from the Select Committee on Public Walks: With the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Them, XV.337, Vol. 15, Paper 448. http://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers/ docview/t70.d75.1833-014187?accountid=12253. Accessed 26 June 2016. Howkins, A. (2011). The Commons, Enclosure and Radical Histories. In D. Feldman & J. Lawrence (Eds.), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (pp. 118–141). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jerram, L. (2011). Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jevons, W. S. (1883). Methods of Social Reform and Other Papers. London: Macmillan and Co. Jordan, H. (1994). Public Parks, 1885–1914. The Garden Historical Society, 22(1), 85–113. Joyce, P. (2003). The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso. Leech, B. (Ed.). (1927). How Manchester Is Managed: A Record of Municipal Activity, 1927. Manchester: Manchester City Council. Leech, B. (Ed.). (1929). How Manchester Is Managed: A Record of Municipal Activity, 1929. Manchester: Manchester City Council. Leech, B. (Ed.). (1930). How Manchester Is Managed: A Record of Municipal Activity, 1930. Manchester: Manchester City Council.

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Maidment, B. E. (1985). Class and Cultural Production in the Industrial City: Poetry in Victorian Manchester. In A. J. Kidd & K. W. Roberts (Eds.), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester. Manchester and Dover, NH: Manchester University Press; distributed in N. America by St. Martin’s Press, New York. Major, J. (1852). The Theory of Landscape Gardening. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. Manchester City Council. (2016, February 23). Information Report: Update on Parks Strategy. Manchester: Manchester City Council. Manchester Forum. (n.d.). Topic: Queen’s Park Museum and Art Gallery Available Through. http://www.manchester-forum.co.uk/index.php?topic= 352.0. Accessed 27 June 2016. National Trust. (2015). Play Our Part: What Does the Nation Need from the National Trust in the 21st Century? London: National Trust. Nicholas, R. (1945). The City of Manchester Plan. Norwich: Jarrold and Son Ltd. Offer, A. (1981). Property and Politics, 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Reilly, C. (2009). Aristocratic Fortunes and Civic Aspiration: Issues in the Passage of Aristocratic Land to Municipal Ownership in Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Manchester with Particular Reference to the Sale of Heaton Park. Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University. O’Reilly, C. (2013). From ‘the People’ to ‘the Citizen’: The Emergence of the Edwardian Municipal Park in Manchester, 1902–1912. Urban History, 40(1), 136–155. Pettigrew, W. W. (1929). City of Manchester Handbook of the City Parks and Recreation Grounds. Manchester: Manchester Parks and Cemeteries Committee. Pettigrew, W. W. (1937). Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration. London: The Journal of Park Administration. Rees Leahy, H. (2012). Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Roberts, N., & King, P. (1991). Policy Entrepreneurs: Their Activity Structure and Function in the Policy Process. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 1(2), 147–175. Savage, M., & Wolff, J. (Eds.). (2013). Manchester: City of Culture. In Culture in Manchester: Institutions and Urban Change Since 1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Searle, G. R. (1971). The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sennett, R. (1994). Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. London: Faber and Faber.

152  A. GILMORE AND P. DOYLE Sigsworth, M., & Worboys, M. (1994). The Public’s View of Public Health in Mid-Victorian Britain. Urban History, 21(2), 237–250. Simon, S. (1938). A Century of City Government: Manchester, 1838–1938. London: George Allen and Unwin. Stedman Jones, G. (1983). Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Sunday Music in the Parks: Experiences in Salford’. (n.d.). Manchester Guardian. Thomas, K. (2015, June 26). Who Runs Public Parks and Are They in Danger of Privatisation? The Guardian. Webb, S. (1991). Labour. Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1901. Wyborn, T. (1995). Parks for the People: The Development of Public Parks in Manchester. Manchester Region History Review, 9(4), 22.

Archival Sources The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser. The Manchester Times and Gazette. Manchester Guardian. Manchester Parks and Cemeteries Committee, Minute Books. Parks Superintendent, Annual Reports. Salford Parks Committee, Annual Reports (1847, 1848, 1852, 1887, 1888, 1923, 1925, 1927).

CHAPTER 7

Cultural Ecologies: Policy, Participation and Practices Lisanne Gibson

7.1  Introduction: Location and Place as an Object of Cultural Governance Urbanists have long accepted the ways in which urban resources, well-maintained streets, parks and public squares, are productive of public well-being, political exchange and civic culture (for instance, Jacobs 2000 [1961]; Zukin 1996). Building upon these assumptions, ‘cultural planners’, such as Charles Landry (1994) and Franco Bianchini and Michael Parkinson (1993), have argued for investment in culture and leisure by asserting a relationship between cultural development and cultural, economic and social vitality. Indeed, in addition to the spatialisation of cultural management, the assertion of a relationship between cultural and economic development has been a defining feature of cultural policy in the UK (as well as, at least, in other Anglophone countries) for the last 30 years (Gibson 2002, 2008). This spatialisation of cultural management is premised and driven by the characterisation of a

L. Gibson (*)  School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_7

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‘deficit’ of both resource and culture as a local phenomenon (rather than as a function of larger structural forces such as access to employment, a living wage and so forth) (Miles and Sullivan 2012). So, for instance, Gateshead, a town in the North-East of England, has been identified as a town with a ‘deficit’ of cultural resource and as a ‘cold spot’ for cultural participation.1 At the same time, this identification of ‘cultural deficit’ as a problem of location and local culture (place) has gone handin-hand with the measuring of particular types of participation through surveys such as ‘Active People’ (Sport England) or ‘Taking Part’ (Arts Council England) the results of which in turn inform decisions around state cultural investment. Thus, some forms of participation are validated and resourced while others are either not accounted for or are problematised (Miles and Gibson 2016, 2017). In parallel to the localisation of accounts of cultural resource deficit or wealth, particular cultures of participation, and their designation as ‘excluding’ or ‘including’, have also been localised at the level of ‘community’. Therefore, contemporary rationalities of government again find the locus of responsibility in local factors. It is thus that ‘community’ and location have come to operate as central logics in the contemporary management of culture and leisure. The relationships between these factors, resource and participation, and the ways in which they are defined and valued (by being the focus of investment and management or not) have significant effects not only for which places and activities are the focus of investment but also more fundamentally for civic and political formation. This premise is the key underpinning thesis of the research undertaken through the ‘Understanding Everyday Participation- Articulating Cultural Value’ project.2 That is that the socially and administratively contingent (political) resourcing of and participation in cultural and leisure economies 1 The so-called cold spots are areas of ‘low cultural engagement’ as measured by the national survey ‘Active People’ in which Gateshead over the period 2008–2010 appeared in the lowest 20% of local government areas for participation in the arts (Arts Council England, n.d.). See Gilmore (2013) for a discussion of ‘cold spots’ as an object of UK arts policy. 2 ‘Understanding Everyday Participation- Articulating Cultural Values’ (UEP) was a research project which ran from 2012 to 2018 involving an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at the Universities of Manchester, Leicester, Exeter and Loughborough. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC AH/ J005401/1) as part of their Connected Communities: Communities, Culture and Creative Economies programme with additional support from Creative Scotland.

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plays a central role in the formation of publics and the connections (and disconnections) between them (Miles and Gibson 2016, 2017, 2021-forthcoming). A great deal has been written about the recent (last 30 years or so) utilisation of the term ‘community’ as part of a particular kind of ‘advanced liberal’ governmentality, which seeks to manage individuals through equipping them with the capacities to become self-managing in an ever-increasing variety of ways (Rose 1996). The articulation of ‘community’, as the object of government, both moves the target of intervention to the local (rather than society) and accords the responsibility for particular kinds of functionality or deficit to the local. As Ash Amin (2005, 612) argues ‘the social has come to be redefined as community, localised, and thrown back at hard-pressed areas as both the cause and solution in the area of social, political and economic regeneration’. Location-focused cultural policies are premised on the notion that community (rather than society) can be (re)-built, (re)-created, supported, (re)-enacted through state-funded cultural interventions. The assumption of a relationship between state-supported forms of culture and leisure participation, and assimilation and consensus-building amongst local communities, to a large extent drives national cultural policies of investment, which are motivated by models of a functional social order at the base of which are ‘cohesive’ communities. Such cohesion, inclusion or exclusion is understood as a function of and therefore amenable to fixing at the level of location, regardless of the ways in which more macrocontexts, for instance national, supranational and international economics, might impinge on the location or the people within it. There is a wealth of research that has analysed the development of national cultural policy in relation to the tropes of ‘social exclusion’ and ‘community cohesion’ including in the literature on culture-led regeneration. Such discussions have understood the national cultural policy context in terms variously of a New Labour3 neo-liberalism and/ or the ‘instrumentalism’ of new public management (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2015; Stevenson 2004; Belfiore 2004). Analyses of culture-led regeneration which seek to account for cultural policy in terms of 3 ‘New Labour’ is a term coined by the British Labour Party in order to rebrand the party and its policies under the leadership of Tony Blair and his supporters in the run-up to the 1997 general election and then during the Party’s subsequent period of government under Blair’s premiership.

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macrodiscourses, while valuable in themselves, cannot be used at face value to understand particular local histories of cultural development (Gibson 2013). Thus, in undertaking an analysis of national cultural policies and their articulation to location and place for this chapter, I am moving away from more macroaccounts of cultural policy discourse and instead understanding the detail of how cultural policies of place have played out in the context of a particular local cultural ecology. O’Brien and Miles have also argued that an ‘understanding of the specifics of place is an essential means of counter-balancing rhetorical conceptions of cultural policy’ (2010, 11). For them, culture-led development in the town of Gateshead is presented as an example driven by ‘the use of a pro-active cultural policy to promote inclusive community art programmes’ (they contrast this to the case of Liverpool where cultural policy is understood as ‘more reactive’) (2010, 9). What these accounts, whether focusing on macrocultural policy discourses or the specifics of cultural policies in place, do not account for is the agency of practice on the development and implementation of cultural policy and programmes. In this chapter I bring a new perspective to the well-established thinking on culture-led development, ‘place making’ and related literatures by arguing for the importance of local histories of cultural participation and practice in understanding the history and development of cultural policy. In this discussion, the case is made for the agency not only of facilitated forms of cultural practice but also, and crucially, everyday forms of cultural practice. In making this distinction, I am highlighting the differences between cultural practices that are facilitated by the state (through direct subvention or mechanisms of indirect support, for instance, tax exemption) and everyday participation, cultural activities undertaken by individuals under their own initiative and which are not dependent on state funding (Gibson and Edwards 2016; Miles and Gibson 2016). Cultural policy studies, with its focus on analysing the macrooperation of power implicit within structures of cultural development and support, rarely accounts for the microcultural ecologies within which cultural policies operate. I argue that understanding the historic local contexts of cultural participation and cultural practice is key to accounting for the ways in which cultural policies are shaped and implemented within a cultural ecology. This chapter will analyse the case of cultural participation and practice over the last 40 years in Gateshead a town in the North-East of England and will ask how

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do already existing cultures of practice in a place, both facilitated and everyday, interact with policy drivers to effect and shape the local cultural policy and programmatic outcomes?

7.2  National Cultural Policy and Place, 1990s–2008 The regionalisation agenda formed the backdrop to the cultural developments in Gateshead over the period from the late 1980s. During their period in opposition prior to 1997, the Labour Party explored future options for regional government (see reports such as ‘Renewing the Regions –Strategies for Regional Economic Development’, Regional Policy Commission [1996]). The aim was to develop proposals that would enable a programme of wide-reaching constitutional reform, in John Prescott’s words (Deputy Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007) ‘reversing the tide of centralisation and giving regions and the people who live in them more power to determine their own future’ (in John et al. 2002, 734). The emergence of a regional framework for public policy in England was developed after Tony Blair’s New Labour government came to power in 1997 and following its successful re-election in 2001. Tomaney (2002, 728) notes that a study for the North East Regional Assembly showed that over 20 “regional” organizations were involved in the preparation of at least 12 regional strategies, which affected many aspects of the region’s life. The dominant trend among these bodies was toward the creation, or strengthening, of regional structures in order to better assist them to contribute to regional strategy making.

Thus, there was a significant strengthening of the apparatus of governance in the English regions culminating in the publication of the White Paper ‘Your Region, Your Choice’ in May 2002. Over this same period in England, from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, there was a multiplication of national cultural programmes, which had location and place as their focus. This multiplication was the result of New Labour’s focus on regionalisation informed and motivated by its identification of the negative impact, especially on post-industrial towns, of the centralisation of governance under the previous Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). Thus, by the late 1990s, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport

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(DCMS) had established Regional Government Offices and Regional Cultural Consortia (RCC) were in operation (1999). English Heritage had regional offices (1998), the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) had developed Regional Committees (2001), and the Museum Libraries and Archives Council’s (MLA) ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme was focusing on better support for regional museums (2002). In his book Creative Britain, Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (1997–2001), set out his vision for cultural policy under the new government: One of the defining differences between the parties at the recent general election was this Labour Government’s fundamental belief that the individual citizen achieves his or her true potential within the context of a strong community. For years the absurd assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society’ held sway. That philosophy brought about a palpable decline in the quality of communal and personal life in Britain; and our first aim must be to rebuild – piece by piece – the nation’s sense of community. Our cultural life – embracing artistic and sporting endeavour, the quality of our media and the sense of our heritage – has a key role to play in this. (italics added, Smith 1998, 42)

Thus, community, as the object of cultural government, comes into focus. The consequence of this was that the new cultural funding arrangements were dispersed at a local level. As Smith argued in relation to cultural funding coming from the proceeds of the National Lottery: ‘the Lottery, after all, is the people’s money. More of it should go to where the people are’ (1998, 44).4 For New Labour, the object of government was community rooted in place. Communities were cast as ‘included’ and ‘excluded’, and local places as ‘regenerated’ or as ‘needing regeneration’. Cultural policy was to have a significant role in effecting the ‘inclusion’ of communities and the ‘regeneration’ of places. Smith argued:

4 The Peoples Lottery White Paper (1997) proposed that ‘Distributors should be able to examine needs in their sectors in a more systematic way… an important aspect of getting money where it is needed is to ensure that, where it is sensible, distributors work together, for example, to fund facilities which together work to reduce deprivation in areas of special need’, House of Commons Research Papers, The National Lottery Bill, [HL] 1997/98, Bill 148.

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There are, I believe, five principal reasons for state subsidy of the arts in the modern world: to ensure excellence; to protect innovation; to assist access for as many people as possible, both to create and to appreciate; to help provide the seedbed for the creative economy; and to assist in the regeneration of areas of deprivation. (italics added, Smith 1998, 19)

While acknowledging the wide-ranging reasons for government support of culture, Smith presents cultural policy as a tool to positively impact on ‘areas of deprivation’. Thus, New Labour from the beginning of its period in government made an explicit connection between cultural policy and the management of ‘areas of deprivation’ through the lens of culture-led regeneration leading to social regeneration.5 In addition to state cultural funding being dispersed at the local level, the combination of this place-based focus with the articulation of the local as ‘included’ or ‘excluded’ meant that cultural funding was expected to ‘make a difference, to attack targeted areas of need and produce significant improvements, particularly in regions of greater disadvantage around the country’ (my italics, Smith 1998, 44). In 1998, the DCMS issued A New Cultural Framework, which set out ‘a new approach to culture’ (p. 1). Key to the new direction detailed in the document was ‘the emphasis we will put in the year ahead on the role arts and sport can play in facilitating social regeneration’ (p. 2). This was to be achieved through a partnership between DCMS and the Social Exclusion Unit, which was a product of the ‘joined up government’ approach followed by New Labour in tackling social exclusion. The Arts and Sport Policy Action Team or PAT10 as it came to be called (established following the Social Exclusion Unit’s report on Neighbourhood Renewal) was fundamental to implementing New Labour’s regional and local cultural agenda. The RCC were formed drawing in representation from a wide range of interests including local government and the creative industries. The purpose of these new RCCs was to:

5 This was influenced by work undertaken by thinktank Comedia and its agenda setting report ‘The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal through Cultural Activity’ (Landry et al. 1996).

