Impacts of Covid-19 on the cultural sector

The project aimed to deepen understanding of the impacts Covid-19 on cultural organisations, the cultural sector workforce, and audiences. It also explored the implications for how and what policy decisions were made in response to the crisis.

Research findings were shared as they became available so they could inform responses in real time.

This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through UK Research and Innovation’s Covid-19 rapid rolling call.

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Across the arts, culture and heritage (ACH) sectors, organisations face the same challenge: how to effectively communicate their full economic and social impact in ways that are compelling to policymakers when the data available is so often fragmented, incomplete, inconsistent and insufficiently granular.

In 2024, the Centre for Cultural Value, alongside The Audience Agency, MyCake and Culture Commons, embarked on an R&D project to investigate developing a blueprint for a National Cultural Data Observatory, with a view to addressing these issues. Supported by funding from ESRC, the project was intended “to scope and demonstrate where a significant opportunity or gap lies in the data infrastructure landscape”.

The research included consultation with almost 500 sector stakeholders, and a pilot case study working with the evaluation team at Bradford, UK City of Culture 2025, including the development of a live regional demonstrator for the Bradford district.

This new report, Transforming the Cultural and Heritage Sector’s Data Infrastructure, explores why the sector’s current data infrastructure is limiting evidence-based policymaking. It highlights the need for an independent, people-centred approach to managing cultural data on a national scale, alongside a shared data framework that makes it easier to connect and compare datasets. The report also sets out how a National Cultural Data Observatory could connect fragmented datasets and uncover hidden data.

As the project moves into its next phase, the Centre will play a key role in ensuring the National Cultural Data Observatory remains research-led and ethically grounded. Continuing to work with partners across the sector, the Centre will focus on strengthening data practices, developing ethical frameworks and ensuring that the Observatory’s tools, standards and governance structures support more meaningful, people- and place-centred evidence for policy and investment.

Download the report

Discover more about the NCDO project, next steps and sign up to the NCDO manifesto by visiting the dedicated project website.

Image credit: Barnsley Bright Nights. The Dancing Fountain by Alexis Richter. Photo by James Mulkeen.

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Supported by Research England, the programme brings together local authorities, community networks and cultural organisations to develop approaches for understanding cultural vitality rooted in local experience and priorities.

Telling the whole story of a place

Across the cultural sector and local government, there is growing recognition that existing data does not always capture how people experience and value culture in their everyday lives. Cultural Vitality Labs responds to this by putting participatory research and co-production at the core of cultural evidence practice.

Rather than starting with predefined indicators, the programme will start from local knowledge and lived experience, allowing evidence to emerge from the realities of place. The Labs will create practical, locally meaningful ways to understand a place’s cultural vitality, including recognising informal cultural activity and exploring how culture connects to wellbeing, belonging, community resilience and civic life.

Working with local partners

We will be working with local authority, cultural sector and community partners in three local areas:

• Norwich
• London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
• West Yorkshire

The Cultural Vitality Labs will create space for collaboration between local authorities, cultural organisations and communities. Partners will work together to explore what cultural vitality looks like in their area, what kinds of evidence matter to local people and decision-makers and how participatory approaches can surface perspectives often missed by traditional data collection.

While each Lab will be shaped by its local context, all share a commitment to co-production, collective reflection and practical learning. Activities will include mapping local cultural ecologies, co-designing indicators that reflect everyday cultural life and testing creative and participatory research methods. This process will support reflection on how cultural evidence is gathered, interpreted and used, and how it might better support inclusive, place-based decision-making.

Shared learning

Alongside place-specific insights, the programme is designed to generate shared learning, supporting cultural practitioners across the sector to articulate the value of their work in ways that resonate locally, while helping policymakers access richer, more meaningful evidence to inform planning and investment.

Through this programme, the Centre aims to contribute to broader conversations about cultural data and evidence in the UK, offering practical, place-based approaches to understanding what culture means to people and places, and helping shape future national strategy, including the development of the National Cultural Data Observatory.

