Here’s a paradox: people in other countries envy Britain for having a capital city that is globally dominant, yet some Brits prefer to take potshots at London. This week we saw a classic of the “bash London” genre: a report by the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee which criticised the Arts Council for giving an “unfair” amount of funding per head to the capital.
London’s cultural offerings and creative industries contribute £21 billion to the UK economy, employ almost 400,000 people and are the reason why eight out of 10 tourists visit. As an artist friend from Berlin said to me recently, it’s crazy that a country should complain so loudly about the runaway cultural success of its capital city. Yet provincial politicians peddle the myth that the way to let our other great cities fly higher is to clip London’s wings.
The parliamentary committee’s siren call to “rebalance” funding towards the regions might sound superficially attractive but the practical consequences would be disastrous for everyone. London is a centre of cultural excellence. Its world-beating treasures, be they institutions such as the British Museum, National Gallery or Royal Opera House or cutting-edge contemporary dance, drama or installation art, are for everyone. Slash public funding and inevitably the quality and reach would slip. Do we really want London to lose ground to cities such as New York and Paris, as well as metropolises in rising countries such as China and India?
In any case, when it comes to London versus the regions, funding of the arts is not a zero-sum game. What is not acknowledged in the committee’s report is how growth of the arts in London has helped cities and towns in the rest of the UK; fuelling co-productions, touring, new talent and audiences all around the country. Half the London-based groups funded by the Arts Council do more than 80 per cent of their performances outside London.
For example, the hugely popular giant spider which climbed buildings during Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 was produced by a London-based company, Artichoke, which hasn’t done a show in London for years. The relationship between London and the rest of the country is one of mutual interdependence, not antagonism.
Successful industries tend to cluster around centres of excellence — think Silicon Valley or Hollywood — but their benefits spread out. If we try to allocate money by measuring geographical “fairness” or in pursuit of extraneous social and economic objectives, we’ll probably end up with more disasters such The Public in West Bromwich, built with the best of intentions but lacking creative energy. The arts centre closed after wasting millions of pounds of public money.
Rather than fighting over the biggest slice of pie, we need to make the pie larger — we need more growth, not redistribution. This means support for touring and collaboration, stimulating production through measures such as the Government’s new theatres tax relief, working together to foster the cultural sector in different parts of our country and fiscal devolution for cities so that they can determine priorities intelligently. Above all, it means valuing and nurturing Britain’s greatest cultural resource: London.
Munira Mirza is Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture