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• provide the main focus and channel for representing and developing the whole spectrum of cultural and creative interests in the region • be responsible for drawing up a cultural strategy for the region, which would also assist in guiding the distribution of lottery funding • advise the Regional Development Agencies and Regional Chamber on these subjects (DCMS 1998, 3). This devolvement of the responsibility for cultural policy and planning to the regions was further enabled through the ‘strengthening or establishing of regional bodies in DCMS sectors’ (1998, 14). In 2001, the DCMS issued the Green Paper, Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years, which amongst other things required all local authorities to produce cultural strategies by the end of 2002. These local government cultural strategies worked in conjunction with the RCCs, which also drew up detailed cultural strategies for the regions working closely with local authorities, Regional Development Agencies, cultural institutions and all regional cultural bodies. These strategies would then set the priorities for action in the region (DCMS 2001, 38). Following A New Cultural Framework (DCMS 1998), the Arts Council announced proposals for the greater delegation of funding to the Regional Arts Boards (RAB). Following the appointment in 1998 of Gerry Robinson as Chair and Peter Hewitt as Chief Executive (former CEO of Northern Arts, the North-East’s RAB),6 there was a rationalisation of Arts Council schemes. At this time, there were ‘more than a hundred different funding schemes in operation across the country, with many organizations funded by both the Arts Council and their RAB’ (Hewison 2014, 97). Despite the fact that the Arts Council was responsible for 97.3% of the core income of the RABs, ‘a strong sense of local identity made them instinctively suspicious of London’ (Hewison 2014, 97). The initial driver for the Arts Council’s movement of budget to the regions was to effect a rationalisation and economisation by transferring responsibility for all but the ‘national’ arts to the RABs. 6 Peter Hewitt started his career as Regional Community Arts Officer for Northern Arts and was committed to regional cultural management and provision. He was CEO of Northern Arts (1992–1997) and then CEO of Arts Council England (1998–2008).

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However, as Hewison notes, ‘this apparent surrender of power from the centre did not produce the desired economies’ (2014, 97). Hewitt and Robinson then planned to abolish the RABs in The New Arts Council of England: A Prospectus for Change (2001), with the Arts Council and the RABs becoming a single organisation controlled from the centre, reverting to a pattern that had existed in the 1940s and 1950s. The RABs, as self-governing charities with strong regional identities and loyalties, rejected this proposal outright. It is an illustration of the New Labour commitment to the regions that Chris Smith exhorted the Arts Council that regional participation should be genuine, insisting that RAB directors should not become representatives of the centre rather than spokespeople for their region (Hewison 2014, 99). A period of consultation began, with a new document, Working Together for the Arts (Arts Council 2001) proposing that the new Regional Councils, the equivalent of the former Boards, could have a powerful say over policy in their areas with their Chairs also becoming members of the Arts Council. By March 2002, all the RABs accepted the creation of a single organisation under these new proposals. Regional Councils continued to approve the budgets and other funding decisions for their regions but once RAB staff were employed by the centre the control had shifted. The re-formulated Arts Council England (ACE) was officially constituted in April 2003. From 2007 to 2008 (in the context of the Global Financial Crash), the DCMS undertook a regional infrastructure review led by the then Minister for Culture, Margaret Hodge, with the objective to ‘achieve significant cost savings and efficiencies in terms of what needs to be done regionally’ (DCMS 2008a). Following the DCMS Regional Infrastructure Review (2008b), Hodge announced changes to the way the DCMS was to organise its work within the English regions which would lead to savings of £1.72m (Arts Professional 2008). In a ministerial statement, she said that these changes would ‘concentrate our expenditure on front-line services’ (Hodge 2008) and they were presented as a ‘new, simplified and improved way of working’ (DCMS 2008a). In practice, this meant the centralisation of cultural power through the four DCMS bodies that already had a significant regional role, Arts Council England, Sport England, English Heritage and the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, rather than the development of cultural strategy through the RABs, which were dismantled.

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7.3  Gateshead Cultural Policy and Practice The dismantling of the RABs was a move of great significance for cultural policy in the North-East. The Regional Arts Association was established there in the 1950s (the second to be set up nationally)7 and was incorporated in 1986. By 1990, the Northern Arts RAB, according to ex-Chief Executive Officer Peter Stark,8 managed nearly two-thirds of the total Arts Council funding in the region against a national average of one-third and had the third highest per capita investment in the arts after London and Merseyside. Thus, the North-East had a powerful local system of cultural management which was strongly rooted in the region’s cultural identity as we will see. These particular features of cultural policy in the North-East and the large scale culture-led regeneration undertaken in Gateshead in the 2000s establish Gateshead as an optimal case for exploring the ways in which national cultural policy interacts with a particular cultural ecology. Gateshead is a large town (population 202,400 in 2017) on the southern side of the River Tyne across from the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, which is the regional centre of the NorthEast of England. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gateshead was an industrial town which was increasingly dominated by a mix of heavy industry and manufacturing as its primary industry of coal mining declined. By the late 1970s, much of this industry had been closed down leaving large areas of post-industrial contaminated land close to the river, high levels of unemployment and low levels of economic activity. In this context, the Gateshead local authority—Gateshead

7 Prior to the 1989 Wilding Report which was a review of arts funding structures, there were 12 Regional Arts Associations providing funding and advice for the arts across England. Most of these Regional Arts Associations ‘came into being in the 1960s, organised through the combined initiative of local government and arts organisations’ (Holden 2007, 8). 8 Peter Stark was CEO of Northern Arts between 1984 and 1992. He led the bids for the major capital projects—Baltic, Sage Gateshead and Millennium Bridge—that anchored the culture-led transformation of the Gateshead Quayside. He was awarded the OBE in 1990 and a professorship in Cultural Policy and Management at Northumbria University in 2000. After 12 years working in South Africa, he co-authored the GPS Culture reports on arts funding (Gordon et al. 2013, 2014a, b).

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Borough Council—invested in the development of culture and leisure infrastructure as a strategy for the regeneration of the town. Key cultural practitioners working in Gateshead since the 1980s claim that any analysis of cultural policy in the area needs to understand the particular nature of cultural practice and cultural politics in the NorthEast.9 They refer to the longer term development of culture and leisure policy in Gateshead, tracing it back to discussions in the 1970s about the need for the development of the Gateshead Youth Stadium in the context of the local authority looking to affect the regeneration of the town via the development of existing infrastructure. Thus, Gateshead’s initial capital investment in regeneration was through the development of a derelict youth running track into the Gateshead International Stadium, which opened in 1981. The story of the development of cultural programming in Gateshead runs through its innovative and advanced public art programme developed in the 1980s, the Gateshead Garden Festival (1990), its hosting of the Year of the Visual Arts (1996) and Northern Arts’ The Case for Capital (1995).10 This story culminates in the development of the Gateshead Quayside including the Baltic Art Gallery, the Sage Music Centre and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (see Fig. 7.1). This narrative of Gateshead’s cultural development is well known but there are diverging analyses of the main drivers. Writers such as Bailey et al. (2004) argue that the development of the Gateshead Quayside was ‘underpinned not by economic imperatives, but by a will and

9 In 2002 as a visiting fellow at the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at Northumbria University, I undertook a series of interviews with key cultural practitioners and policy makers in the North-East. These conversations provided the genesis of the ideas developed here. In 2015 as part of the ‘Understanding Everyday Participation’ project work in Gateshead, I carried out a selection of further one to one interviews with key subjects. These interviews were recorded and transcribed and interview quotes in this chapter are from those interviews, see bibliography for detail. Consent was provided for the use of the interviewees words in association with their names. 10 The Case for Capital produced in 1995 was a blueprint for £170m capital arts infrastructure investment in the North-East. The subsequent development of the Gateshead Quayside was primarily funded through successful applications to the Arts Council, National Lottery and European Regional Development Fund.

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Fig. 7.1  The Baltic, Sage and Millennium Bridge on Gateshead Quayside (Photograph: Wilka Hudson. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/])

determination on the part of local arts activists and politicians to provide the area with the cultural facilities that it deserved’ (2004, 61). Others, such as Natasha Vall, argue that the culture-led development of the Quayside should be viewed through the lens of ‘the emergence of the market-oriented “cultural sector”’ (2011, 12), driven by the attempt to produce an ‘experience economy’ (2011, 161). Thus, for Vall, the success of The Case of Capital and the resulting Quayside development is ultimately cast in terms of macroforces, as the success of ‘the campaign to promote the region as a site of connoisseur metropolitan culture’ at the expense of the ‘celebration of vernacular culture’ (2011, 1–2). This is in contrast to the view of Stark and others involved in the development of the Quayside. Stark asserts that: what we achieved in terms of the big capital is rooted in that history of local ward-level delivery which was way beyond face painting. This was serious programming and the art, for instance, the very early arts that Mike White

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did at Wrekenton, the Annual Art Festival and so on, these were really, really interesting projects. (my emphasis)

So how did this approach to community cultural development rooted in ‘a history of local ward-level delivery’ square with a programme that involved the development and programming of large arts-based capital developments? Cultural practice and policy in Gateshead have been influenced by four key features which subsequently affected the nature of the developments on the Quayside: First, the long period of political stability in Gateshead’s local government which meant that planning could happen five to ten years ahead; second, the geography of the Borough, which is a mix of urban and peri-urban space spread over a relatively large geographic area, means that cultural life is experienced at ward level rather than through the town centre; third, the particular local character of everyday cultural participation; and fourth, the agency of a diverse set of key individuals involved in local politics and community practice. 7.3.1   Political Stability Labour’s long period of office since 1973 when the Gateshead Borough Council came into existence meant that the area had an unusually stable local governance. Since the 1970s, a series of chief executives and council leaders passionate about Gateshead have capitalised on this political stability, enabling long-term planning, strong advocacy with national government and investment in significant capital infrastructure developments. For instance, in the 1970s: the redevelopment of the A1 motorway (connecting London, the capital of England with Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland); the Gateshead International Stadium in 1981; the Gateshead part of the Metro Transport system; and the MetroCentre opening in 1986, then the largest ‘out of town’ retail facility in Europe. 7.3.2   Geography of Gateshead and Associational Identity Gateshead is a Borough which covers 142.4 square kilometres (55 square miles) and is made up of 22 wards. Its geographic mix of urban and peri-urban communities across a hilly landscape and the village-based structure of these areas, most of which are ex-coal mining villages and communities, means that historically, leisure facilities and activities were

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supplied and accessed locally. There was and is a highly localised network of community and church halls, Workingmen’s Institutes, branches of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), Club & Institute Union (CIU), and local authority libraries. Through these venues, there was a strong tradition of club life in Gateshead, which was particularly buoyant between the ‘golden years’ of 1946 to 1980 (Annable 2015, 7). In his history of The Clubs of Gateshead, Annable describes how ‘members began to queue up before opening time to get into the club as the working man had money in his pocket especially during the 1970s’ (2015, 7). With the recession of the 1970s, the clubs started to close as unemployment rose and working-class families’ disposable income declined. Nevertheless, the nature of engagement with leisure defined by local provision, preference and vernacular practices remained a central characteristic of everyday participation.11 In addition to the importance of associational life, was the cultural importance of education in northeastern mining communities. Thus, according to Ednie Wilson, Creativity Development Manager for Gateshead Council (1996 to the present), the community education service was a fundamental pathway for the provision of culture and leisure throughout the 1980s and into the late 1990s: Not just for the things that it was explicitly there to do, there was a mandate for that service which was about community education and all the various things that might be, but it also became a network. It became a way for people to talk to Gateshead. The community education service was in every little community. There were things in every village hall. There were youth clubs, there were older people’s groups, and there were women’s groups.

Participation in adult education is a defining characteristic of the cultural ecology of the North-East. Comparing participation in adult education (Fig. 7.2) by English local authority areas reveals the marked distinctiveness of the high levels of participation in adult education in the NorthEast including Gateshead.

11 Interviews undertaken as part of a year-long study of everyday participation in Gateshead for the ‘Understanding Everyday Participation’ project revealed that this remains the case with Gateshead participants being distinctive amongst the areas studied for having relatively localised preferences for participation (Miles and Gibson 2021, forthcoming).

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Fig. 7.2  English local authority areas and participation in adult education, 2011/12

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Gateshead’s geography of dispersed villages and communities meant that there was a multiplicity of local cultural practices based in the network of community halls and similar. The community education service’s engagement with and facilitation of local and vernacular cultural practices was grounded in a validation of a strong local sense of identity. Wilson recalls: So we’d got a number of Gilbert and Sullivan Societies and drama societies and floral artists and the Allotment Association and, and, and… But alongside that the WEA and the working men’s clubs had libraries and a strong sense of working people can better themselves by learning stuff, even if it’s a better way to grow marrows or conversational Spanish…. We had at the time when I first started five brass bands, I can’t tell you how many choirs there were, but there were lots of church choirs and school choirs and glee clubs and those kind of things. And it was the neighbourhood-ness of it that meant that was all out there.

In the context of this geographic dispersal, highly localised forms of associational identity and a strong tradition of participation in adult education, the network of local libraries was (and is) hugely important. Gateshead has 17 branch libraries, located in most of Gateshead’s wards. Use of these libraries is notable for being highly representative of the local population regardless of sociodemography (Delrieu and Gibson 2017a, b). When the Local Arts Development Agency (LADA) Network was brokered between the local authorities and Northern Arts in the late 1980s, the pathways into communities established via the library network and the community education service were fundamental to the success of the local arts development programme. 7.3.3   Gateshead Community Arts Practice Ros Rigby was appointed Arts Development Officer by Gateshead Council in 1984. She was the first to occupy such a role in the North-East and at least one of, if not the first, to occupy such a role in local government in England.12 For Rigby, reflecting on the development of cultural policy in 12 In 1988 Rigby went on to co-found Folkworks one of the UK’s foremost folk music agencies which was also, alongside Northern Sinfonia, one of the partner organisations involved in setting up Sage Gateshead. She was Programme Director at Sage Gateshead from the Sage programmes establishment in 2001 (prior to the venues opening in 2004) to 2016.

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Gateshead, a key factor in enabling the Council to be innovative in its support for cultural programmes was the abolition of Tyne and Wear County Council in 1986. This meant that the local government budget that had been going to the County government was returned to the individual local authority: So the money that used to go and probably mainly supported projects not in Gateshead, suddenly came back to the council; so when I started that job I had one and a half people working for me and then suddenly, I mean it doesn’t sound that big now, but suddenly we were able to appoint a team of five or six.

Rigby goes on to explain that as Gateshead did not at that time have significant cultural venues that needed programming, this meant that a ‘decent budget’ was available from the Council and via Northern Arts. This meant that the Council could grow a team of practitioners ‘with a very strong commitment to work throughout the borough because, of course when you’ve got a network of branch libraries… then you’ve automatically got roots into the whole borough and you know a kind of commitment to developing activities throughout’. As noted by Wilson, there had already been an established community education network in Gateshead since the 1970s. With the advent of the local authority community arts programme and via the Community Arts Panel of Northern Arts from the 1970s, there was support for a large number of locally generated independent community arts projects. These included a group called ‘Them Wifies’; a community arts collective founded and facilitated by Katherine Zeserson13 and Geraldine Ling (Jerry).14 Zeserson describes ‘Them Wifies’ as … part of a wider movement, from the mid-seventies, it was a really rich scene of community arts in the Northeast in Tyneside… Uncle Ernie’s and all the stuff around the Bubble and the mobile workshop part of the

13 Katherine Zeserson was co-founder and Arts Development Officer for ‘Them Wifies’ between 1984 and 1994. Amongst other subsequent roles she was founding Director of Learning and Participation at Sage Gateshead (2001–2015) and is currently a freelance Strategic Adviser, Facilitator and Creator working with music and cultural organisations. 14 The name is local slang for ‘those women’; according to Zeserson, this was what they were called ‘by kids on the estate’.

170  L. GIBSON Newcastle Play Council which was set up at the Children’s Warehouse in the late seventies, ‘Them Wifies’ grew out of these mobile workshops. And this mobile workshop was a classic sort of, you know, very seventies community arts play based kind of really, really great work around the estates. Some of the women involved in that said we need to do something for women here. That women are invisible and we need to — And it was all part of the girls youth work movement as well.

