This time last week, Arts Lancashire and colleagues from across the Lancashire culture sector attended the Convention of The North in Preston, an annual political conference bringing together political, business, community and academic leaders to collaborate on a shared agenda for the North. This year it was hosted at the University of Central Lancashire and at County Hall.
It was brilliant to listen to Helen Jones, Co-Director of LeftCoast, a Creative People & Places project in Blackpool and Lauren Zawadzki Co-Director of Deco Publique in Morecambe and The National Festival of Making in Blackburn participating in the Place, Culture and Devolution panel alongside peers from across the North and representatives from national organisations. Jenny Rutter, Chair of Creative Lancashire and Chief Executive of the British Textile Biennial and the Associate Director of Super Slow Way also presented as part of the Place and Culture Policy Workshop.
Jenny, has kindly shared a copy of her speech with us, in which she addressed leaders of Lancashire County Council, highlighting devolution as ‘an opportunity for radical change’, a chance to ‘invest in your creative and cultural sector’ and calls for them to ‘champion the vision of the creative and culture sector as a way to deliver [their] own‘.
Read on below…
Hi Everyone, I’m Jenny Rutter, and I am here wearing a number of hats today, firstly as Chair of Creative Lancashire the Creative Industry development programme delivered by Lancashire County Council, and in my day job the Chief Executive of the British Textile Biennial and associate director of The Super Slow Way.
It’s great to be here today – in my home town of Preston, at a convention which celebrates the power of ‘northerness’ which is putting culture & place front and center of the agenda! And for anyone who doesn’t know me – don’t be fooled by my accent, I may sound Southern, but my Ancestry DNA test will tell you i’m 88% Lancashire and just a little bit Viking!
Throughout my career which has been in the most part spent in Lancashire and entirely within the Northwest – I have been working in one way or another on cultural regeneration programmes. It’s been a long and winding journey through European Funding highs, to local govt cut back lows – which i’m not going to lie in policy terms at times has felt at best cyclical & repetitive and at worst headbanging against brick walls to make the case for investment into creative industries & culture as a must do and not a nice to have.
It would be easy to be jaded and to look at the propositions presented within the culture and place policy paper as just another set of recycled ideas and to be upfront, I do worry that certain strands could represent a replication of models that have served the South and metropolitan centres well but have left other parts of the North very much behind. However, I do believe that we are at a point in the conversation now, here at this convention, where we have an opportunity to really shift the dial and make some radical moves that can change our collective creative future in the North.
Having worked on 2 enormously successful Arts Council Creative People and Places programmes in Lancashire – Left Coast in Blackpool and The Super Slow Way in East Lancashire, i’m really heartened within the policy paper, to see CPP identified as an exemplar model which we can learn from to deliver our vision for creative and cultural growth in the region.
CPP, whilst absolutely not perfect, has in its over 10 years of existence successfully disrupted and challenged the traditional models of investment in culture and place. The key to its success I think and hats off to the arts council for this – has been to acknowledge and address the deep entrenched inequality within its own investment distribution and to target the places of most need, where previously investment would have been considered risky or unsafe. Having started as an overly optimistic audience development – bums on seats approach – CPP has rightly shifted in focus to become a programme celebrating the inherent & unique cultures within people and places at a hyper local level, putting those communities front and centre of decision making about their own cultural lives. As an action learning approach – CPP empowered the teams delivering the projects to take risks, to experiment, and to discover what truly resonates with their local communities. And the results speak for themselves. A surge in pride in place, in cultural engagement, and in the recognition of these previously overlooked places as vital contributors to our national cultural landscape.
Here in Lancashire CPP investment has been a catalyst for significant growth across the cultural ecology and in the development of compelling authentic visitor destination offers – directly, through my own organisations: British Textile Biennial – an ambitious contemporary art biennial rooted in Lancashire’s unique & globally connected textile heritage story and The Slow Way Linear Park initiative – a significant 20 year regeneration programme, to develop the canal corridor in East Lancashire through community ownership and activation of derelict, unused and ignored buildings and landscapes transforming them into a variety of imaginative uses. But also through partnership working supporting the development of for example the brilliant and vibrant National Festival of Making which transforms Blackburn town centre every year, welcoming over 40,000 visitors and delivering a locally relevant festival that any city or town in the country would be proud to call its flagship cultural offer.
You can learn more about these projects – and more in Creative Lancashire’s publication which I encourage you all to take away with you, which showcases the ambition and potential that exists within our own often overlooked part of the North.
For me the quality of life priority is paramount within the place and culture policy paper as an important way to draw together the strands of place making which are so often delivered in silo’ed programmes, missing out on the amplification opportunities available through connecting cultural, social and environmental justice together – as we are trying to do within the Super Slow Way Linear Park project.
But for me – it’s not the what should we do, more the how we should do it, and crucially where we should start – and by that I mean geographically, which has prompted me to pose some challenges for our wider discussion.
My challenge to you, the leaders and people charged with delivering against the Place & culture policy agenda is to think boldly. To ask: What does true parity like? What are the quality of life standards we should expect for every citizen of the North? Will you take on board the lessons of the Creative People & Places approach and shift focus to those places furthest from achieving an acceptable quality of life for their residents and re-distribute public investment and energy into the places where the private sector isn’t going to pick up the slack.
My challenge to Lancashire County Council is – for too long, culture has been an afterthought, a footnote in your regeneration plans. Devolution presents an opportunity for radical change here. Look at the evidence, the success stories documented in the Creative Lancashire publication, and invest in your creative and cultural sector. Elevate their work. Champion their vision as a way to deliver on your own.
To the Metro Mayors of our neighboring thriving cities I say, in order to build a truly One Creative North you have a responsibility to look beyond your borders, and build better interconnectedness across our region, not just between yourselves but with the places in between who are further behind in their devolution/regeneration journeys, whose contexts are more challenging than yours and to actively play a role in their growth as well as your own. Ultimately the north or the idea of the north, stands or falls not on our most successful places but on our least!