Becoming Awesomestow - profiling investments in cultural assets and creative quarters in British towns and their impact on regeneration

Abstract

The project title was taken from one of the 2013 Reith Lectures that was presented by the artist, Grayson Perry. Perry was talking about the impact of artists and the cultural sector on general regeneration. His term 'Becoming Awesomestow' was applied to the London borough of Walthamstow, from which Perry had just recently moved. “This idea, you know the currency of bohemian-ness…especially in the urban ecology…artists move into the cheap housing and the cheap spaces and they make them...” Perry’s reference was to a phenomenon in urban regeneration, made popular in the 1990s and 2000s [and accounted by Florida, Leadbeater, Markusen and others in the academic literature], whereby run-down, post-industrial areas become inhabited for work and living by artists and creatives and which subsequently take on a bohemian charm or cool and grow in popularity and value and hence becoming ‘Awesomestow’ (a reference to Walthamstow, where Perry had a studio). During the late 1990s and 2000s many UK cities and towns attempted some form of creative industries or cultural quarter initiatives. These often aimed to regenerate town centres, address issues of urban decline, redress some town planning decisions undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s and tackle socio-economic problems (worklessness and participation, skills etc). Cultural assets (threatres, concert halls, galleries etc) were sometimes regarded as catalysts within such initiatives, attracting further investment and creative talent. With relatively predictable budgets and organisational structures, such cultural assets they were also seen as supporting less structured parts of the sector (predominantly small and micro-businesses) at policy level and in the development of sector skills and audiences. the creative and cultural sector became known for its promise of contributing to regeneration. The work of Richard Florida on the 'Creative Class', in particular, was widely adopted into the Economic Development In 2004, DCMS published ‘Culture at the Heart of Regeneration’ . In its introduction, the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell stated that ‘there are many fantastic examples of culture acting as a catalyst to turn round whole communities’ In this project we wanted to see if we can see evidence of this kind of change outside of the main cities and in some small, lesser celebrated towns. Our aim was to use a combination of visual and oral narrative accounts sourced from stakeholders in each town to assemble evidence of ‘Strategic Added Value’ that the formal economic impact assessments often refer to, but do not always fully capture. Our investigations show that while the original visions and masterplans for creating cultural quarters and creative districts in these towns were often idealistic, the new venues have stimulated practical and varied activities and benefits, in keeping with local needs