‘Them Wifies’ came out of the community arts movement articulated not to the creation of community but to the validation of community, to work with and for community to achieve political ends such as tenants’ campaigns or equal rights for women and so forth (see Jeffers and Moriarty 2017 for a collection of essays on the history of British community arts by academics and practitioners). As Zeserson describes it, this work involved building relationships with many different Gateshead communities, working with these groups by going to them. Well, Jerry and I— Jerry was at Wifies for thirteen years. I was there for eleven years. I joined Wifies in’84 and Jerry developed drama practice and I developed music practice and we were all over Gateshead communities and my job was to be a community musician in Gateshead from 1984 to 1994. So I was in and out of it all the time. It was my world. So I had worked with the traveller community in that way. And I’d worked all over the borough. I worked in every community in the borough. I worked with women’s groups, I worked with the small numbers of refugees that we had in the city at that time and so on. So when I came to create the relationships for Sage Gateshead I was drawing on my own experience.15

So, in Gateshead in the 1990s, there was a coming together of two areas of activity. The local authority built a community arts practice across Gateshead working at ward-level with the groups, associations and clubs already in the community. At the same time there was a significant regional arts development network via the LADA. In addition was the development of an ambitious public art programme and the establishment of Gateshead’s reputation for public art, the most well known of 15 Members of ‘Them Wifies’ continued to influence cultural development in Gateshead after they had moved on from that organisation. Geraldine Ling was a key founding member of The Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company (founded 1986), Zeserson as founding Learning and Participation Director at the Sage Gateshead.

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Fig. 7.3  Antony Gormley, Angel of the North, completed 1998 (Photograph: S. Arrowsmith. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/])

which was the project to develop the Angel of the North on the site of a disused coal mine (Fig. 7.3).16 7.3.4   Public Art, the Gateshead Garden Festival and the Year of the Visual Arts Gateshead Council was one of the first local authorities in England to develop a public art programme after deciding ‘to take art to the public because it did not have its own contemporary art gallery’ (Public Art Team 2006, 3). An initial wave of public art commissioning in the early 1980s resulted in the installation of works by significant artists such as Bottle Bank by Richard Harris17 and Cone by Andy Goldsworthy, both 16 ‘The Angel of the North’ by Anthony Gormley was completed in 1998 at a total cost of £800,000 the majority of which came from the National Lottery. 17 Since removed to make way for the Gateshead Hilton.

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installed as part of a programme to environmentally regenerate the banks of the River Tyne (Shaw 1990). This early commissioning was so successful that a Public Art Programme was launched in 1986. Once again Gateshead Council was a forerunner in its approach to cultural development. It was not until 1988 that public art became a focus for national cultural policy with the Arts Council’s launch of its ‘Percent for Art’ campaign, attempting to link public art more directly to public sector intervention. The idea of the utility of culture as a driver for the regeneration of post-industrial cities gained further prominence in the UK in 1989 when the Arts Council produced its report An Urban Renaissance: The Role of Arts in Urban Regeneration. This report and the focus on culture-led development, which gained traction as a strategy for city redevelopment, was grounded in the already established focus on the utility of culture to the cultural and economic development of cities through examples such as the development of the Harborplace in Baltimore, USA, in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Europe, the Capital of Culture programme was established in 1983 and drove a European-wide phenomenon of culture-led development. Gateshead’s Public Art Programme was given a tremendous boost when it hosted the Garden Festival in 1990, which, in Peter Stark’s words, had ‘as much sculpture as there were flowers and vegetables’. The National Garden Festival programme was staged in five towns and cities across the United Kingdom from 1984 to 1992 and was funded by the Department of Environment (under the then Conservative government). Sara Selwood has described the Festivals as ‘characterised by the reclamation of derelict land – the removal and camouflaging of waste land and industrial debris – to secure long-term redevelopment, [and] provide a focus for regional promotion and celebrate urban renewal’ (1995, 27). Thus, the vision for the National Garden Festival programme was to enable places, especially post-industrial cities, to develop brownfield sites for leisure use. The Festival in Gateshead consisted of 200 gardens and 50 art exhibitions located on ‘a large area of derelict land (200 acres) that had previously been the site of a coal depot, gasworks and coking plant’ (Blackman 2014, 57). The Garden Festival programme was funded by a variety of sources, the Arts Council but also, underlining the Festival’s regeneration function, non-cultural funds such as the Regional Development Agency’s Single Regeneration Budget, The Town Centre Partnership and The East Gateshead Partnership (Public Art Team

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2006).18 The Festival resulted in a key derelict area of Gateshead—on the banks of the Tyne River facing the city of Newcastle upon Tyne— receiving accelerated funding to reclaim the land. In Rigby’s words: it was a big thing for Gateshead to have that and it enabled both a very rapid redevelopment of the land and detoxification of the land and all of that, but also a lot of money from Northern Arts and from other sources to have a whole programme of activity right through the year.

Thus, in addition to the strong commitment to the provision of community-based culture and leisure services at ward level, there was also a local commitment to regeneration through investment in culture and leisure infrastructure at the level of the Borough. In 1992, Northern Arts bid to host the Year of Visual Arts,19 it won on the basis of its bid ‘The Region is the Gallery’. The programme took place over all 52 weeks of 1996 in all 33 Local Authority areas in the North. Stark explains that the bid was part of Northern Arts’ three-part strategy for the arts in the North in the 1990s: 1. Reassert our primary relationship with local government and with the individual artist; 2. Win something to give our arts national and international profile (at that stage the Sinfonia couldn’t get slots on Radio 3); 3.  Target major new capital and institutional investment in music and the contemporary visual arts that would (a) draw in substantial new revenue funding, (b) sustain the profile (c) support the region’s existing—smaller—infrastructure. Thus, Stark positions the importance of the Garden Festival ‘and off the back of that we’re then able to build the ‘96 bid and off the back of that we get the Baltic, and the Angel is key’. Crucially there were high levels of public engagement in Gateshead with these initiatives—the public 18 The Festival secured £37 million of investment (Vall 2011, 150), with sponsorship the overall investment was £50 million. 19 Year of the Visual Arts 1996 was a year-long celebration of the visual arts which took place in the North of England. It was part of an Arts Council led initiative and was supported financially by the Arts Council, Northern Arts and a wide range of partnerships between the public and private sectors in the region.

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art programme, the Garden Festival (over three million visitors) and, the Gateshead activities for the Year of the Visual Arts, which gave impetus to the strategy to lobby for capital investment in culture. These initiatives also reveal an underlying strategy at Northern Arts working handin-hand with Gateshead Borough Council, at least, from 1984 onwards. 7.3.5   Gateshead Quays Cultural Development The lobby for significant cultural capital developments in Gateshead was driven by the fact that there were limited venues for cultural provision and local councillors’ belief and assertion that Gateshead should have ‘quality’ assets for culture and leisure. A number of commentators have identified the importance of the partnership of Les Elton as Chief Executive of the Council and George Gill as Leader of the Council to the development of Gateshead Council’s cultural development programmes in the 1980s and 1990s. Zeserson describes being at a speech by Gill: I saw him at one of his speeches in 1999 that was utterly extraordinary — It was somewhere like the Blaydon Miner’s Welfare or something like that… He did this thing of reading out that little bit of Priestley, you know. ‘This horrid backyard of Newcastle’, you know from English Journey20 — and he said nobody will ever be able to say this about Gateshead again and it was like — It was absolutely incredible. It was like whoa! This really is powerful, you know.

Vall (2011) argues that there was a tension implicit in the development of the Gateshead Quays between the strategy to develop large arts buildings representing ‘quality’, in the context that cultural development had been rooted in a highly local engagement with and facilitation of communities’ vernacular cultural practices. Zeserson, as the first Director of Learning and Participation (2002–2015) at the Sage Gateshead, addresses the consequence of this tension for her practice: 20 English Journey by novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley was published in 1934, it documented a journey around England as it was then describing three separate Englands—the heritage charm of places like the Cotswolds, an emerging ‘modern’ England, and an industrial England. Priestley experienced Tyneside at the height of the 1930s Depression describing Gateshead in terms such as ‘The whole town appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race. Insects can do better than this’ (1994 [1934], 31).

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… if the Head of the Council was about this being about providing the best stuff for Gateshead and that meant the importation of ‘high class’ culture then my approach was to use the long standing practices involved in ward-level delivery to bed in Sage… we’re building a mansion in people’s back yards and so my job with the background of X years of community practice in Gateshead was to engage the community and to make the Sage a place that offered something to the community.

Amongst the practitioners interviewed for this chapter, all of whom have been engaged in cultural practice in the North-East since the 1970s and were, in various ways, involved with the development of the Gateshead Quayside, there is a consensus about the ‘rootedness’ of the Quays development in the ‘history of local ward-level delivery’. Rigby identifies the example of Folkworks and its establishment as an illustration of this: Northern Arts actually set up Folkworks as a way of — They stimulated the idea of Folkworks existing because Peter [Stark] is a folky … and really thought that somewhere in England somebody should be paying attention to this art form. Which was very strong in this region because of the mining history and the sort of links with Ireland and Scotland and all of that. I mean, I think that is acknowledging something about vernacular culture. I think my view having been quite involved actually, is that you will always get that view that to someone what’s funded is not for me, not for the local population, but actually compared to some regions I think we were pretty strong.

Thus, the strength of cultural identity and associated local vernacular cultural practices had been supported by the local and regional structures of cultural development for at least 15 years before the development of The Case for Capital. It was the very same practitioners who were involved with this and the subsequent development of the Quayside, and so there was a continuity in both the aim to support and to develop local vernacular cultural practice. For Vall (2011), the culture-led development of the Gateshead Quayside exemplifies the importation of ‘metropolitan’ (middle-class) culture with the aim of developing an ‘experience’-based cultural economy. As a way of explicating the rootedness of vernacular local identity in the regional cultural structures, Zeserson offers the example of George Loggie who was the last Chair of Northern Arts (20 years as vice chairman and chairman 1982–2002) and was a councillor for Wansbeck District Council, a primarily working-class area:

176  L. GIBSON …. he absolutely exemplified what was good about the system and what is bad about the current system because he was the chair of the regional arts board and he was passionately supporting the arts board to fund a really diverse portfolio, ranging from very familiar, safe work to completely new disasters. And he was absolutely championing the importance of that for his region. And that gave him a credibility with his own, if you like, cultural cohort. People who’d grown up like him… It gave it a kind of legitimacy across cultural boundaries— social cultural boundaries. So the regional arts board had a whole range of diverse people, councillors, and people who ran institutions, and independent artists like me and it was not perfect and some bad decisions were of course sometimes made but it was ours, you know? It was the region’s and it was reflective of the region and I think the abolition of that structure was a disaster, absolute disaster for the healthy development of the ecosystem.

It is the local and regional agency of the structures of cultural funding and policy that made this commitment to the local vernacular of cultural practice and participation possible, through the diverse backgrounds of the governing bodies of such as the RAB and the locally focused experience and commitment of the people involved.

7.4   Conclusion Stark et al. (2013, 2014a) have provided cogent evidence of the effect of the centralisation of cultural governance after the Hodge Review. They estimate that by 2013, 75% of England’s decisions on public cultural funding were centralised (2013) and that in 2012/13, central government spending per head on culture in London was nearly 15 times greater than in the rest of England (2013). In Hard Facts to Swallow, which considered Arts Council planned expenditure from 2015 to 2019, they found an overall balance of expenditure in London’s favour of 4.1:1 (2014b). Across three reports on the geographic distribution of central government cultural funding, they argue that there is ‘an absence of any strategic support of participation in the arts at local level and the proven contribution that such work can make to individual and community wellbeing’ (Stark et al. 2014c). Despite a government inquiry in 2015 into ‘Countries of Culture: Funding and support for the arts outside London’ (Culture, Media and Sport Committee 2016),21 an Institute for Public 21 At

which I was one of two expert witnesses.

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Policy Research (IPPR North) report, analysing ACE national portfolio spend for 2018–2022, shows that the spend will be £27 per head in the North compared to more than £71 per head in London (Romer 2017). Thus, the centralisation of cultural governance has resulted in a decline in the amount of central public cultural funding received by the North. This alongside the fact that local cultural funding has reduced by 40% since 2009/19 (Institute for Fiscal Studies 2019) puts the sustenance of local everyday participation and practice at risk. This chapter has argued that understanding the role of location and place in national cultural policy is important to understanding the dimensions of local cultural policy, and that in order to understand the specificities of local cultural policy, the relationship between these two— national and local—political characteristics must be explored. However, I have argued that an even richer understanding can be gained by adding an understanding of local cultural participation and practice. It is the relationship between these three—national cultural policy, local policy and politics, and local cultural participation and practices—that the example of Gateshead has allowed us to explore. Accounting for the specificity of the ways in which a local cultural governance and cultural participation and practice ecology develops alongside and in relation to more macroconstructs of cultural policy allows a deeper understanding of the characteristics of cultural ecosystems. There is a great deal of research that reveals that regular participation in the cultural activities funded by the state is limited to the white, highly educated, middle-class population, Taylor for instance concludes that the figure in England is as little as 8.7% (Taylor 2016). There is also research which shows that ‘the operation of the formal cultural realm is implicated in the making of economic, social and geographical inequalities’ (Miles and Gibson 2016). Thus, the case for understanding the local characteristics of everyday participation and practice is an argument that spans beyond the realms of cultural policy studies’ fixation on cultural value and posits instead civic and social effect and impact as the most important centre of reference (Miles and Gibson 2021, forthcoming). This refocusing on the demand side does not mean a holistic rejection of state cultural policy. On the contrary, through the example of Gateshead I have argued that a cultural policy grounded within the vernacular cultural practices of place is best able to facilitate cultural participation and practice in a way that develops and supports cultural and social ecosystems.

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Bibliography Amin, A. (2005). Local Community on Trial. Economy and Society, 34(4), 612–633. Annable, P. (2015). The Clubs of Gateshead. Newcastle upon Tyne: Summerhill Books. Arts Council England. (n.d). Areas of Low Engagement: Active People Survey: List of Local Authorities by Level of Arts Engagement, 2008–2010. https://www. artscouncil.org.uk/areas-low-engagement. Accessed 14 May 2019. Arts Council England. (n.d.). The Taking Part Survey. https://www.artscouncil. org.uk/taking-part-survey. Accessed 2 May 2019. Arts Council England. (2001). Working Together for the Arts: The Arts Council’s Detailed Plan for Future Support of the Arts in England. Arts Council of England. Arts Professional. (2008, July 14). DCMS to Streamline Regions. https://www. artsprofessional.co.uk/news/dcms-streamline-regions. Accessed 1 May 2019. Bailey, C., Miles, S., & Stark, P. (2004). Culture-Led Urban Regeneration and the Revitalisation of Identities in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East of England. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10(1), 47–65. Belfiore, E. (2004). Auditing Culture: The Subsidised Cultural Sector in the New Public Management. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10(2), 183–202. Belfiore, E. (2019). From CEMA to the Arts Council: Cultural Authority, Participation and the Question of ‘Value’ in Early Post-war Britain. In E. Belfiore & L. Gibson (Eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance. London: Palgrave. Bianchini, F., & Parkinson, M. (Eds.). (1993). Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: The West European Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blackman, F. M. (2014). The Angel of the North: Public Art and Wellbeing. Doctoral thesis, Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10927/. Accessed 28 May 2019. Culture, Media and Sport Committee. (2016). Countries of Culture: Funding and Support for the Arts Outside London. House of Commons. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmcumeds/114/114.pdf. Accessed 12 September 2019. Delrieu, V., & Gibson, L. (2017a). Understanding Everyday Participation: The Effect of Place and Space on Patterns of Participation in Libraries and Leisure Centres. Leicester: University of Leicester. http://hdl.handle. net/2381/40387. Delrieu, V., & Gibson, L. (2017b). Libraries and the Geography of Use: How Does Geography and Asset ‘Attractiveness’ Influence the Local Dimensions of Cultural Participation. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 1–16.

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Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). (1998). A New Cultural Framework. London: HM Government. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). (2001). Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years. London: HM Government. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). (2008a, July 2). Margaret Hodge Outlines Measures to Streamline Cultural ‘Delivery’ in the Regions. Press Release. https://www.wired-gov.net/wg/wg-news-1.nsf/0/8AADE941847F7B698025747A003FB559?OpenDocument. Accessed 7 May 2019. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). (2008b). DCMS Regional Infrastructure Review. London: HM Government. Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR). (2002, May). Your Region, Your Choice: Revitalising the English Regions (White Paper). London: HM Government. Gibson, L. (2001). The Uses of Art: Constructing Australian Identities. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Gibson, L. (2002). Creative Industries and Cultural Development: Still the Janus Face? Media International Australia, 102(1), 25–34. Gibson, L. (2008). Defence of Instrumentality. Cultural Trends, 17(4), 247–257. Gibson, L. (2013). Piazzas or Stadiums: Towards an Alternative Account of Museums in Cultural and Urban Development. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1(1), 101–112. Gibson, L., & Edwards, D. (2015). Valuing Participation: The Cultural and Everyday Activities of Young People in Care. Leicester: University of Leicester. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/33114. Gibson, L., & Edwards, D. (2016). Facilitated Participation: Cultural Value, Risk and the Agency of Young People in Care. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 194–204. Gilmore, A. (2013). Cold Spots, Crap Towns and Cultural Deserts: The Role of Place and Geography in Cultural Participation and Creative Place-Making. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 86–96. Gordon, P., Powell, G., & Stark, P. (2013). Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital. GPS Culture. http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/rocc/Rebalancing_ FINAL_10mb.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2019. Gordon, P., Powell, G., & Stark, P. (2014a). Policy for the Lottery the Arts and Community in England. GPS Culture. http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/place/The_PLACE_report.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2019. Gordon, P., Powell, G., & Stark, P. (2014b). Hard Facts to Swallow. GPS Culture. http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/hardfacts/141120HardfactstoswallowGPSmain.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2019. Harrison, J. (2006). The Political-Economy of Blair’s “New Regional Policy”. Geoforum, 37(6), 932–943.

