Do Cities of Culture Actually Work?
Plus What's On Feb 15-21
A year-long, city-wide arts festival is tricky to pull off. Bradford 2025 UK City Of Culture follows in the footsteps of Derry 2013, Hull 2017 and Coventry 2021. Established by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in the aftermath of Liverpool’s undoubted triumph as European Capital of Culture 2008, the more limited British version hasn’t been an unqualified success story: Hull is generally agreed to have made a good effort, balancing the books and capturing the popular imagination, whilst Coventry went bankrupt with unpaid debts of £4.25m owed to the City Council and various arts organisations. That’s an awkward legacy for an institution which is supposed to be about legacy.
Nor has Bradford 2025 escaped controversy. A new 3,800 venue, Bradford Live, stands empty in the city centre amidst arguments about lack of funding transparency and escalating costs. With a 10% increase in Council Tax anticipated next year, Bradford residents may be forgiven for querying whether a publicly funded arts extravaganza is what the poverty-stricken city needs.
It doesn’t help that the meta-context for public arts funding in the UK is disintegrating in real time. MF Robbin’s excellent Substack The Value Of Nothing explains the situation in a post, The End Of The Playground. He explores the cynical and politically-motivated incoherence of the local government funding model — in which Westminster makes the cuts and then your local council gets the blame — through the stories of two children’s playgrounds.
And these abandoned playgrounds are in the Home Counties neighbourhood of Central Bedfordshire. If a tough and well-managed rural Tory adminstration is panicking about the cost of its statutory care responsibilities, where does that leave a densely populated Northern economic basketcase with its additional burdens of crime, poverty, congenital disorders and ill-health?
As it happens, I do believe in the power of arts-led regeneration. But it’s a difficult thing to prove or quantify, and many of the ‘outcomes’ in this Local Council Association list of case studies seem a bit fuzzy. Hull’s gradual return to prosperity after a dreadful 50-year hiatus is built on investment into the docks and the city’s emerging importance as a manufacturing centre for green technology.
But nowadays Hull’s historic Old Town is both a chic address and a tourist attraction — which wasn’t true 20 years ago. Foregrounding the city’s neglected maritime heritage is of a piece with the Council’s strategic investment into culture following the genuine public enthusiasm of 2017 — which according to urban legend had Hull City fans yelling: “Yer only here for t’culture,” at the opposing terraces.
If Hull’s image, at its most abject, conjured up images of abandoned fish-factories and the most deprived council estates in the region, Bradford’s is currently worse. You don’t win City of Culture as a succcessful and thriving community; the wards of the metropolitan borough are highly clustered, if not strictly speaking ‘segregated’, between the white-majority population and the 25% that hail from the remote Mirpur District of north-eastern Pakistan.
In the 19th-century Bradford was one of the richest places in the world, and it has some fine Victorian architecture to prove it. The city’s once-prominent Jewish community played a pivotal role in establishing the textile industry which generated this wealth; sadly, the community is now reduced to a few-score individuals. A Jewish colleague, an actor and drama teacher who’d raised his family there, decided after the disastrous 2001 race riots — in which disaffected Pakistani youth played a prominent role — that it was “time to get out”. His phrase haunts me still.
And whilst members of other Asian communities in the UK hurtle towards white status, the young Pakistani Muslims of Bradford remain poor, ghettoised, badly educated and disproportionately convicted of crime.1 With local MP Robbie Moore calling repeatedly for a Bradford-specific rape gangs enquiry, everyone instinctively understands that when the Bradford chapter of the scandal finally blows up, it’s going to leave a smoking hole in the local authority’s reputation that will be visible from space.
With attitudes hardening on both sides of the ethnic divide, it’s easy to feel that Bradford is a city still going in the wrong direction.
In the meantime we have this: Bradford 2025 UK City Of Culture. Resolutely ‘diverse’ and gurgling with happiness about an alleged cultural vibrancy that is at odds with the observable despair.
Bingley
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The metropolitan borough extends far beyond the city proper to encompass mountains, moorland and half a dozen distinctive and seperate Pennine towns. And it was one of these outposts, Bingley on the River Aire, that I visited last weekend to see Grue.
This part of West Yorkshire is a substantial trek from my home on the North Yorkshire-East Riding border. But I didn’t mind because Bingley is on my favourite scenic British railway line — the one that runs from Leeds through Shipley and Saltaire and then over the Pennines to Carlisle near the Scottish border. The town is famous for being the site of the once mighty Bradford & Bingley Building Society, which came to grief during the 2008 financial crisis. “Used to be”, “formerly” and “now defunct” are helpful phrases when describing this region.
