If we want the middle and north of England to authentically "regenerate", culture must be at the heart of it

One of the A/UK team this week spent a day in Derby, which is readying itself to pitch to be a City of Culture in 2025. The city centre was dotted with Hollywood-Boulevard-style pavement plaques - like the one above - celebrating those who were "made in Derby”. The fact that Florence Nightingale is one of them illustrates the strategy that the Observer noticed in a piece this weekend, where Derby’s historic (and present) engineering/industrial sector could ride on the boost and glamour of a cultural award.

Derby’s region is officially the Midlands, but touches on cities usually regarded as Northern like Manchester and Sheffield. And the whole area sees culture as the centre for their drive for “levelling up”, or devolution, or any of the names for uneven development on these islands, vis a via London and the South East.

This Guardian piece reports on a new study, The Case for Culture: What Northern Culture Needs to Rebuild, Rebalance and Recover, thusly:

Recommendations in a ten-point action plan include devolving funding decisions to a regional level from London; encouraging more strategic partnerships and less competition between different areas; and greater investment in next-generation creative talents…

Prof Katy Shaw, lead writer of the Case for Culture report, said she thought many people were fed up with “hearing about the value of the north only in terms of things like technology or business.

“For the first time what this report is doing is evidencing, not just asserting, why and how culture is possibly the quickest and also the most underused lever for levelling up,” she said.

“We’re sick, really, of hearing how much change is needed in the north to rebalance and rebuild and how we are always at the bottom of the snakes and ladders board.

“The north is really well positioned coming out of the pandemic to think about how we can work on what we are good at – and that includes culture. We can use culture as a catalyst to boost our region and to boost our position in the UK to have genuine levelling up.”

Dan Jarvis, the Labour mayor of South Yorkshire, will be at the launch. He said levelling up had to be more than an economic mission.

“It’s got to be about improving how people feel about the places where they live,” he said. “Culture does this … it adds colours to people’s lives and makes a place somewhere that we want to live, study, work and invest in. No one deserves to live in black and white. There is a real opportunity now to level up the north and culture must be central to that.”

More here. We liked some of the metaphors and language from the report itself:

Northern culture is the coal of the contemporary - a vast seam that runs across the region that underpins wellbeing, placemaking, production and economic growth. Under extreme pressure, it has transformed into something extraordinary with limitless energy and potential.

The power of Northern culture and heritage goes beyond its contribution to the North’s economic recovery. The benefits of arts and culture, heritage and museum sites, parks and gardens, to local communities and health and wellbeing needs to be more widely acknowledged by policy and place makers.
Culture connects us like nothing else and the pandemic has reminded us that place and participation matters now more than ever. The challenge is to preserve what we have and create new culture, as well as ensuring that culture is by all, and for all, going forwards.