180  L. GIBSON Hesmondhalgh, D., Oakley, K., Lee, D., & Nisbett, M. (2015). Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hewison, R. (2014). Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain. London: Verso. Hodge, Margaret. (2008, July 2). Daily Hansard: Written Ministerial Statements. Ministerial Statement. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080702/wmstext/80702m0001.htm#0807025 3000007. Accessed 7 May 2019. Holden, J. (2007). Funding Decentralisation in the UK Cultural Sector: How Have We Done So Far? London: Arts and Business. http://www.aandbcymru. org.uk/uploads/Funding_Decentralisation_in_the_UK.pdf. Accessed 28 May 2019. House of Commons. (1997/98). The National Lottery Bill (Research Paper). [HL] 1997/98 (148). London: House of Commons Library. Institute for Fiscal Studies. (2019). English Council Funding: What’s Happened and What’s Next? https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/BN250-English-councilfunding-whats-happened-and-whats-next.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2019. Jacobs, J. (2000 [1961]). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. London: Pimlico. Jeffers, A., & Moriarty, G. (Eds.). (2017). Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement. London: Bloomsbury. John, P., Musson, S., & Tickell, A. (2002). England’s Problem Region: Regionalism in the South East. Regional Studies, 36(7), 733–741. Landry, C. (1994). The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. Stroud: Comedia. Landry, C., Greene, L., Matarasso, F., & Bianchini, F. (1996). The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal Through Cultural Activity. Stroud: Comedia. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2017). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value in Place. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 1–3. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2021, forthcoming). Understanding Everyday Participation: Culture, Place and Inequality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Miles, A., & Sullivan, A. (2012). Understanding Participation in Culture and Sport: Mixing Methods, Reordering Knowledges. Cultural Trends, 21(4), 311–324. Northern Arts. (1995). Case for Capital for the Arts in the North. http://www. thinkingpractice.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CfCapital+presentation+ report.compressed.pdf. Accessed 7 May 2019. O’Brien, D., & Miles, S. (2010). Cultural Policy as Rhetoric and Reality: A Comparative Analysis of Policy Making in the Peripheral North of England. Cultural Trends, 19(1–2), 3–13.

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Priestly, J. B. (1994 [1934]). English Journey. London: Mandarin. Public Art Team Gateshead Council. (2006). Public Art in Gateshead and the Angel of the North. https://www.gateshead.gov.uk/media/5724/Angelpack-small/doc/Angel_Pack_small.doc. Accessed 28 May 2019. Romer, C. (2017, August 10). Arts in North Underfunded by £700m, Think Tank Claims. Arts Professional. https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/ arts-north-underfunded-ps700m-think-tank-claims. Accessed 21 May 2019. Rose, N. (1996). The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government. Economy and Society, 25(3), 327–356. Selwood, S. (1995). The Benefits of Public Art: The Polemics of Permanent Art in Public Places. London: Policy Studies Institute. Shaw, P. (1990). Public Art Report: Local Authority Commissions of Art for Public Places. London: Public Art Forum. Smith, C. (1998). Creative Britain. London: Faber & Faber. Sport England. (2017, June 30). Active People Survey. https://www.sportengland.org/research/about-our-research/active-people-survey/. Accessed 2 May 2019. Stark, P., Powell, D., & Gordon, C. (2013). Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital: A Contribution to the Debate on National Policy for the Arts and Culture in England. http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/rocc/Rebalancing_FINAL_10mb.pdf. Accessed 21 May 2019. Stark, P., Powell, D., & Gordon, C. (2014a). The PLACE Report: Policy for the Lottery, the Arts and Community in England. http://www.gpsculture.co.uk/ downloads/place/The_PLACE_report.pdf. Accessed 21 May 2019. Stark, P., Powell, D., & Gordon, C. (2014b). Arts Council England’s National Investment Plans 2015–18 Hard Facts to Swallow, Analysis, Commentary and Evaluation. GPS Culture. https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1412872263674/ GPS-Hard-Facts-to-Swallow-R.pdf. Accessed 21 May 2019. Stark, P., Powell, D., & Gordon, C. (2014c). Regional Arts Funding Imbalance Will ‘Worsen Significantly’, Warn Arts Leaders. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2014/oct/10/arts-funding-imbalance-hard-facts-report. Accessed 21 May 2019. Stevenson, D. (2004). “Civic Gold” Rush. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10(1), 119–131. Taylor, M. (2016). Nonparticipation or Different Styles of Participation? Alternative Interpretations from Taking Part. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 169–181. Tomaney, J. (2002). The Evolution of Regionalism in England. Regional Studies, 36(7), 721–731. Vall, N. (2011). Cultural Region: North East England, 1945–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zukin, S. (1996). The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Interviews with Author (Roles as at Time of Interview) Ednie Wilson, Creativity Development Manager, Gateshead Council, Interview Date: 28/05/15. Katherine Zeserson, Director of Participation and Learning, Sage Gateshead, Interview Date: 18/05/15. Peter Stark, freelance Cultural Policy Analyst, Interview Date: 28/05/15. Ross Rigby, Performance Programme Director, Sage Gateshead, Interview Date: 18/05/15.

CHAPTER 8

Calling Participation to Account: Taking Part in the Politics of Method Catherine Bunting, Abigail Gilmore and Andrew Miles

8.1  Introduction This chapter explores the provenance, development and performativity of the Taking Part Survey, the principal research instrument for national statistics on cultural participation in England. The survey was initiated in 2005 as part of a programme of research and evidence generation led by the then Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).1 It involved a group of non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) responsible for strategy, decision-making and performance management of 1 The Department of Culture, Media and Sport changed its name to The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in July 2017.

C. Bunting  Independent Consultant, London, UK A. Gilmore  Institute of Cultural Practices, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Miles (*)  Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_8

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sectors within the broad church of the arts, culture and sport under the New Labour administrations of 1997–2010. We explore this recent history of a flagship survey of cultural indicators for policy development through the accounts of several key players who participated in its design and implementation: civil servants, researchers and policymakers within these different cultural agencies. We then mobilise these accounts to help us evaluate and contextualise the significance of Taking Part in cultural knowledge production over this period and since. The methodological approach we take here is therefore a qualitative one, which aims, through a series of in-depth interviews, to capture the narrative accounts of the protagonists involved in developing the survey. These protagonists describe their impression of the process of the survey’s development from their experience at the time and reflect on the ways in which Taking Part met or failed to meet its original objectives a decade later. Through this approach, we are able to expose and unpack the broader narrative of the participation survey itself, which we counterpose to the official presentation of Taking Part as an objective or neutral technocratic device. We draw on critical literature from cultural policy studies, cultural sociology and actor-network theory in order to reveal the complex social and political life of Taking Part and its emergence as the expression of a particular administrative culture. We begin by considering the background and context of Taking Part, setting out the rationale for our close examination of the development of a survey aiming to provide statistical data on cultural participation with reference to key debates about performance management, evidence-based policymaking and research methodologies, which were occurring at the time (and which have since continued). We then go on to examine the initiation and development of Taking Part through the recollections of our interviewees, observing their experiences when negotiating the form and content of the survey; their perceptions of the role it played within their sector organisations; and more broadly their assessment of its impact as a source of national statistics on cultural participation. The formation of the Taking Part Survey represents an important time in recent cultural policy history; it provided an important opportunity for a number of sector interests to come together in an attempt to establish a shared research methodology for measuring participation, which allowed comparison across the newly formed ‘family’ of DCMS sectors. It was the first in a set of collaborative strategic research

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activities, aimed at developing evidence for policymaking, which included the Culture and Sport Evidence programme (CASE).2 As a key component of a new centralised mechanism to manage policy performance through government targets, this required formation of shared definitions and so represented the formative articulation by a select group of policy actors of those culture, sport and leisure activities that are, or should be, the focus of public policy. Yet what our informants’ accounts highlight is the messy, entangled and contested nature of this process, its inscription by organisational cultures and histories, and—alongside what they view as the achievements of Taking Part—its limitations, unintended consequences and missed opportunities. Policy regimes and approaches to cultural indicators have changed since this period, most notably following the general election of 2010 and the change of government to the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition. This new government began by removing public agencies and infrastructure that it considered to be bureaucratic and wasteful, some of which were explicitly engaged in technologies of public service performance measurement and management (Panchamia and Thomas 2014). For the DCMS, this meant that, in principle, the department was no longer held to account on targets measured through Taking Part data, although, as we go on to reveal, Taking Part proved to be a weak performance management tool. Nevertheless, over ten years on from its inception, Taking Part remains central to the notion of cultural policy appraisal, measured participation is still the main indicator for the success (or otherwise) of policies providing access to the arts and culture (Belfiore 2016), and the role of cultural statistics in understanding participation continues to be debated. In closing this chapter, we reflect on how the context and demand for cultural participation data have shifted in recent years and consider the contemporary relevance of the participation survey as an evaluation measure for democratic accountability (Hanberger 2006). Our conclusions are twofold. On the one hand, we argue that despite considerable interest and investment in methods for generating participation data over the short history of Taking Part, this form of measurement has not actively informed policymaking that has increased participation or furthered cultural democracy through public investment in the arts and 2 CASE ran from 2008 until 2013. For further information and outputs, see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/case-programme.

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culture. Rather, the survey has provided an opportunity to prolong the ‘participation myth’ (Jancovich 2015) by acting as a proxy for an understanding of cultural participation and its public value that privileges the interests of those who can participate in decision-making, while masking inherent inequalities. On the other hand, we suggest that now that the requirement to measure participation rates in a prescribed set of activities has been removed, there is an opportunity for Taking Part to become a more exploratory and wide-ranging survey; one that can be used to help shape and democratise cultural policy by painting a broader picture of how people in England make their lives through participation, without sacrificing the continuity of data generated by regular measurement of participation in established cultural forms.

8.2  More Than Measurement: Exploring the Social and Political Life of Taking Part Taking Part; The National Survey of Culture Leisure and Sport is a large-scale, stratified and weighted, face-to-face sample survey commissioned by the DCMS, which has been running continuously since July 2005 (DCMS 2006; Taylor 2016). Until 2011, when half the sample became repeat contacts in order to create a longitudinal dimension, it asked detailed questions of around 29,000 adults (and from 2006 a smaller sample of children) each year about their participation in both state-sponsored and other forms of cultural and sporting activity. Responses could then be contextualised using further information collected on a wide range of demographic and other indicators. Taking Part is thus a rich data resource, yet it was largely operationalised by government in a very narrow way; its main outputs being quarterly statistical releases on participation rates and trends in the DCMS sectors. This is because the survey’s primary purpose was to furnish data on whether the DCMS and its NPDBs were meeting the targets set by its Public Service Agreements (PSAs) and Departmental Service Objectives for increasing participation in culture and sport by certain under-represented priority groups. In this respect, Taking Part was conceived of as the cornerstone of a technocratic approach to cultural governance, with an emphasis on instrumentalism, accountability and ‘evidence-based policy’, that was

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symptomatic of an accelerating shift towards the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) style of administration under the Labour governments of 1997– 2010 (Lapsley 2009; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2016). Subsequently, New Labour’s approach to ‘auditing’ culture according to its contribution to broader social and economic goals elicited a largely negative response from the cultural sector and in cultural policy studies. Concerns have been raised about the inability of this framework to address the ‘intrinsic’ value of the arts (Holden 2004; Selwood 2010), how the pursuit of ‘defensive instrumentalism’ was ultimately likely to be self-defeating, and about the way in which the apparently neutral and ‘scientific’ evaluation logic underpinning the NPM worked to depoliticise the debate about cultural value (Belfiore 2004, 2012). The ensuing critique of what Belfiore and Bennett (2007) call ‘the cult of measurement’ in UK cultural policy highlights the need to problematise and situate the development of such a survey politically (Blomkamp 2015); firstly, as a component of a particular ‘politics of method’ (Savage 2010); and secondly in relation to the rhetoric of evidence-based policymaking. Recent work in cultural sociology and in science and technology studies has drawn attention to the ‘social life’ of research methods (Law et al. 2011). This argues that ostensibly benign ‘tools’ such as the sample survey, and the ‘objective’ techniques (indicators, statistics) used to mobilise and make sense of them, are in fact both loaded and performative: they tend to contain assumptions that order and enact, as much as describe, reality (Law 2009; Reddern 2015). In providing an insight into the dynamics of the process by which Taking Part was conceived, our interviews show how the survey presents a concept of cultural participation that emerged from historical knowledge and organisational cultures, cross-agency negotiation and pragmatic decision-making (Ban 1995); they also illuminate the tensions in, and real-world limitations of, the evidence-based policymaking model at the heart of NPM (Cairney 2015). We have sought to comprehend the social and political life of Taking Part by exploring the experiences of seven key individuals involved in the initiation, design, delivery and use of the survey. Six of our interviewees were officers and managers who, at the time the survey was introduced, were working at DCMS or one of its four main NDPBs: Arts Council England; English Heritage, now divided into two bodies with Historic England taking over the latter’s statutory role as advisor on and champion of the wider historic environment; the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) now amalgamated into Arts Council England;

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and Sport England. These interviewees were responsible for the initial development of Taking Part and oversaw the delivery of fieldwork and data analysis and reporting in the survey’s early years. Our final interviewee was a local government professional who was involved in the development of culture and sport indicators at local level and able to provide a perspective on the value of Taking Part to officers working ‘on the ground’. Semi-structured interviews lasting between an hour and 90 minutes were conducted by phone or face-to-face. During the interview, we asked participants to tell us about the background and context to their own engagement with Taking Part and that of their organisation. We asked about their understanding of the rationale and aims of the survey, the process of its management and design, the way in which decisions about what should be included and defined as cultural participation were taken, the relationship between Taking Part and data needs at local and regional levels, the use made of the survey by different organisations involved in cultural policy and its delivery, and, finally, their thoughts about the way the survey has changed over the years and its future. In the following sections, we discuss the themes emerging from these interviews. Firstly, we consider the very different ways in which the performance management approaches were received and negotiated across the NDPBs. Secondly, we trace the impact of organisational knowledge, cultures and power on the ways in which ‘cultural participation’ was recognised and included in the survey. Thirdly, we assess how our interview participants evaluate the longer-term impacts of Taking Part on the understanding of cultural participation and on cultural policy in the UK. In the final section of the chapter, we turn to discussion and conclusions based on these research findings. 8.2.1   Relationships with and Attitudes to Indicators Attitudes to performance management, in particular the measurement of performance using quantitative targets, varied considerably amongst our interviewees and revealed the different relationships they and their organisations had to Taking Part. Prior to the survey’s introduction, all had access to some form of cultural participation data via surveys run by bodies such as the Office of National Statistics (ONS) or the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountability (CIPFA) or through oneoff, bespoke commissioned studies. Historically, such research was not

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seen as central to the policymaking process but rather a supplement to existing organisational knowledge. As one interviewee explained: It wasn’t a primary policy driver…because the culture at the time over those early years wasn’t target driven…I used to analyse the results and put them out there…people would say “well that’s interesting”…but then to some extent it was parked and people got on with their business.

Interviewees reported that, as New Labour’s drive to improve public service delivery began to make itself felt across government departments, they became aware of the ‘strong and consistent’ messages being conveyed about the importance of accountability and robust assessment of performance against policy objectives. PSAs, documents setting out the aims, objectives and key targets of individual government departments, were introduced as a formal performance management mechanism. One interviewee described the development of a ‘measurement culture’ that permeated central and local government and, to varying degrees, their partners and funded bodies, anchored to understanding participation: That’s an interesting cultural shift…from where we used to have participation in culture and sport as an interesting aside…to where it’s right at the centre of all the funding decisions.