Bingley also inspired the name of the second, more easygoing, love interest in Jane Austen’s novel Pride & Prejudice. This suggests the romantic novelist had greater contemporary socio-economic insight than she is given credit for. Unlike the aristocratic Darcys and the landed-but-improvident Bennetts, the nouveau-riche Bingleys were a family of Northern heritage whose fortune came from manufacturing. Austen doesn’t specify, but perhaps they owned one of the early textile mills which span wool into the hard-wearing worsted fabric for which the area is famous.
Some of these cloth manufacturers survive, supplying luxury brands. But mostly they don’t, leading to a general Yorkshire expectation that when an event happens in a mill, it’s likely to be in a converted mill that’s now an arts centre. But in this case, it wasn’t. Damart Mill’s historic chimney and warehouse buildings loom over the rest of the town like Tolkien’s Tower of Barad-Dur. But as the British headquarters of the eponymous French fashion brand its influence is wholly benign; I was told their monthly outlet sales provoke a good-natured pandemonium in the town centre.
Bingley exudes a modest prosperity. The town isn’t Cotswolds-pretty, but it retains a distinctive 18th and 19th-century industrial character. It has rapid transport links with booming Leeds, with Haworth and the Bronte country to the west and the Nidderdale National Landscape to the north. It’s easy to undestand why the town is generally considered a pleasant place to live, despite since 2003 being sundered by the A650 dual carriageway.
Damart Mill’s business isn’t any longer based on worsted, but on advanced technical fabrics. (The company still boasts of the time Princess Diana said she was a fan of their thermal underwear.) Grue is taking place in a disused basement beneath their warehouse and entry is by timed ticket. As I wait for my pre-booked slot I enjoy a coffee and a tiny slice of gluten-free carrot cake in the site’s airy works canteen. It is the nicest works canteen I have ever been in.
About eight of us take the elevator down to Grue, in two batches. My companions for this adventure are two families. In the basement we encounter the entrance to a kind of Santa’s Grotto. But this grotto had been constructed entirely out of recycled paper with cardboard for walls.
The first room is an office. Just a typical, somewhat dreary, site office — but constructed out of origami. A man appears, wearing a woolly bobble hat. He’s a member of the Bingley Historical Society, and he’s here to act as our spirit guide to the mysterious world beyond a hidden portal.
Working to a template developed by paper artist Steve Wintercroft, in association with Scarborough’s community arts company ARCADE, it took a thousand volunteers several weeks to create this magical labyrinth out of stuck and folded paper. After the office, which was just a ruse, a fairies’ grotto gives way to a lagoon, a street of houses, a big, green monster and finally the dragon we’d been warned to watch out for. Though simple in conception it was wholly effective and the small kids were enthralled.
When we came to the end I would have happily gone round again, but instead we were shepherded to the cafe and invited to draw a picture of our experiences. My own effort looked as if it had been scrawled by a five-year-old under the influence of Picasso, Joan Miro and tartrazine. But when the lady displayed it on a washing line with the others I was as proud as punch.
Do I have any criticism? Of the organisation and volunteer effort, none. Of the paper-folding? No, it was beautiful. But maybe of the live performance, which on the day I visited was both confusing and painfully twee.
Because, as with the talking plates at Harewood House over Christmas, installation artists of this type can go to infinite trouble to get the visuals exactly right — and then tack on some crappy words as an afterthought. Or, even worse, think they can rely on improvisations.
Creating stories and dialogue are not off-the-cuff activities. There’s craft involved. Searching for the storyline — or, if you must have one, the moral — for this installation I didn’t find it in weak and fanciful sermonising about believing on your dreams. “And if we all believe together we can make them real like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan”.
I mean yuk. Ick. Even the three-year-olds looked unconvinced.
Instead I find a more honest meaning in how a thousand volunteers devoted several weeks to creating something extraordinary together. In my imagination I see groups of lonely people gathered together round tables on wintry afternoons. Piles of paper and scissors, tea and coffee on the side and the gentle hum of purposeful activity. This hidden aspect of the story could have been better depicted and documented, and much more prominently displayed at the start or finish of the walk-through. For me, at least, that would have added to the installation’s intelligibility and the testimonies might have been joyous.
The kids didn’t care. They were far too young to take issue with a man in a bobble hat telling them (in this age of internet delusion!) that shared wishful thinking is the way forward.
And the paper sculptures were great. The detail on the fairies was breaktaking.
Would I go round again? Absolutely yes, I’d even pay for myself this time, although unfortunately the event is fully booked. But all is not lost. There are rumours that this magical experience will return to Bradford 2025 in some form or other later this year. Grue, Damart Mill, Bingley, to Feb 23, returns only.
What’s On Feb 15-21
Here is a round-up of what I consider to be the most interesting shows happening in Yorkshire and beyond this week. If you click on the provided link you will go straight through to more information about the show.