Want to discover more about cultural vitality and placemaking? Take a look at these resources:

Understanding and measuring cultural vitality in the UK

Developing a cultural indicator suite: Interim report

Research digest: Understanding cultural vitality

Research digest: Culture and placemaking

In Arts Professional: Indicators of cultural vitality: Hope not harm

Image credit: Mafwa Theatre. Flourish. Photo by Tribe Four Films.

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With support from Research England, the Centre for Cultural Value led a national research project to develop the Cultural Indicator Suite, a practical framework for measuring and communicating the everyday cultural vitality of the places we live.

This research responds to growing demand across the UK cultural sector for stronger evidence of cultural value and impact beyond economic growth.

The project included a review of recent UK and international research on cultural vitality and interviews with representatives from Local Authorities across urban, rural and coastal regions. The resulting interim report lays out a practice-relevant vision for how the UK cultural sector can more effectively understand, measure and support cultural vitality.

Read interim report

Junction Arts, Bolsover Children’s Festival

What are the key insights?

The interim report highlights several important findings for cultural policy, research and practice:

• Traditional cultural indicators have overemphasised ‘high culture’ and formal participation, underrepresenting informal, local and community-driven cultural life.
• Cultural vitality should be understood ecologically, not in siloes – recognising the interactions between cultural institutions, community spaces, policy contexts, infrastructure and everyday creativity.
• ‘Resilience’ is an outcome of culturally vital communities. The seven dimensions of cultural vitality outlined in the Cultural Indicator Suite provide a structured way to explore and evidence this relationship.
• There is an urgent need to develop rural cultural vitality measures, address diversity and access gaps and understand the cultural sector’s contributions beyond economic growth, including wellbeing and belonging.

These insights strengthen the case for more inclusive and place-centred approaches to measuring cultural value in the UK.

Junction Arts. Banter and Banner

What are the seven indicators of cultural vitality?

The Cultural Indicator Suite captures the interconnected dimensions of cultural vitality at place level. Together, these indicators provide a framework for measuring and communicating  the holistic, everyday cultural vitality of places, emphasising the impact of culture across  social, civic, economic and wellbeing outcomes.

The seven indicators are:

1. Cultural participation and engagement
2. Cultural infrastructure and accessibility
3. Cultural diversity and inclusivity
4. Creative economy and employment
5. Social and civic engagement
6. Cultural policy and investment
7. Wellbeing and quality of life

Stephen Dobson explains more about the seven indicators in this video from Policy Leeds.

Mafwa Theatre. Family Flourish Day. Photo by Tom Arber

Cultural Indicator Suite

Live at Leeds. University of Leeds.

Cultural Vitality Research Digest

Illuminate Oldham. Photo by Alan Hodgson

Cultural Vitality Labs

Eden Court. Photo by Kieran Eaglesham.

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What is peer research, and why does it matter?

Peer research flips the traditional research model on its head. Instead of researchers asking the questions and interpreting the answers, people with lived experience become the researchers, shaping the questions, choosing the methods and analysing the findings. In the context of projects taking place in school settings, it’s young people who are centred in the research process. This approach to research and evaluation aligns with the Centre for Cultural Value’s Evaluation Principles, valuing insider knowledge and creating space for authentic voices, while also empowering young people through recognition and leadership.

Their research, their words

At Outwood Academy City Fields, a small cohort of Speak Up students volunteered to become “Youth Researchers,” a term they chose to reflect their growing expertise and agency. In bi-weekly, one-hour sessions, the team of Youth Researchers developed research skills, debated youth voice and research rights and designed their own research study.

Rather than sticking to surveys, they opted to explore creative data collection – drawings, Lego models, photography and word associations – giving participants choice and making the process fun and inclusive.

Their choice of research question centred on the theme of courage, with the Youth Researchers agreeing on their own definition for this core concept: self-belief, bravery, confidence, self-expression, self-value.