For DCMS, this created a new imperative to collect data that could be used as evidence through which to influence investment decisions made by the Treasury. As a result of the 2004 Spending Review, DCMS took responsibility for a PSA with four elements: the take-up of sporting opportunities by young people; halting increases in childhood obesity; the take-up of cultural and sporting opportunities by adults aged 16 and above from priority groups (black and minority ethnic groups; disabled people; and people from lower socio-economic groups); and improving the productivity of the tourism, creative and leisure industries (DCMS 2005). The third of these elements, known as PSA3, encompassed the following indicators and targets: • increasing the number who participate in active sports at least twelve times a year by 3%, and increasing the number who engage in at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity level sport, at least three times a week by 3%;

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• increasing the number who participate in arts activity at least twice a year by 2% and increasing the number who attend arts events at least twice a year by 3%; • increasing the number accessing museums and galleries collections by 2%; • increasing the number visiting designated Historic Environment sites by 3% (DCMS 2005). The process of negotiating this PSA with Treasury spurred DCMS to develop a form of measurement of participation that would withstand the scrutiny of the National Audit Office, responsible for examining the quality of the data systems used to measure progress against targets. DCMS believed that a national survey was required to both define clear indicators for PSA3 in the first place, and to be able to report on progress against those indicators throughout the life of the PSA from 2005 to 2008. This was to be part of wider research perceived by central government as being of high quality and national significance, responding to recent criticism of the department concerning the quality of its in-house evidence base. In 2004, DCMS began the process of consultation to develop the survey which would come to be called Taking Part, together with its primary NDPBs: Arts Council England, English Heritage, the MLA and Sport England. Research staff at individual NDPBs were initially less enthusiastic: each had their own methods for collecting or accessing data on participation, and there was some reluctance to relinquish authority and divert resources to a DCMS-led initiative over which they would have less control. However, there was recognition that a collaborative approach would maximise the quality and cost-effectiveness of data collection, and also some excitement about the project’s potential to encourage ‘people and organisations out of silos’ and create, …an opportunity to look at things we hadn’t considered, such as cross-cultural engagement, and the policy of engagement.

Governance structures were put in place to enable DCMS and NDPBs to work together on the development of Taking Part. The dynamics of this relationship were shaped by the different perspectives, motivations and organisational cultures that partners brought to the process which articulated quite different positions on the value of measurement, the meaning

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and significance of PSA3 target, and the broader question of how their performances as organisations should be judged. At one end of the spectrum was Sport England, which saw increasing participation in sport as its raison d’être and stronger performance management as central to the organisation’s survival and success. This NDPB was already developing its own performance management regime in order to establish greater relevance and leverage at local level, gain broader insight into the patterns, causes and effects of sport participation, and to make the public policy case for sport. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it…we need to measure what we do…we need to understand what’s going on better and we need to get it down to local level.

Significantly, the organisation was able to demonstrate a causal relationship between frequency of sport participation and positive health outcomes that was accepted by the Department of Health. This development proved a crucial link in the supply chain of evidence required by government, one which specifically implicated the generation of participation data within the case-making for further investment and contributed to the overall rationale for Taking Part. However, in the same year that Taking Part was introduced, Sport England also launched Active People, a multi-million-pound survey of sport participation that provided data on a wide range of different activities for every local authority area in England. While DCMS was focused on measuring the sport participation element of PSA3 at national level through Taking Part, Sport England’s primary research focus was very much on Active People, a greater financial investment designed to service its funding agreements with national governing bodies for sport and inform its relationships with local authorities. Participation indicators at a national level were a secondary concern, and Taking Part—while a useful exercise in cross-sector collaboration, perhaps—would never match the reach and impact of the organisation’s own data collection efforts. At the other end of the spectrum, English Heritage broadly rejected the idea that its performance as an organisation should be assessed using measures of overall heritage participation. The heritage element of PSA3 covered activities such as visiting ‘a city or town with historic character’ and visiting ‘a monument such as a castle, fort or ruin’ (DCMS 2010). However, while English Heritage was very much concerned with

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promoting attendance at the heritage sites it was responsible for, it did not see itself as being responsible for heritage participation more widely: DCMS was trying to use it [Taking Part] as one of the factors in determining success…this was always a massive tension because the sites team [at English Heritage] weren’t really interested…all they were interested in was raising attendance at their sites.

Senior management at English Heritage felt no real ownership of the policy imperative to increase participation by priority groups, described by our interviewee as a ‘diktat from above’, and their relationship to Taking Part as ‘weird’: They never really bought into the ‘got to increase participation among underrepresented groups’…it just wasn’t there…it was there as a token.

The culture of the organisation at the time was not particularly measurement focused, and senior figures at English Heritage were more inclined to base decisions on their own expertise and instincts than on evidence. Official measurements of heritage participation based on Taking Part were therefore not that important to the organisation, or indeed politically charged, as they were not part of their performance management regime. English Heritage continued to provide DCMS with visitor numbers for its sites and these data, while not used to measure any official target, became more significant than the heritage element of PSA3 in negotiations between the two bodies. This NDPB remained firm about where it understood its responsibilities to lie in relation to increasing participation and was able to persuade DCMS to accept its position, aided perhaps by the fact that heritage funding made up a small fraction of the department’s expenditure: There was a bit of a push from DCMS to support wider participation, but not enough…heritage under New Labour was a much less important focus for DCMS than arts and sport…it may have benefited from being under the radar.

If Sport England and English Heritage adopted discrete positions on performance management, it seems that the Arts Council had ‘mixed

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feelings’ about the issue. One interviewee felt external demands for greater public accountability were a source of internal tension at the Arts Council, which could be explained by the different motivations and perspectives of officers working within the organisation: Staff [were] in one of two camps: either an ‘aficionado’ or a ‘demo­ crat’…There were the art form people, so the people who worked on music and theatre and visual arts, and they came from the sector and they were artists by background and they were the experts. And then there were, at the time, the social exclusion team, the participation team, the learning team, the diversity team, all of those guys, who came from local authority backgrounds…who had a very different kind of view. …people from participation were like, ‘of course this is important, of course we should be measuring it’. And they saw the PSAs as a route to furthering their cause within the organisation. But, you know, the art form people and their teams were, kind of, ‘what’s all this about?’.

Another interviewee observed that composition of NDPB governance helped shape the culture of the organisations and their attitudes towards performance management: If you look at [the board membership of] Sport England, about a third were local government people but it was quite a balance. MLA was reasonably balanced, but the Arts Council board, it was almost all artists. Or representatives of producers of art. There were no local government representatives on it at all. If that is the board that is driving the policy, and all of a sudden then we started to understand.

With different parts of the organisation pulling in different directions, it appears that the Arts Council felt some responsibility to increasing overall arts participation, but recognised that it was limited in its ability to influence the take-up of arts opportunities outside its own funded portfolio, plus increasing participation was only one of a number of objectives that the organisation was seeking to achieve. As with English Heritage, the requirements of PSA3 relating to priority groups felt imposed from above, and there were concerns about the implications of focusing on particular groups at the expense of a more general arts audience:

194  C. BUNTING ET AL. You could get to a position where the Arts Council’s regularly funded organisations felt like they had to put on a diverse play to try and get audiences in of a particular colour…it just felt very wrong that we could go down that kind of track….it would mean that you then lost numbers overall because your traditional audiences may not have come in through the door… I wasn’t very keen on many of the definitions we came up with in the PSA targets. I felt they put perverse incentives into the system.

This latter reference reveals a broader objection to the performance measurement of arts policy through PSA3, and its potential impact on performance management. The ‘perverse incentives’ of the bundle of targets introduced through the PSA could, it was felt, result in unfair penalisation of performance which would have been broadly classified as good and reward mediocre performance which was closer aligned to more specific targets (Bevan and Hood 2006, 521). At the Arts Council, then, PSA3 was acknowledged but not fully embraced within the organisation’s understanding of its own strategic goals. The indicators were seen more as a technical exercise in accounting to DCMS, to be managed by the research team, than as a policy lever owned by the organisation as a whole: It was a bottom-up issue of measurement, rather than a top-down strategic idea.

Taking Part was viewed by the Arts Council as a valuable opportunity to track arts engagement in detail over time, and to collaborate on a major research project with DCMS and other NDPBs, but from a performance management perspective ‘it didn’t really mean a lot’. Finally, the MLA was perhaps closest to Sport England, as a relatively enthusiastic advocate of collecting participation data to inform decision-making and the assessment of outcomes, which became a key priority for the organisation’s policy directorate. It supported the national indicators set out in the PSAs and welcomed Taking Part as a means of tracking sector performance in relation to broader patterns of cultural consumption and participation over time. In fact, the MLA would have preferred Taking Part to go further in measuring the ‘fine grain’ and the social and educational outcomes of participation:

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At the MLA, we had a number of frameworks for participation. One was the participation ladder that saw citizens from first time visitors to repeat visitors, volunteers to patrons of cultural activities…we also had a less ingrained, but still influential, view on participation in terms of the needs that participation met. Are they participating for social reasons? Educational reasons? Entertainment? […] I argued for the survey to include more questions related to the outcomes framework.

However, according to our interviewee, MLA was limited in its ability to make use of Taking Part as a performance management tool, partly because unlike Sport England, it lacked the formal mechanisms for making decisions based on survey results, and partly because of a lack of engagement with the data: I found it incredibly frustrating to see millions of pounds spent on research that most people either didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. There were very little incentives for the sector to pay attention to the data if their funding and jobs were not related to the evidence.

Overall, there was considerable variation across the ‘DCMS family’ when assessing the value of the Taking Part Survey and its role in measuring the national participation target, and indeed in the extent to which NDPBs felt accountable for the delivery of the target in the first place. While PSA3 was effectively a contract between DCMS and HM Treasury, it is evident that DCMS expected to share some of the responsibility for increasing culture and sport engagement with its major NDPBs, although the nature and scope of this shared responsibility were never made explicit. DCMS placed a ‘strong emphasis’ on PSA3 within its NDPB funding agreements while also recognising that NDPBs were part of a ‘complex delivery chain involving many partners’ (DCMS 2005). Furthermore, while DCMS and its NDPBs were already involved in activities aimed at widening participation in culture and sport, there were few strategies designed explicitly to maximise progress against PSA3, and there was little indication of what the consequences would be if targets were not met. Thus Taking Part was born in something of a policy vacuum, in which it became easier to talk about how PSA3 should be measured than how it might be achieved. One interviewee felt that for DCMS the PSAs were:

196  C. BUNTING ET AL. …less about governing NDPBs and more about wanting to be part of the new broom in government…to be recognised, and to be able to come to the table, it [DCMS] needed to be part of that performance management process.

It seems that Taking Part became the focal point for collaboration between DCMS and its NDPBs around PSA3, so that joint conversations about the target were largely technical rather than strategic, and quickly turned to the specific activities that should and should not be included in the survey. 8.2.2   Processes and Politics of Defining Participation There was a range of competing factors that informed the decisions about which culture and sport activities were included in the definition of PSA3 and the Taking Part Survey. For the most part, individual NDPBs took the lead in developing sets of activities that they felt represented a meaningful definition of participation in their respective sectors. For both Sport England and the Arts Council, a major consideration was ensuring consistency with previous and concurrent research. Sport England consulted internally and externally, including with an academic advisory board and ‘international experts’, to develop a long list of sports which, along with elements found in the General Household Survey and the Health Survey for England, were included in its Active People survey, and then incorporated within Taking Part. The Arts Council was keen to ensure continuity with the questions included in a previous Omnibus survey, which were in turn based on the definitions of arts attendance covered by the long-running, commercial Target Group Index survey. There were other philosophical, tactical and political challenges in deciding how participation should be defined by the Taking Part Survey. The key issue across arts, sport and heritage was how broad to take the definition, and different stakeholders had different perspectives on this. On the one hand, there was a desire amongst NDPBs for Taking Part to be inclusive of contemporary and everyday leisure activities as well as more traditional and mainstream forms of participation:

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What we didn’t want to do was to disappear down a few rabbit holes. We wanted to somehow get an overview of the way people were engaging in arts and culture at that time…I remember we had to make sure that it didn’t look like a beauty parade…We wanted to almost showcase the breadth of art and culture…What people were interested in, what people were doing, rather than it seeming like it was any kind of elitist focus on more traditional classical art forms.

There was also a tactical recognition that the broader the scope of the activities covered by PSA3, the greater the chance that the target would be met. At the same time, there was recognition that for the data to be useful to policy development and performance management, it should prioritise the types of culture and sport activities that were the focus of core NDPB strategies and funding streams: We did end up doing a lot of art form-by-art form stuff, and there was, at the time, a visual arts team, and a music team that did classical music, and a dance team that did ballet and contemporary dance, and a theatre team. And actually what they wanted was, the theatre data, you know…and we were able to do that for them. Given the way the Arts Council was structured and the kinds of data actually internally people would respond to… Taking Part did that job.

This was also the position of staff at the Treasury and the National Audit Office, who were keen to align Taking Part with ‘where the money goes’. There was a feeling amongst some interviewees that HM Treasury took a more ‘old school’ and ‘elitist’ view of what constituted cultural participation, revealed, for example, through recalled discussions with Treasury officials about ‘whether things like carnival were really “art”’. Sport England’s challenge was where to draw the boundaries between sport and general physical activity. The Department of Health was an important stakeholder for Sport England, but as one interviewee explained, there were differences in opinion concerning how to promote physical activity for better health: The actual view I always felt when…working with colleagues from the Department of Health…was that sport, rather than being a turn-on for people to be active, can be a turn-off for many people. […] They would rather…promote walking upstairs, getting off a bus one stop early, mowing the lawn.

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Sport England and DCMS took a ‘pragmatic approach’ to agreeing which activities to include, trying to ensure that the focus was on the sports that received public funding through Sport England while also generating data that would be meaningful to wider stakeholders: I kind of generally took the view that sport is what Sport England and DCMS decided sport [to be]…we set the boundaries. […] We had a big debate over cycling…and it ended up with this complex thing…cycling is included if it’s for recreational purposes but if somebody says they’re cycling for transport purposes…we excluded it.

Taking Part had to balance ‘expert’ understanding of culture and sport with what would be meaningful to the ‘ordinary people’ completing the survey: Sometimes you would have a group of stakeholders who were involved in…the delivery of that art form and they would almost have what I would call a purist view of it, whereas we were very much, as a research team thinking, well, if I was to go and ask my father about all of this would he understand what on earth I was talking about, would he get these distinctions? Because we didn’t want it to be it defined purely by experts with a very, very high degree of knowledge about that subject. We wanted it to make sense to as many people as possible.

This was particularly challenging for heritage, where there were fewer existing measures of participation to draw on: as one interviewee pointed out, the definition could be as broad as ‘just walking out the door’ (e.g. when visiting a heritage town). Another interviewee explained DCMS preferred a narrower definition focused on visiting heritage sites, while the social inclusion team at English Heritage was keen to include more active forms of participation such as historical re-enactment. The dissonance between professional and public perspectives on what constitutes cultural participation was perhaps most pronounced when it came to archives. To the MLA, it was obvious that Taking Part should collect data on whether people had visited an archive in the previous twelve months, but many survey respondents simply didn’t understand what was being asked of them:

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To me, it was incredibly revealing that the consultants [running the fieldwork] repeatedly asked us to take away questions about archives. Many people didn’t know what an archive was.

In sum, despite the difficulties and the inevitable compromises that had to be made, the general consensus was that negotiations over the focus and scope of Taking Part resulted in a ‘broadly sensible’ range of culture and sport activities; one that balanced the needs of multiple stakeholders and was ‘fit for purpose’, while working within the practical constraints of survey design. 8.2.3   Use, Impact and Limitations of Taking Part Reflecting on both the value of the survey to their organisations and its weaknesses and limitations, most interviewees felt that Taking Part was successful in producing a large-scale, high-quality dataset: ‘a national picture of cultural consumption and participation’. They acknowledged the significant contribution that Taking Part made to the evidence base for the culture and sport sectors: It was really helpful to have that understanding for the first time. And also to be able to quantify the number of people doing different things. I’m sure there were constant surprises when we were looking at the data. Which was because we never had that rich picture before.