I’ll start with a sad one. Manchester-based LipService Theatre were a Northern institution. Consisting of comedy duo Sue Ryding and Maggie Fox, they were so joined at the hip I was never quite sure which one was which. Their particular brand of subversive lunacy was to take some revered 19th-century classic novel and subject it to grievious bodily harm. Their version of Wuthering Heights was called Withering Looks, and I can’t think of a literary joke better than that.
Maggie died in 2022, leaving the bereft Sue with a shipping container full of 40-years-worth of stage props from their hilarious shows. From a life-sized stuffed sheep to what she claims are a pair of Charlotte Bronte’s knickers it all has to be got rid of — somehow. Funny Stuff is about letting go — of grief, memories and things. Cast, Doncaster, Feb 18, £15.
In not dissimilar vein, Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act is an acclaimed solo show written by David Stuart Davies in which actor Nigel Miles-Thomas takes on 14 different roles. Haunting as well as funny, it is directed by Gareth Armstrong who does this sort of thing very well. Stephen Joseph Theatre, Feb 15, £18.
Still on the East Coast, OperaUpClose present composer Vaughan Williams’s chamber opera Riders to the Sea with an additional prologue by Michael Betteridge. The rarely-seen piece is based on a play by JM Synge, a close friend of Irish poet WB Yeats who is more famous for A Playboy Of The Western World. Set on the remote Irish Aran Islands, Riders to the Sea isn’t a bundle of laughs but is an intriguing re-interpretation of a canonical Irish work. Godber Studio, Hull Truck Theatre, Feb 21 & 22, £11.50 & £13.50
Lions Of Rotherham
There’s another chance to see writer-director Karen Mulcahey’s extensively researched history play Lions of Rotherham this week. Five local actors tell the story of a group of Rotherham men who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. The play incorporates diaries, oral history interviews and recordings with much of the script taken from the actual words of the men. Karen and Breakout Arts are doing valuable work in a troubled town and deserve your support. Rotherham Civic Theatre, Feb 19, £10 & £17 plus pay what you can.
Yorkshire is blessed with some strong amateur companies. Ilkley Playhouse is a small community theatre led by professional artistic co-directors Yvette Huddleston and Damien O'Keeffe who work to develop the in-house offering. Charley Miles’s Daughterhood, about women’s roles and sibling rivalry, is in a long line of imaginative texts tackled by their resident team. Ilkley Playhouse, Feb 18-22, £5-£10.
York, too, is blessed with riches this week. York Light Opera Company are bringing the award-winning musical comedy Legally Blonde to the Main House stage at York Theatre Royal. Legally Blonde The Musical is a total gas, and the standard of their twice-yearly big productions is always high. To Feb 22, £15-£31.
Meanwhile in the Studio there’s Loot, Joe Orton’s outrageous pitch-dark comedy satirising the Roman Catholic Church and attitudes to death. York Settlement Community Players do the deed. York Theatre Royal, Feb 18-27, £10 & £15 (content advisory).
For Kids
Anything by Lyngo Theatre, really. Marcello Chiarenza and Patrick Lynch have been going for years, quietly creating exquisite shows for teeny-tinies. Why? Just because. This one is Egg & Spoon for ages 1-4. And whilst the adults gasp at the stunning visuals, the little ones are mesmerised by a truthful storyline about an egg, a bird, and the arrival of spring. Everything is geared to their attention spans and understanding. Music by Carlo Cialdo Capelli. Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, Feb 19 & 20, £8 & £10.
Back To Ours
If you want to reach poor people, you can’t expect them to come to you. It has to be the other way round. People who have been deprived for several generations have limited geographical boundaries. The next town or even their own city centre might as well be the moon.
Back To Ours is a community arts organisation that’s been around since 2012 and was given a boost by Hull City of Culture 2017. It uses existing community assets – high streets, schools, community centres, clubs, shopping centres, and pubs — to produce shows that are right on people’s doorsteps. No bus fares, no parking fees, no worrying about whether the poshos are going to give you a hard time because of how you look (poor), or how you’re going to get home.
Middle Child Theatre’s Christmas show Treasure Island returns with a few seasonal updates to tour Archbishop Sentamu Academy, Feb 19, Derringham Bank Church, Feb 20, North Hull Community Centre, Feb 21 and The Pennine Centre, Feb 22. All tickets £3.
Finally, there’s another chance to see actress Tracy-Ann Oberman’s updating of Shakespeare’s most disturbing romantic comedy. The Merchant Of Venice 1936 draws upon family memories of neo-Nazis activity in London’s East End during the 1930s. Hurry, tickets are going fast. Leeds Playhouse, Feb 18-22, £15-£47.50.
That’s it for this week, folks. I’m off out now to see imitating the dog’s All Blood Runs Red, the story of forgotten Afro-American flying ace Eugene Bullard. I’ll report back next week. Leeds Playhouse, to Feb 15, £15-£35.
Liz x
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Qasim, 2021