Recently Completed Projects
Impact of Regulation on Third Sector Cultural Buildings
In 2008, together with Cultivate and David Lewis I worked on a commissioned research project for emda, examining the risk presented to third sector cultural organisations by the increasingly onerous regime of Government regulation. While we found a wide range of existing and forthcoming regulations which bear on such organisations, our overall conclusion was that the great majority are coping successfully, and many are making sensible use of the wide range of available support. Our report made some recommendations to emda and its partners about how the situation might be improved.
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Advantage Creative Fund is England’s only non-profit-distributing equity investment fund dedicated to support of the creative industries. It operates in the West Midlands region and I have been involved with it since 2000, when it was a pilot scheme. I subsequently worked on raising £6m capital to launch the fund region-wide in 2003, and have recently been working with the Fund to raise a further round of capitalisation to help it grow through to 2015 and beyond.
Arts in the Northamptonshire Local Area Agreement
I am working with Northamptonshire County Council in an ACE-funded pilot programme to seek ways that the arts, and culture more widely, can be more securely embedded in the County Local Area Agreement. We have developed a short-term strategy to address some opportunities for the arts to contribute to output targets already within the LAA. In the mid-term we are establishing a comprehensive data-gathering and analysis system which will produce baseline and longitudinal data to create a robust evidence base for the value of arts activity in pursuit of LAA objectives. This project has the support of the Regional Cultural Observatory, and aims to link with the forthcoming revised CPA framework as it develops.
Cotswold Canals Restoration Project Arts Strategy
Deborah Harrison and I produced for British Waterways the arts strategy for the Cotswold Canals Restoration Project. The strategy will inform the first phase of the restoration from Saul to Stroud. The large concentration of creative practitioners in Stroud and its environs, including artists and designer-makers of international standing, offers a singular opportunity for the canal project to achieve its regeneration, environmental and tourism objectives through the involvement of art in the planning and execution of the scheme.
Blackfriars Gloucester Creative Industries Development
Together with Nicholas Falk of URBED, in my Comedia capacity, I worked on a creative industries development strategy within the major redevelopment area of Gloucester, in particular focusing on the 13th Century Blackfriars priory and the Fleece Hotel, also formerly a monastery. The object was to find a viable future use for these assets as the core of the designated cultural quarter of the regeneration zone lying between the historic docks and the cathedral.
Three Cities Cultural Consortium
In 2004 I was asked by Arts Council East Midlands to write a proposal to the Urban Cultural Programme on behalf of a newly-formed cultural consortium of Derby, Leicester and Nottingham. That bid secured £800,000 for a programme of new commissions and residencies which ran through 2005-06, which I was contracted to evaluate for the Consortium. The programme, Three Cities Create and Connect, managed by ArtReach, also secured ERDF funding to continue into 2008 and I recently completed monitoring and evaluating the outputs of that award.
Wolverhampton Creative Industries Quadrant
The Light House, the media and creative industries centre located in the Chubb Building in Wolverhampton has been a very successful example of cultural contributing to urban regeneration. More recently, the earlier momentum of the surrounding area has weakened, and Comedia was asked, with Marsh Grochowski Architects, to consider ways in which the initiative to create a fully-fledged creative industries quarter might be renewed.
For Arts & Business I did an evaluation of the programme of new visual art commissions promoted by a leading Nottingham law firm in their new building, The Arc. The evaluation involved a survey of the views and attitudes of staff to gain information about the extent to which the project had enhanced the working environment and raised the profile of the practice.
I worked with two separate projects related to literature development in the region, an organisational development review and business planning exercise with the Oundle Festival of Literature, and a review of the future options for the East Midlands Literature Development Officer Network following changes in Arts Council and Local Government policy.
Gloucestershire Creative Industries and Arts
With Comedia, and Deborah Harrison of Silverleaf in Bristol, I led a large-scale study in Gloucestershire in 2005-06. The study embraced two related but distinct briefs, one to establish the scale, character and potential of the creative industries sector in the county, and to produce a development strategy. The study included 1000 telephone interviews and 14 face-to-face case studies, together with analysis of official statistics, which for the first time drew a comprehensive and authoritative picture of the county’s creative sector. The resulting development strategy was adopted by Gloucestershire First, the sub-regional strategic partnership which has prioritised creative industries as a growth sector. The second part of the study was to evaluate the economic and social impact of the subsidised arts in the county. This involved an extensive co-ordinated series of audience and participant surveys, the county’s citizens’ panel and data from 25 subsidised arts organisations both large and small. The study found a wide range of social benefits ranging from jobs and volunteering to individual personal growth and skills development. The modest local authority subsidy to the arts yields a thirty-fold return in the local economy. The reports are accessible from the download page of this site here.
Comedia was contracted to evaluate the programme sponsored by A&B and CABE, and managed by Public Art South West, called PROJECT – engaging artists in the built environment. I led the evaluation over two years and produced the report, which can be downloaded from this site. The PROJECT scheme was intended to examine the impact of involving artists not as artisans to produce artworks for building projects, but as creative thinkers embedded into development teams from the planning stage. The evaluation found that there was a marked impact on the mindset and working practice of the various professions involved, architects, planners, developers, as well as the artists themselves. The reports are accessible from the download page of this site here.
Northamptonshire Creative Industries and Arts Development
François Matarasso and I carried out a two-part piece of work in Northamptonshire in 2005-06. We examined the creative industries sector in the county and provided an extensive source of data profiling the industry in detail to Creative Connections, the county’s sector-specific business support agency, which informed its development strategy and paved the way for the inclusion of creative sector objectives in the LAA. Alongside this, we produced a review of the options for the future of arts development in the county, leading to the concept of a dedicated organisational development programme, Creative Northamptonshire, for which I subsequently wrote a bid to the Arts Council’s Thrive programme.