Another interviewee believed that regardless of how it was used, the survey had an effect on organisational self-image, as staff began to feel more knowledgeable and authoritative about patterns of participation in the wider population: The arrival of data on all these issues does have a big impact…Just the existence of data. I’m sure I remember someone saying to me once something about, ‘we’re not wandering round in the dark any more’. Even if it didn’t make much difference in terms of policy or decisions, I do think that Taking Part did have this effect, internally, of creating a sense that we had knowledge…In a very intangible way it has a big impact on how people feel about their work.

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The size, and the number of partners and the level of investment involved, meant that Taking Part was a ‘flagship’ project, encouraging the idea that ‘research should be taken seriously’ and bringing policy actors into dialogue within one another. It was recognised that the survey could indeed be used to confirm and challenge assumptions and inform sector strategy: When the first few rounds of results from Taking Part came out, it confirmed that library visits were going down. We saw a lot of resistance from the sector to use that national and regional picture […] But…if a representative sample of citizens were telling us, I don’t like what the library has to offer, our responsibility as public servants was to listen to them, reflect on the insights, change the service, if needed.

It was also acknowledged that perhaps Taking Part’s greatest contribution was to provide a ‘definitive’ picture of inequalities in participation in publicly funded culture and sport by revealing the different levels of participation in different sectors by demographic and socio-economic groups. Taking Part data was analysed and disseminated in a number of ways. At first, the focus was on basic reporting, publishing quarterly and annual figures on participation in activities by sector, with a small number of demographic breakdowns. Interviewees described this reporting process as labour intensive, with research staff at DCMS and the NDPBs feeling under pressure to maintain the publication cycle: It was a lot of work for a lot of people. And because it was a lot of money people wanted to see outputs, you know? So there was this kind of pressure, in terms of resourcing, to kind of keep that cog turning, the machine working…It was driven really by the PSA targets.

Over time the regular production of participation measures became both laborious and monotonous, not least because there was very little change in participation rates from year to year, and NDPB research staff found the analytical reporting mechanistic and tedious: So I became bored with that…all my time in the end was about a schedule, the next report…that’s not what I thought research was all about.

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Some of the partner organisations undertook more in-depth analysis of Taking Part data to address specific questions of policy relevance. These discrete projects were viewed as more valuable and influential than the regular reporting of overall participation rates. For example, English Heritage used Taking Part to produce a report that helped shape the organisation’s policy around family-friendly activities: We did a report looking at the drivers of adult participation…multivariate analysis…and we found out that the biggest driver of participation was visiting as a child and we were able to use that evidence along with some qualitative evidence…to persuade the Head of Properties at English Heritage to do child-focused activities…so that was really positive.

Both the Arts Council and Sport England used Taking Part to help produce ‘segmentations’, which broke the English population down into distinct categories based on people’s participation in and attitudes towards the arts and sport respectively. For the Arts Council and its funded organisations this was a significant change of approach, which cemented Taking Part data in policy practice: …then we did the segmentation, which you can have all kinds of thoughts about, but by a long margin it was the most influential piece of research, I think, I was ever involved in at the Arts Council. And it’s still used. … Whether you like it or not, I think people responded to it in terms of providing a common language and framework.

At the same time, interviewees recognised that there were limitations to the survey, which could only ever produce a partial picture of participation. For some, the requirement to measure progress against PSA targets compromised Taking Part’s design: I think the obsession with performance metrics was to the detriment. […] I do think there were some inherent things in the way it was designed and I was complicit in that….it was an issue about how do you measure PSAs…rather than how do you better understand what the trends are.

Much of the questionnaire was dedicated to measuring frequency of participation in a long list of activities that reflected the interests of the partner organisations and the sectors they represented, rather than a more

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‘colloquial’ understanding of how people spend their spare time and the hobbies and interests that matter to them most. The performance management imperative meant collecting data on activities such as rugby league and opera, which were important to the NDPBs but where the proportion of the population participating was very low. Small sample sizes meant that it was difficult to ‘drill down’ to find out more about the people who took part: We drove what was a social survey into a performance metric vehicle and that posed problems…you get past the top ten sports and you’re in some very small numbers…but they are big sports politically – cricket, rugby league – the numbers playing rugby league in a national survey…you pick up very small numbers. […] You were driving a survey into places where it wasn’t fit for purpose.

Some related limitations of Taking Part more explicitly to the choice of research method: The main limitation is that it was a survey. Surveys are not good at asking how or why.

Taking Part was not able to provide much insight into the reasons for participating or not participating in different activities. The survey contained some simple questions on motivations and barriers but the resulting data felt ‘superficial’ and there wasn’t enough resource to develop more insightful questions or to explore other approaches to the research: …that balance between maximising the value of the survey and looking at some of the other questions that weren’t specifically around PSAs… so more around the quality of engagement, the barriers to engagement. Sometimes there wasn’t enough resource to do some of that ‘nice to have’ stuff.

Similarly, although the subsequent CASE programme was able to use data from Taking Part and other sources to model drivers of participation in culture and sport and provide some estimates for learning and well-being outcomes (CASE 2010), the survey itself provided little information on the wider benefits, dynamics or outcomes of participation. Nor did it address how participation in culture and sport related to the

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broader context of leisure or other aspects of day-to-day life. Crucially, it disassociated participation from social context and the sites where participation takes place: A big thing for us…you can never be sure where [people] were participating…a lot of visiting heritage sites is on holiday…does it matter if someone’s going to visit Florence…or going to look round Machu Picchu…is that what we were trying to measure? We never really got to the bottom of that.

Taking Part was very much a national survey: while it could produce regional breakdowns of participation, the sample size was not large enough to produce robust estimates at local authority level. For one interviewee, this was the survey’s ultimate failing as it could not produce knowledge or support accountability at the level where the ‘delivery’ of culture and sport facilities and opportunities happens. Even at national level, Taking Part was seen as a ‘blunt instrument’ for policy development and performance management because participation rates changed very little from year to year; the survey was too broad in scope to be able to detect the impact of specific policy interventions, and there were no major changes to national policy in response to Taking Part data. All that obsessive measuring…the results in overall terms shift by one or two per cent over ten years…nobody’s changing any fundamental decisions as a consequence of this…it begs the question, ‘what was that all about?’.

In the end, then, Taking Part was valued not as a policy evaluation tool so much as a long-running initiative which generated a national picture of participation in a specific set of culture and sport activities, built the confidence of survey partners, and provided an opportunity for cross-sector research collaboration. Interviewees felt that despite these benefits, Taking Part was a substantial expense that was becoming harder to justify. The political context and the structures and priorities of the partner organisations had changed considerably since the survey began, so Taking Part could be reviewed to see how it aligns with current policy objectives. Since PSA targets—and the need to account for public funding of culture and sport using national participation rates—disappeared when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition replaced the Labour

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government in 2010, there was an opportunity for Taking Part to evolve into a more flexible research tool, with different waves of the survey designed to explore different aspects of participation and its value over time. Several interviewees felt that any future survey should be informed by a qualitative understanding of what people perceive culture and sport to be and the activities that matter to them on a day-to-day basis; one interviewee ruefully reflected on what might have been achieved had Taking Part been designed with these principles in mind from the outset: If Taking Part had been designed in a holistic, coherent way…what do people do with their lives…it probably would have measured things in a different way. It would have dealt better with the position of these different activities in people’s whole lives, and how they relate to each other, and it might have given greater insight.

8.3  Discussion and Conclusions This chapter presents an historical account of the Taking Part Survey through the reflections of major decision-makers involved in its development and implementation. These reveal the complex, messy and contingent nature of this process, and the mixed feelings of partners about the survey’s function as well as the use of the data that ensued. They disclose differing interests in and dispositions towards the survey related to the organisational cultures of the ‘DCMS family’, and their different approaches to performance management and target-setting, including the ‘perverse incentives’ these sometimes encouraged. The interviewees acknowledge the broader effect of the survey, suggesting that, above and beyond its role in data generation, Taking Part provided DCMS with a way of demonstrating its competencies in a policy arena of target culture and evidence-based policymaking, even as it revealed inherent tensions within this process. Other recent histories of this period in English cultural policy have pointed to a turn towards policies aimed at increasing participation in the arts and culture under New Labour as part of a ‘defensive instrumentalism’ (Belfiore 2012), which is explicitly interwoven with the targetsetting and audit culture of the New Public Management (Gilmore 2014; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2016). Our findings contribute to an understanding of policymaking at this time in these terms. They correlate also with an account that, despite the wide-scale investment in the rhetoric

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of participation policy and the adoption of a performance management regime which placed participation indicators at its heart, characterises this period as one of concrete failure to change either the levels of engagement within the accepted framework of participation, or the opportunities for different voices to be heard in decision-making about its content and funding (Jancovich 2015). Taking Part was conceived as an instrument for performance management, and its narratives are symptomatic of the inherent tensions between democratic and technocratic accountability (Hanberger 2006). On the one hand, the NDPBs appreciated the generation of data which provided more detailed understanding of the take-up of the forms of participation they funded. On the other hand, they were aware of the limitations of the survey and largely critical of the ‘blunt instrument’ of policy appraisal that was the PSA. This predicament reflects the measurement imperative at the core of performance management. The PSA (and Taking Part as a consequence) focused on measuring participation rates (the levels and frequencies of defined types of participation), once the negotiated definitions of participation had been finally agreed across the NDPBs. It follows an interest in producing ‘good evidence for policy’ (Parkhurst 2017, 10) which can underpin measures to target and increase participation by priority groups delineated by the PSA, in pursuit of associated instrumental outcomes. This evidence would, in principle, be useful in appraising and informing policies through which to regulate the ‘supply’ of arts, culture and support (as well as identify and hopefully influence ‘demand’). However, for the NDPBs, the focus on these measures was problematic in various ways. While subsequent research, most notably the CASE programme, aimed to develop evidence of causal relationships, Taking Part was established largely on assumption, rather than evidence, of the benefits of increasing participation rates for instrumental outcomes. For the arts and heritage sectors, unlike sport, attempts to link participation rates to health or other outcomes accepted by government were unconvincing (Walmsley 2012), and so there was no specific imperative to establish optimum rates (or ‘dosages’) of arts and heritage. Furthermore, the emphasis on instrumentalism resulted in measures which were confusing, at best, and a wasteful distraction at worst, to those ‘aficionado’ NDPB officers focused on, say, visual arts development or heritage preservation. Our interviewees acknowledge that the survey had varying levels of significance and utility within their organisations. Limitations they

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identified included the lack of data on the situated practices of participation, and its unrepresentativeness at local authority level, rendering its value to stakeholders outside of the national bodies dependent on further research and data modelling mechanisms. It was noticeably poor at providing explanations concerning the motivations and barriers to participation, and, as has been considered elsewhere, the dependence on fixed, traditional definitions furnished discriminatory ‘deficit models’ of participation (Miles and Sullivan 2012; Stevenson 2013; Miles and Gibson 2016). Furthermore, there seemed to be no repercussions when data from Taking Part were used to appraise participation policy, and the performance management role of the survey which helped shape it was never fully enacted. Nevertheless, there has been continued investment in the survey beyond the lifetime of the PSA3. This anomaly can be understood through what Cairney (2015), drawing on a concept first coined by Herbert Simon (1972), refers to as ‘bounded rationality’ in policymaking, where actors make use of evidence within the limits and confines of their own grasp of the policy environment, in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity (2015, 5). Where there are knowledge gaps, both around the distinction between the policy problem and the evaluation of its resolution, Taking Part provides a way of shoring up the rationale through which participation policy is understood and accepted, even when the logic chains between evidence and decision-making are imperfect or become disrupted. It provides a continuing performative role, as part of a broader set of research activities, which provide structure to the complex relationship between evidence and policymaking. Furthermore, we argue, this performativity is one of the two common concerns for target-setting and performance management described by Bevan and Hood (2006), the other being the potential for ‘gaming’ the system by policy actors. In their terms, Taking Part can be understood as a synecdoche, where one element of an evaluation system can stand for the whole. Under New Labour and defined by PSA3, the participation measures act as proxies for outcome measures, a strategy mirrored elsewhere in the logic frames of cultural evaluation (e.g. the Council for Europe’s 2016, Indicator Framework on Culture and Democracy). The definition of what is included in and understood by participation is therefore paramount, since it has the potential to represent the greater whole of the value of the state’s investment in arts, culture and sport, which may

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explain our interviewees’ frustration with, but ultimate acceptance of, Taking Part’s limitations. The collaboration between the NDPBs and the DCMS therefore was particularly important to those involved, who took on the role of policy entrepreneurs (Roberts and King 1991); proposing the survey as a consensus on value frameworks which also provided a mechanism for the department to join in with evidence-based policymaking. However, it was not an opportunity for opening up dialogue about the broader nature and benefits of participation from a public value perspective and did not provide the means for new voices and constituencies to become directly involved in decision-making. While this can be explained away by the kinds of organisational path dependencies described by our respondents, Taking Part’s failure to open up understandings of cultural participation raises questions about its contribution to democratic accountability (Hanberger 2006; Jancovich 2015). In turn, its durability has, arguably, helped to calcify the forms of instrumentalism initially resisted by art-form officers and heritage policy actors who were more concerned to look at policy efficacy according to their own priorities, by art form and in relation to specific sites, buildings and attractions. Following a consultation of user groups in 2015, DCMS (2016) published a new five-year plan for the future development of Taking Part. This promised some development of content, for example, to further probe digital participation, and to find out more about issues of causality through the development of an online platform for the longitudinal component of the survey. It also announced that greater dissemination of data would be supported by a new online analysis tool. While these are welcome developments in themselves, there is no suggestion of a shift in strategic thinking about the potential of the survey as a tool for democratic policymaking. In the wake of the withdrawal of the PSA reporting framework, Taking Part retains a largely static inventory, justified by a conservative and limiting understanding of its purpose as a monitoring tool for DCMS and its NDPBs around traditional definitions of cultural participation. We would argue that for its broader potential to be realised, we must first—as we have set out to do in this chapter—contextualise the focus and development of Taking Part, recognising its ‘social life’ as the core component of a particular politics of method. By emphasising their contingent nature, this perspective encourages us to unpack and interrogate Taking Part’s measures of participation, using a range of other data

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and approaches to reveal the ‘work’ that the participation survey, when deployed as a driver of performance management, does in excluding as well as including participation and participants. Recent policy-facing academic work (e.g. Taylor 2016; Leguina and Miles 2017) which undertakes re-analysis of Taking Part data suggests that, when shorn of such a narrowly instrumental, technocratic purpose and considered as part of a dialogic, mixed-methods approach (Mason 2006), the Taking Part survey has an important contribution to make to understanding how, where and why cultural participation happens, thereby enhancing its public value and future relevance.

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Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2005). DCMS Autumn Performance Report: Achievement Against 2002 and 2004 Public Service Agreement Targets and the Efficiency Review Target. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/272224/6721.pdf. Accessed 28 July 2015. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2006). Taking Part: The National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2005–2006; Adult and Child Data [Computer file] (2nd ed.). Colchester: UK Data Archive [distributor], September 2010. SN: 5717. http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/ UKDA-SN-5717-1. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2010). The Taking Part Survey: 2005/06 Adult Questionnaire. old.culture.gov.uk/images/research/TP_ AdultQuestionnaire_2005-06.rtf. Accessed 28 July 2015. Department of Culture, Media and Sport. (2016). Taking Part: The Next Five Years. London: DCMS. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/511407/The_Future_of_Taking_Part_-_ FINAL_29032016.pdf. Gilberton, J., & Wilson, I. (2009). Measuring Participation at a Local Level: Be Careful What You Wish for! People, Place & Policy Online, 3(2), 78–91. Gilmore, A. (2014). Evaluating Legacies: Research, Evidence and the Regional Impact of the Cultural Olympiad. Cultural Trends, 23(1), 29–41. Hanberger, A. (2006, October 4–6). Evaluation and Democratic Accountability. Paper presented at the UK Evaluation Society and the European Evaluation Society Joint Conference in London. http://www.jus.umu.se/digitalAssets/66/66091_evaluation-and-democratic-accountability—ees-london-06-. pdf. Accessed 19 Dec 2017. Hesmondhalgh, D., Oakley, K., Lee, D., & Nisbett, M. (2016). Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holden, J. (2004). Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government, Policy. London: Demos. Jancovich, L. (2015). The Participation Myth. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(1), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1027698. Lapsley, I. (2009). New Public Management: Cruellest Invention of the Human Spirit? Abacus, 45(1), 1–21. Law, J. (2009). Seeing Like a Survey. Cultural Sociology, 3(2), 239–256. Law, J., Ruppert, E., & Savage, M. (2011). The Double Social Life of Methods (CRESC Working Paper Series, No. 95). Milton Keynes: CRESC, Open University. Leguina, A., & Miles, A. (2017). Fields of Participation and Lifestyle in England: Revealing the Regional Dimension from a Reanalysis of the Taking Part Survey Using Multiple Factor Analysis. Cultural Trends, 26(1), 4–17.