They developed the imagery of a dandelion, which became their metaphor for growth and ambition. Visualisation became an important part of their approach when explaining the research to peers. Having this clear dandelion metaphor ensured that the Youth Researchers could effectively communicate what they were asking their peers to reflect upon, aiding their description of the research task.

They selected two research methods – photography and drawing – aiming to capture their peers’ reflections on how their courage had grown through participating in the Speak Up programme and where they hoped it would take them in the future. Offering two methods was important to the Youth Researchers, ensuring that participants felt they had a choice and could be confident in how they chose to express themselves:

We chose to offer two methods because we felt this gave participants a choice for how they wanted to be creative. For example, if a student was not confident drawing, being asked to do so could make them feel at a disadvantage – even though we were not judging their art, it could have felt like that.

Following data capture sessions with their peers, the Youth Researchers analysed the data. Findings revealed a clear journey from isolation and low confidence to growth, openness and future aspirations. As one Youth Researcher put it:

I believe that young people’s courage has been improved and will continue to grow.

Taking it a step further, the Youth Researchers also reflected on their own research processes, demonstrating a rigorous and robust approach to evaluation.

Experts in their own right

Between September 2024 and May 2025, the Youth Researchers also acted as consultants for the National Theatre’s own Speak Up survey, which was circulated to all participants across the Speak Up regions.

As consultants, they suggested various changes to the survey’s language and format and offered broader feedback on the survey process. One interesting suggestion was to include open-text boxes alongside multiple-choice questions, prompting respondents to comment on their answers. The Youth Researchers “felt this might help get more information from students”.

The Youth Researchers thought that their peers would have insights to share, and the use of mixed methods to capture both quantitative and qualitative data within the survey proved impactful, with many students choosing to include valuable additional comments that offered further insights into their perspectives.

Platforming peer voices

A significant ambition for Speak Up was to platform the voices of young people, including the work of the Youth Researchers who were invited to present at the National Theatre’s Speak Up: Arts Everywhere Symposium in July 2025.

Together they prepared and delivered a workshop for arts and education sector stakeholders, sharing their experience, the research findings and reflecting on the Youth Researcher programme.

The team of Youth Researchers also shared their presentation with local arts, culture and heritage sector practitioners at an event at the Theatre Royal Wakefield. A live illustrator captured the themes from the discussion, with the final illustration serving as an impactful and engaging way to communicate the project to young people. They were thrilled to see themselves and their work represented in this way.

Why peer research matters for arts and culture

For arts practitioners and cultural organisations, this project serves as a blueprint for co-produced evaluation. It shows that when young people lead, the insights are richer, the language more authentic, and the impact deeper. The Youth Researchers didn’t just collect data; they influenced survey design, presented at national symposia and led interactive workshops for professionals.

Beyond research skills, the Youth Researchers also reported increased confidence, resilience and creativity. They felt heard, valued and proud to contribute to something real. As one student remarked, “making research for everyone is satisfying”.

What can we learn as cultural practitioners?

If you’re working in arts education or cultural engagement, consider how peer research could transform your evaluation practice. It’s not just about gathering feedback. It’s about sharing power, amplifying youth voice and creating space for creativity in research.

Peer research isn’t just an evaluation tool; it’s a way to embed youth voice at the heart of cultural practice. When young people lead, the process becomes more authentic, inclusive and transformative.

If you’re inspired to try peer research, here are some practical steps from our learnings through the Speak Up Youth Researcher project:

1. Start small and voluntary
   Invite a small group of young people who are interested in shaping the project. Voluntary participation ensures genuine engagement. Flexibility around session timings can be beneficial, but regular involvement is key to ensuring development.
   
   
2. Provide training and support
   Begin with sharing basic research skills, such as question design, ethics and consent, with a focus on gradually moving towards facilitation skills. Shift from “teacher” to “guide” as confidence grows.
   
   
3. Co-create the questions
   Let young people decide what matters to them and guide them in defining their terms. Their priorities will often reveal insights adults might overlook.
   