210  C. BUNTING ET AL. Mason, J. (2006). Mixing Methods in a Qualitatively-Driven Way. Qualitative Research, 6(1), 9–25. Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday Participation and Cultural Value. Cultural Trends, 25(1), 151–157. Miles, A., & Sullivan, A. (2012). Understanding Taste and Participation in Culture and Sport: Mixing Methods, Reordering Knowledges. Cultural Trends, 21(4), 311–324. Panchamia, N., & Thomas, P. (2014). Civil Service Reform in the Real World: Patterns of Success in UK Civil Service Reform. London: Institute for Government. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/. Parkhurst, J. (2017). The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence. Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy. Abingdon: Routledge. Reddern, G. (2015). Culture, Value and Commensuration: The Knowledge Politics of Indicators. In L. MacDowall, M. Badham, E. Blomkamp, & K. Dunphy (Eds.), Making Culture Count: The Politics of Cultural Measurement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, N., & King, P. (1991). Policy Entrepreneurs: Their Activity Structure and Function in the Policy Process. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 1(2), 147–175. Savage, M. (2010). Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940: The Politics of Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Selwood, S. (2010). Making a Difference: The Cultural Impact of Museums. London: NMDC. Simon, H. (1972). Theories of Bounded Rationality. In C. B. McGuire & R. Radner (Eds.), Decision and Organization. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co. Stevenson, D. (2013). What’s the Problem Again? The Problematisation of Cultural Participation in Scottish Cultural Policy. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 77–85. Taylor, M. (2016). Nonparticipation or Different Styles of Participation? Alternative Interpretations from Taking Part. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 169–181. Walmsley, B. (2012). Towards a Balanced Scorecard: A Critical Analysis of the Culture and Sport Evidence (CASE) Programme. Cultural Trends, 21(4), 325–334.

CHAPTER 9

An Afterword Peter Stark

My brief from the editors is to reflect on why a collection of essays concerned with history in, and the history of, our work with the arts and culture in society might be relevant to contemporary policy issues in that field. I am asked to do so from my now nearly 50 years of professional practice. I’ve chosen three stories from that career triggered by the collected essays: One local and regional, one national and one international.

9.1   Local and Regional—Peoples’ Theatre My local example references James’s thoughtful piece on the history of the Peterborough Natural History and Field Club (and Museum), Gilmore and Doyle’s essay on the Salford and Manchester Parks and the role of such long-lived institutions in the warp and weft of the civic and cultural life of ‘places’. I grew up in Heaton in Newcastle, and in 1963, at the age of 16 I joined the Young People’s Theatre based in a converted cinema at the bottom of my road. By two years later, I had read Stanislavski, struggled with Grotowski exercises, debated Brecht texts and performed in a play P. Stark (*)  GPS Culture, Gateshead, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9_9

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written by a fellow member that was broadcast (in full) by the, then new, Tyne Tees Commercial TV channel. I assumed that such opportunities were available locally around the country to any young person with an interest, some talent and a willingness to commit. When I went to University in Leeds, I realised how unique my opportunity had been. I needed to know more. People’s Theatre was founded in 1911 as the Clarion Dramatic Society, an avowedly and openly political company, to raise funds for the British Socialist Party. It was visited and praised by the playwright and critic Bernard Shaw in 1921 and by the novelist J.B. Priestley during his English Journeys in 1933. The core founders of the Youth Theatre in 1963 who taught and mentored me had been members of Joan Littlewood’s seminal Theatre Workshop Company at Stratford in the East End of London in the 1950s but had returned or moved north. Unbeknownst, I had been in illustrious, as well as inspiring, company. When I returned to the North East in 1984 as Director of Northern Arts, one of the conundrums of the post was to understand the difficulty that the Tyne and Wear Theatre Company (now Northern Stage) had had since its foundation in establishing itself with the region’s core theatre audience. Part of the answer to that lay in the particular ‘ownership’ that that audience (and Newcastle City Council) felt for the Theatre Royal (massively reinforced by the annual visit of the RSC, previewing their complete season before it opened in Stratford). Another part of the answer lay in the commitment to the work of Live Theatre and its stable of new writers and performers from the region. A more ‘traditional rep’ should have been able to locate its seasons of work between these two but—still in the 1980s—for many that loyalty slot was filled by ‘The Peoples’ with a programme of plays often more interesting (and with larger casts) than could be risked by the Tyne and Wear company from its base at the University Theatre in Newcastle. The net sums available to professional ‘repertory’ companies to fund productions after the costs of maintaining buildings and core staff during the 1980s and 1990s were far smaller than has generally been appreciated.

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9.2  National—Taking Part Nationally, my example is triggered by the essay on Taking Part research methodology by Bunting, Gilmore and Miles in the overall context of this unusual interaction at the national level between policies for sport and the arts. In 1984, I met with Bill Saunders, then an eminence grise of sports policy in the North East. I sought his advice on my plans to revive the centrality of the relationship with local government that had led to the foundation of the North East Association for the Arts in 1961. He told me that immediately after the war he had been one of a small group of what we might now call ‘Sports Development Officers’ working for the Central Council for Physical Recreation and beginning to deliver programmes around the country. He recounted the group being carpeted by the formidable Director Phyllis Colson in late 1946 and told that (from my notes at the time). If we are going to ensure that people throughout this country have opportunities and inspiration to improve their health through participation in sport and physical activity then there are two lessons we will follow rigorously from now on. First, no local authority ever makes a mistake and secondly we (the CCPR) never achieves anything.

In short, the national role was to support and to facilitate but to always ensure that the credit for achievements went to those in the long-term front line of delivery. The same planning impetus, to offer local opportunities to participate in and enjoy the arts, had been present in the work of CEMA through such initiatives as the Music Travellers during the war. By 1946, ACGB had prepared a booklet and travelling exhibition ‘Plans for an Arts Centre’ designed to encourage local government to provide local infrastructure to sustain that objective. Keynes, however, wrote to his Secretary General, Mary Glasgow, ‘Who on earth foisted this rubbish on us?’. The project was stillborn, and by 1951, ‘Few but Roses’ was endorsed as Council policy. In short, the national role would be to support ‘the few’ professional companies that were judged to be of exemplary standard with no role for

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the promotion of creative participation by ‘the many’. By 1956, the last vestiges of an ability to engage with local government across the country disappeared with the closure of the Council’s regional offices.

9.3  International: The Swallows Partnership My last example was triggered by the reflection on the collection as a whole and Belfiore’s otherwise splendidly concise and insightful contribution in particular. It seems that our historical reference base for cultural policy in the UK is still stubbornly parochial. This despite the periods we often reference—say experiment in the 1960s and 1970s or the debates between cultural democracy (crudely Community Arts here) and the democratisation of culture (equally crudely ‘education and outreach’ work of larger funded cultural organisations) being profoundly informed by international practice and theory. I have in mind the visiting experimental practitioners from America and Europe in the case of Experiment and the work of the Council of Europe in the 1970s on animation socio-culturelle in the case of participation. In this, we fail to give due weight to both the importance of what is currently happening culturally in other countries and we fail to heed L.P. Hartley’s warning from The Go Between that ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. My last example is of an occasion when both failures on my part combined into a painful but necessary lesson. I lived and worked in South Africa for 12 years from 2000 first in Johannesburg and then in the Eastern Cape where I became aware of extraordinary cultural resonances between the reality of Ubuntu—the social definition of self, ‘I am because we are’—in Xhosa culture and the deep and long communitarian roots of so much of the ‘everyday’ cultural life of the communities of the North East. My Xhosa colleagues were entering a new world after Apartheid with their own historical and distinct cultural roots substantially intact. I decided to found The Swallows Partnership between the North East and Eastern Cape to support the exchange of artists and cultural policy developers and implementers. In order to do so, I needed the support of The Honourable Noxolo Abraham-Ntantiso, the political head of Provincial Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture. Making the ‘case’ over dinner, my presentation was halted by Noxolo who addressed the table.

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That’s fine Peter. You’ve convinced me. However, I wish to stress that until the Premier has signed a formal agreement we reserve, absolutely, the right to withdraw from the process. After all, Peter, we have very little reason to trust the British

I remember the visceral shock of that statement and a sense that a door was opening—albeit under my feet—to new understanding of my Xhosa friends. I had been confronted with the double reality of the past as another country, in another country. My thinking about South Africa’s past had—conveniently—been limited to the Apartheid years. The far longer history of the Empire in Africa had been written off as a closed book during which there had been some minor ‘Frontier Wars’. I discovered that these nine wars fought by the Xhosa against the British between 1779 and 1879 and called by them ‘The 100 year Wars of Dispossession’ were only the ‘hard end’ of a process of lies, deceit and manipulation through which the Xhosa were driven back to what became the Bantustans of Apartheid only much later. The knowledge of that long history and the lessons learnt from it were alive in Xhosa culture. The Battle of Grahamstown in 1819 was central to this history. On April 22 that year, the Xhosa prophet Makana led an unsuccessful attack by 6000 warriors on the British garrison resulting in over 1000 warrior deaths. The site of the battle is still referred to in isiXhosa as Egazini— the place of blood. Later, during the visit to Gateshead by Premiere Nosimo Balindlela to sign the official Swallows Partnership MoU, the Xhosa performer, writer and director Monde Wani made a further connection. During a presentation on the history of the North East by Dr. Bill Lancaster which included a slide of the 1819 Keelmans’ strike on the Tyne showing ‘red-coat’ soldiers stationed on each keel going down the river. Monde pointed to the slide and to the soldiers. He said, ‘It’s the same people’ (Fig. 9.1). Suddenly, the partnership had new depth and nuance in the recognition of the power of the State brought to bear on its own people as well as—on the other side of the world—on those it sought to conquer and colonise. It also produced a new perspective on the extraordinary man who was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Until Mandela was 16 years old, he had been brought up at Mvezo and Qunu with the stories of elders who could have fought in the ninth

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Fig. 9.1  Image from Eneas Mackenzie’s historical account of Newcastle published in 1827 (Eneas Mackenzie’s ‘Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne’ was published in 1827 by Mackenzie and Dent, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A copy of the work is available in the Local Studies Collection at Newcastle Central Library, from whose copy this image has been extracted)

and last of the 100 years wars and whose family histories would have been as infused with their consequences as ours are by those of the two world wars. Bill Lancaster and I asked who the first representatives of the British would have been that Mandela met as a young man? Rolihlahla’s mother converted to Methodism and the young ‘Nelson’ (he was given that name at school) was taken to Wesleyan Methodist Mission Schools at Clarkebury and then at Healdtown. Bill’s research linked the origins of Eastern Cape Methodism to two nineteenth-century missionaries from the North East: John Watson from Ireshopeburn, County Durham and William Shaw from North Yorkshire. The possible connections between Northern Methodism with its emphasis upon mutuality and inclusiveness and the philosophy of ubuntu are there but—beyond them—is it possible that the ‘cultures within which Mandela grew’ also had elements of the political

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radicalism alongside their interpretation of the Christian gospel that was so often found within the Methodist churches of the North of England?

9.4   ….and an Afterthought During the eight-year life of the Swallows Partnership, over 1000 journeys in both directions by artists and public servants and politicians from both countries were made. Briefings before travel and during residencies were informed as much by history as they were by the contemporary situation. Our aim was that those who travelled could become—as the migrating swallows are—‘visitors and at home’ in each other’s communities. My conclusion from that experience is that whenever we travel we owe it to ourselves—and more particularly to those we will visit—to ensure that in addition to whatever guide books and guides we have to understand the present in the new ‘place’, we should also and always secure a historian and a history book or two as guides to the ‘other country’ that is the past of that place. In fact, come to think of it, that might be rather good practice to apply to the place we call home as well.

Index

A Abrams, M.H., 31 Access, 5, 6, 28, 32, 67–70, 78, 79, 81, 85, 89, 100, 105, 111, 112, 122, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138, 144, 147, 148, 154, 159, 185, 188 Accountability, 9, 185, 186, 189, 193, 203, 205, 207 Active People, 154, 191, 196 Actor network theory, 184 1949 Act, The, 112, 114 Adult education, 71–74, 76, 82, 87, 166, 168 Alberti, Samuel, 48, 55, 62 Amin, Ash, 155 Anderson, Benedict, 33 Angel of the North, 171 Arnold, Matthew, 6, 46, 54–56, 62 Art for the People, 75 Arts and humanities, 3, 10, 11 Arts and Sport Policy Action Team (PAT10), 159

Arts Council, 56, 63, 69, 71, 81, 82, 84–87, 89, 90, 160–163, 172, 173, 176, 192–194, 196, 197, 201 Arts Council England (ACE), 3, 44, 63, 80, 90, 108, 154, 160, 161, 177, 187, 190 Arts Council of Great Britain, 6, 71, 78 Arts education, 73 Arts funding, 5, 68, 71, 86, 90, 91, 100, 102, 121, 162 Arts sector, 63, 101 Arts Treasures Exhibition, 133 Australia, 97, 100–103 Australia Council for the Arts, 100 B Badgerland: A Dartmoor Comedy, 99, 108, 115–119, 121 Badgers, The, 99, 105, 106, 116 Balindlela, Nosimo, 215

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 E. Belfiore and L. Gibson (eds.), Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance, New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55027-9

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220  Index Baltic Art Gallery, 163 Baltimore, 172 Beeson, Mark, 99, 105–107, 109, 110, 113–116, 122 Behaviour, 23, 54, 55, 61, 62, 106, 130, 135, 137–140, 146 Belfiore, E., 6, 9, 11, 17, 20, 21, 69, 71, 73, 84, 89, 91, 92, 101, 102, 122, 155, 185, 187, 204, 214 Bennett, O., 6, 7, 11, 20, 21, 27, 28, 56, 139, 187 Bennett, Tony, 21, 70 Bentham, Jeremy, 22, 23 Bentley, J.F., 47 Bevan, G., 194, 206 Bhabha, Homi, 33 Bianchini, Franco, 28, 153 Blair, Tony, 155, 157 Board of Education, 81, 82 Bodger, John William, 47, 49–53, 57, 64 Bourdieu, P., 18, 21, 27, 31, 68, 121 Britain, 18, 29, 31, 33, 56, 57, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 88, 89, 101, 132, 136, 142, 158 British Federation of Music Festivals, 75, 76 British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE), 75, 77 British Socialist Party, 212 Burnett Tylor, Edward, 54–56 Butler, Judith, 19, 20, 37 Butler, R.A., 83 C Cairney, P., 187, 206 Capital of Culture, 90, 172 Carnegie Trust, 75 Chang, Dongshin, 35 Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountability (CIPFA), 188

Cheetham Park, 129, 134 Chinese Festival riots, 33 Chinese Festival, The, 33 Chinese Festival theatre riots of 1755, 5, 19 Citizenship, 72, 73 Civic engagement, 4, 26, 27, 145 Civic identity, 130 Club & Institute Union (CIU), 166 Cohen, Anthony, 103 Colley, Linda, 33 Collier, Jeremy, 22–24 Colway Theatre Trust (CTT), 106, 107, 109, 110 Community arts, 69, 75, 86, 97–103, 105, 109, 115, 122, 156, 169, 170 Community Arts Panel of Northern Arts, 169 Community theatre, 97–99, 103, 105, 106, 108–110, 114, 120 Conservative, 110, 157, 172, 185, 203, 207 Cornwall, 98 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), 6, 68, 70, 71, 74–77, 79–83, 85–88, 90, 213 Council of Europe, 206, 214 Creative economy, 2, 3, 159 Cultural authority, 56, 71, 84, 85, 89–91 Cultural capital, 18, 21, 27, 28, 31, 32, 35, 85, 89, 174 Cultural democracy, 7, 69, 70, 82, 89–91, 100, 104, 105, 122, 185, 214 Cultural development, 8, 10, 69, 97, 98, 108, 153, 156, 157, 163, 165, 170, 172, 174, 175 Cultural ecosystems, 2, 8, 177 Cultural exchange, 63

Index

Cultural indicators, 184, 185 Cultural intermediation, 141 Cultural knowledge production, 184 Cultural legitimacy, 18, 27 Cultural management, 153, 160, 162 Cultural participation, 2–5, 9, 10, 17–33, 35–37, 43, 45, 46, 58, 63, 67, 68, 70, 72, 77, 80–82, 90, 99, 100, 146, 148, 154, 156, 165, 177, 183–188, 197, 198, 207, 208 Cultural planners, 153 Cultural policy(ies), 1–11, 17, 20, 22, 26–28, 32, 36, 37, 45, 46, 56, 62–64, 67–74, 76, 82, 88–91, 101, 102, 121, 122, 129, 130, 146, 147, 153, 155–160, 162, 163, 168, 172, 177, 184–188, 204, 214 Cultural policy studies, 17, 97, 101, 156, 177, 184, 187 Cultural practice(s), 6, 9, 17, 21, 45, 48, 49, 54, 55, 62, 64, 69, 84, 98–100, 104, 115, 120–122, 156, 163, 165, 168, 174–177 Cultural production, 22, 57, 58, 70, 71, 76, 82, 100, 109, 132 Cultural resource, 2, 154 Cultural sociology, 9, 184, 187 Cultural sphere, 27, 68, 122 Cultural value, 2–5, 7, 10, 11, 20–22, 24, 26, 46, 53, 54, 57, 62, 64, 71, 76, 79, 84, 90–92, 177, 187 Culture, 2, 5–8, 11, 17–22, 26–33, 36, 37, 46, 48, 50–59, 62, 68–72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84–86, 88–90, 98, 101–105, 107, 112, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 139–141, 146–148, 153–156, 159, 162–164, 166, 172–176, 184–189, 192, 193, 195–200, 202–206, 211, 214, 215

  221

Culture and Sport Evidence programme (CASE), 185, 202, 205 Culture-led regeneration, 8, 10, 155, 159, 162 Culture White Paper, 17 D Dack, Charles, 50–53, 61 Daisi, 108 Dartmoor, 2, 6, 7, 98, 99, 105–121 Dartmoor Sustainable Development Fund, 108 Davies, Walford, 76 Dean, Basil, 77 De Certeau, Michel, 146 Delanty, Gerard, 103 Democracy, 32, 36, 37, 72, 78, 105, 114 Democratisation of culture, 69, 70, 214 Dennis, John, 5, 19, 22–27, 36 Departmental Service Objectives, 186 Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 68, 157, 159–161, 183–187, 189–192, 194–196, 198, 200, 204, 207 Department of Environment, 172 Department of Health, 191, 197 Development, 2–9, 46, 68–72, 74, 75, 79, 85, 88, 91, 101, 102, 108, 109, 111, 115, 118–120, 135, 138, 140, 146, 148, 153, 155, 156, 161, 163–165, 168, 170, 172, 174–176, 183, 184, 187–191, 204, 205, 207 Devon, 98, 109, 117 Dickens, Charles, 139 DiMaggio, Paul, 31 Diversity, 22, 35, 37, 48, 70, 100, 122, 193

222  Index E East Gateshead Partnership, 172 East Midlands, 58 Ebrey, J., 2, 9, 46 Ed Miliband, 56 Education, 11, 48, 62, 71–75, 130, 143, 145, 146, 166, 168, 169, 214 Engagement, 3–6, 18, 20, 24–26, 28, 33, 44, 45, 63, 68, 71, 72, 77, 87, 89, 107, 109, 111, 141, 148, 154, 166, 168, 173, 174, 188, 190, 194, 195, 202, 205 England, 2, 3, 6, 10, 19, 63, 77, 81, 98, 106, 107, 112, 129, 130, 141, 154, 156, 157, 162, 165, 168, 171, 173–177, 183, 186, 191, 196, 217 English Heritage, 120, 158, 161, 187, 190–193, 198, 201 Enlightenment, 18, 33, 58 Entertainment, 25, 26, 31, 34, 48, 77, 130, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 195 Entertainment National Service Association (ENSA), 77 Evaluation, 9, 37, 100, 101, 185, 187, 203, 206 Evans, Benjamin Ifor, 71, 75, 77, 80, 83 Everett, J., 113 Everyday creativity, 69, 70, 76, 89, 91 Everyday participation, 3, 7, 43, 46, 68–70, 72, 129, 130, 146, 147, 156, 163, 166, 177 Excellence, 6, 69, 70, 79, 82, 84, 89, 91, 100, 102, 159 F Final Report of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction, The, 72

First World War, 134, 142 Folkworks, 168, 175 Fox, Tom, 134 Frankfurt school, 113 G Garden Festival, 163, 172 Garrick, David, 33–35 Gateshead, 2, 10, 154, 156, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168–175, 177, 215 Gateshead Borough Council, 162, 165, 174 Gateshead Millennium Bridge, 163 Gellner, 33 Gentlemen’s Societies, 54, 58–62, 64 Georgian, 58 Geraldine Ling, 169 Giffard, Henry, 29 Gill, George, 174 Gilmore, A., 7–10, 46, 90, 147, 148, 154, 204, 211, 213 Glasgow, Mary, 71, 72, 75–77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 213 Goldsworthy, Andy, 171 Government, 7–9, 17, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 53, 63, 81, 98, 100, 102, 103, 106, 112, 118, 121, 131, 132, 138, 146, 154, 155, 157–159, 165, 169, 172, 176, 185–187, 189–191, 196, 204, 205 Gray, Clive, 18, 21, 22, 63, 148 Greeves, Tom, 99, 112–114, 122 H Habermas, J., 18, 19, 113 Harris, Richard, 171 Health, 78, 130, 131, 134, 141, 147, 148, 191, 197, 205

Index

Heritage, 3, 86, 112–115, 118, 148, 158, 174, 191, 192, 196, 198, 203, 205, 207 Heritage Lottery, 108 Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), 147, 148, 158 Hewison, Robert, 18, 20–22, 113, 160, 161 Hewitt, Peter, 160, 161 Historic England, 187 History, 4, 6, 7, 10, 19, 22, 27, 36, 43, 46, 49, 52–55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 69–72, 74, 80, 88, 91, 98, 99, 107, 109, 110, 119, 120, 146, 156, 165, 166, 170, 175, 184, 185, 211, 215, 217 HLF Young Roots, 108 HM Treasury, 20, 195, 197 Hodge, Margaret, 161 Hood, C., 194, 206 Hopkins, Gerard, 87, 88 Horsfall, Thomas, 144 House of Commons Select Committee, 131 Hutchison, Robert, 69, 74, 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 90 I Identity, 33, 51, 53, 54, 57, 64, 102, 103, 110, 160, 162, 168, 175 Inclusion, 17, 53, 64, 70, 86, 98, 102, 155, 158, 198 Industrial Revolution, 57, 130 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR North), 176 J Jamal, T.B., 113 James II, 24 Jellicoe, Ann, 99, 106, 107

  223

Jevons, William, 140 Johnson, Maurice, 58–60, 62 Jones, Thomas, 75, 76, 82 Joshua Major, 132, 138, 146 Joyce, Patrick, 135, 136 K Kelly, Owen, 70, 86, 98, 102–104 Kershaw, Baz, 37, 97, 99, 103, 107–110 Keynes, Maynard, 56, 82, 83, 213 King George II, 29, 34 Knell, Simon, 52 L Labour, 17, 74, 103, 131, 158, 165, 187, 200, 203 Labour Party, 155, 157 Lancaster, Bill, 215, 216 Landry, Charles, 153, 159 Landstone, Charles, 77, 80, 81 Law, John, 21, 187 League for Audiences, 77 Legitimacy, 23, 27, 29, 32, 37, 68, 176 ‘Legitimate’ culture, 29–31, 36, 68, 77, 84 Leisure policy, 163 Leisure studies, 3 Les Elton, 174 Liberal Democrat, 185, 203 Libraries and museums, 7, 72, 73, 139, 146 Licensing Act in 1737, 27 Liverpool, 156 Local Arts Development Agency (LADA), 168, 170 Local authorities, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 160, 162, 163, 166–171, 173, 191, 193, 203, 206, 213

224  Index Local communities, 30, 53, 64, 114, 147, 155 Local governance, 130, 165 Local government, 63, 131, 135, 146, 147, 154, 159, 160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 173, 188, 189, 193, 213, 214 Loggie, George, 175 London, 29–31, 35, 52, 58–60, 62, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 106, 116– 118, 131, 140, 160, 162, 165, 176, 177, 212 London Brick Company, 52 Lord Chamberlain, 30 Lord Chris Smith, 56 M Manchester, 2, 7, 129–136, 138–148, 211 Manchester Corporation, 131, 134 Manchester Guardian, 131, 138, 139, 141–144 Manchester Plan, 135 Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla, 215, 216 Marginalised identity, 115, 120 Maruyama, Masao, 20 Mass culture, 77–79, 101, 122 Matarasso, F., 69, 99, 101 McConachie, Bruce, 103, 110 McGuigan, Jim, 19, 32 McPherson, Heather, 35 Measured participation, 185 Measurement culture, 189 Medium Fair, 109 MED Theatre, 6, 99, 105, 107–111, 114, 115, 120, 121 Merli, P., 98, 101, 102 Merseyside, 162 Miles, A., 2, 3, 9, 10, 29, 45, 46, 68, 69, 154–156, 166, 177, 206, 208, 213

Minihan, J., 52, 53, 75, 85 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), 106, 116 Moor Than Meets The Eye Landscape Partnership, 108 Moral behaviour, 135 Moral improvement, 54, 148 Morality, 22, 23, 130, 146 Moral value, 26 Mouffe, Chantal, 32, 37 Museum Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), 158, 187, 190, 193–195, 198 Museums, 3, 11, 47, 49–54, 59–62, 139, 144, 145, 147, 158, 190, 211 Museums and Gymnasiums Act of 1891, 52 Museum Society, 43, 46, 47, 52, 53, 57, 58, 62–64 Myerscough, J., 20 Myrone, M., 53 N Narrative accounts, 184 National Audit Office, 190, 197 National Council of Social Service, 75, 76 National Garden Festival, 172 National Lottery, 158, 163 National Park, 6, 99, 105, 106, 109, 111–114, 118–121 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, The, 112, 114 National Survey of Culture Leisure and Sport, The, 186 Natural history, 47, 53, 57, 60 Naylor, Simon, 48 Neo-liberalism, 148, 155 Neve, Timothy, 58, 59 Newcastle upon Tyne, 162, 173

Index

New Labour, 84, 101, 102, 155, 157–159, 161, 184, 187, 189, 192, 204, 206 New Public Management (NPM), 21, 155, 187, 204 Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs), 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193–197, 200, 202, 205, 207 Norman Cross, 50, 51 North East Association for the Arts, 213 Northern Arts, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 173–175, 212 Noverre, Jean-George, 33 O Oakley, K., 28 O’Brien, D., 21, 23, 28, 90, 156 Office of National Statistics (ONS), 188 Old Vic, 81 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 133 P Paris, 131 Parks, 7, 46, 117, 129–135, 138–148, 153 Parks Committee, 131, 132, 134, 140–145 Participation, 1–9, 11, 17, 22, 23, 26–29, 31–33, 35–37, 44–46, 49, 63, 68, 69, 71, 75, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89–91, 100–102, 104, 107, 110, 121, 130, 139, 140, 145, 147, 148, 154, 155, 161, 166, 168, 174, 176, 177, 184–186, 189–196, 198–208, 213, 214 Participation in culture and sport, 186, 189, 195, 202

  225

Participation myth, 186 Participation rates, 186, 200, 201, 203, 205 Peel, Robert, 132 Peel Park, 129, 132, 135–137, 142–144 Performance, 7, 29–31, 34–36, 73, 78–80, 83, 97, 99, 106–111, 113, 140–142, 147, 185, 188, 189, 191, 194, 201, 202 Performance management, 183–185, 188, 189, 191–197, 202–206, 208 Peterborough, 2, 43–55, 57–62, 64 Peterborough Minute Books, 61 Peterborough Museum, 6, 46, 47, 51 Peterborough Natural History and Field Club, 6, 46, 61, 211 Peterborough Natural History Society, 6, 46, 51, 61 Peterborough School of Science, Art and Technology, 51 Peterborough Town Council, 52 Pettigrew, William, 140–142, 146 Phillips Park, 129, 132, 133 Pilgrim Players, The, 81 Pilgrim Trust, 75, 76 Place-making, 2, 8 Plato, 23 Policy development, 10, 184, 197, 203 Policy making, 184, 185, 187, 206, 207 Porsz, Chris, 43–46, 63, 64 Prescott, John, 157 Professionalism, 70 Public Art Programme, 163, 170–173 Public arts subsidy, 121 Public body, 71, 139, 146 Public municipal parks, 132 Public parks, 7, 129, 130, 134, 138, 141, 142, 146

226  Index Public Service Agreements (PSAs), 186, 189, 190, 193–195, 200–203, 205, 207 Public space regulation, 135 Public subsidy, 17, 18, 20, 22, 29, 90 Public Walks and Open Places, 131 Q Queen’s Park, 129, 133, 138, 144, 145 R Reasonable passion, 27, 36 Regional Arts Association, 162 Regional Arts Boards (RAB), 160– 162, 176 Regional Cultural Consortia (RCC), 158–160 Regional Development Agency, 172 Regional Government Offices, 158 Regional Policy Commission, 157 1919 Report, The, 72–75, 87 Rigby, Ros, 168, 169, 173, 175 River Tyne, 162, 172 Robinson, Gerry, 160, 161 Romantic, 53, 56, 57, 63, 111, 130, 133 Romanticism, 57 Rose, Gillian, 103, 105, 115 Rose, Nicolas, 98, 155 Royal Society, 60 Ryley, S.W., 30 S Sage Music Centre, 163 Salford, 2, 7, 46, 129, 132, 134, 138, 143, 147, 148, 211 Salford Parks Committee, 132, 135, 136, 138, 142, 144

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, 56, 158 Selwood, Sara, 20, 28, 172, 187 Sennett, R., 18, 19, 131 Shelton Trust, 98, 102, 104 Shiner, L., 31 Simon, Herbert, 206 Smith, Chris, 56, 158, 159, 161 Social capital, 21, 86 Social Exclusion Unit, 159 Social history, 43, 50, 64 Social impact, 98, 101, 121 Social improvement, 146, 148 Social mobility, 21, 32 Society, 3, 6, 17–19, 23, 28, 35, 46–62, 71–73, 84–87, 98, 100, 121, 131, 133, 155, 158, 211 Sophie de Konshena, 144 South Kensington Museum, 51 Spalding, 58–61 Spatialisation, 153 Sport England, 154, 161, 188, 190–198, 201 Stage Licensing Act of 1737, 5, 19, 29 Standing Committee for National Parks, the, 112 Stark, Peter, 10, 74, 83, 162–164, 172, 173, 175, 176, 211 Surveillance, 138, 139, 143 Sustainability, 8 Swallows Partnership, The, 214, 215, 217 T Taking Part, 9, 43, 54, 141, 154, 184–188 Taking Part Survey, 9, 183, 184, 195, 196, 204 Taste formation, 130 Tate Britain, 53 Thatcher, Margaret, 157

Index

Theatre, 3, 7, 19, 23–27, 29–31, 33, 35, 76, 80, 81, 83–85, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107–110, 119– 121, 131, 140, 193, 197, 212 Them Wifies, 169, 170 Thomas, David, 30 Thompson, E.P., 104 Throsby, David, 8, 26 Town Centre Partnership, 172 Treasury, 26, 79, 189, 190, 197 Tyne and Wear County Council, 169 U Understanding Everyday Participation, 146 ‘Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values’ (UEP), 2, 9, 46, 67, 129, 154 Understanding Everyday Participation (UEP) project, 2, 9–11, 67, 88 UNESCO, 8, 69 United Kingdom, 8, 132, 172 Urbanisation, 130 Urban regeneration, 8 Urban resources, 153 V Vall, Natasha, 164, 173–175 Victorian, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55–57, 62, 63, 139–141 Victorian age, 134

  227

W Walker, Thomas, 47 Walpole, Robert, 29 Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, 3 Watt, David, 98, 102–105, 115 Webb, Sidney, 138, 139 Well-being, 3, 8, 17, 113, 114, 153, 202 Widening participation, 195 Wiles, David, 33 Williams, E.W., 75, 76 Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 87 Williams, Raymond, 5, 57, 69, 86, 104 Wilson, Ednie, 166 Wood, Kingsley, 83 Wordsworth, W., 55–57, 111 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), 166, 168 World Decade for Cultural Development, 8, 69 Y Year of Visual Arts, 173 Young People’s Theatre, 211 Z Zeserson, Katherine, 169, 170, 174, 175