   
4. Use creative methods
   Offer options beyond surveys, such as drawing, building, photography, storytelling and interviews. This makes research accessible and fun.
   
   
5. Share power and credit
   Involve youth researchers in analysis and presentation. Recognise their contributions publicly through events, reports and social media.
   
   
6. Reflect and adapt
   Peer research is iterative. Build in time for reflection and be ready to adapt methods based on feedback.
   

Ava Podgorski is a PGR student supervised by the Centre for Cultural Value (Professor Ben Walmsley and Professor Leila Jancovich) within the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Her PhD explores the issues of evaluation, learning and legacy in relation to Cities of Culture via a case study of Leeds 2023, the city’s dedicated year of culture. Ava’s PhD research is funded by a scholarship from the University’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures. Between March 2024 and December 2025, Ava was a Research Assistant for the University of Leeds’ evaluation of the National Theatre’s Speak Up project. Ava’s professional background is in Arts and Music Education, and she is proud to be a trustee for Mahogany Opera Group.

The National Theatre Speak Up programme ran for four years in 56 schools across 11 areas. The programme invited young people to explore issues important to them by co-creating new artworks with their teachers and local artists. Discover more about Speak Up.

To find out more about evaluation, co-creation and creative methods, take a look at the following resources:

• Evaluation Principles
• How to … co-create an evaluation
• Our essential reads: Evaluation Principles in practice
• Free-to-access online evaluation course: Evaluation for Arts, Culture and Heritage: Principles and Practice

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For decades, audience development has focused on understanding who attends, who engages and how we can broaden or diversify participation. Tools like The Audience Agency’s Audience Spectrum have been indispensable, giving cultural organisations a shared language and robust data on the habits, attitudes and attendance behaviour of UK audiences, drawing on national surveys such as DCMS Taking Part. But this approach primarily captures cultural consumption, not the wider creative ecosystem of cultural participation. Communities are creating culture in ways our current datasets rarely capture.

Research across digital culture, co-creation and community arts consistently highlights the shift toward active cultural participation. Community-led models like Creative People and Places and Fun Palaces show what happens when residents lead cultural decision-making. And studies of inequality in cultural participation reveal how much creative capacity exists in communities that remain excluded from formal cultural spaces.

Audiences increasingly act as co-creators, not passive consumers (Simon 2010; Jenkins & Ito 2015; Edelmann 2022). This shift is particularly marked in digital environments, where people move fluidly between watching, making, remixing, sharing and influencing cultural content. The Audience Agency’s Cultural Participation Monitor also highlights the rapid expansion of livestreaming, digital creation and hybrid participation during and after the pandemic. Yet these forms of creative labour remain largely invisible in traditional audience data. If we’re serious about inclusion, innovation and relevance, we need to understand the full creative lives of the people we seek to engage, not only those who attend, but also those who create.

Changing the way we view culture

This is where the Cultural Vitality framework offers a powerful shift. It encourages us to see culture as a living ecosystem shaped by everyday creativity, social networks, digital platforms and community-led activity, not just by what happens inside traditional cultural venues.

When we overlay a cultural vitality lens onto Audience Spectrum, something exciting happens: audiences start to appear not as passive consumers, but as micro-producers, co-creators and cultural influencers. It reframes familiar audience segments as actors within a cultural ecology, a view strongly supported by Holden’s argument that culture should be understood as an interconnected system of institutions, informal practices, amateur making, digital communities and everyday behaviours (Holden 2015).

Matarasso’s extensive evidence on participatory and community arts reinforces this perspective, showing that people often engage not by attending, but by co-creating, crafting, storytelling and collaborating within social contexts (Matarasso 2019). Meanwhile, O’Brien et al. (2020) demonstrate that marginalised communities, often categorised as “low attending”, are in fact rich in everyday creativity, though often structurally excluded from institutional spaces.

Seeing the creative potential

The cultural vitality lens helps address audience development blind spots by making visible the creative potential otherwise left out of audience development planning. Under a cultural vitality lens, Audience Spectrum segments become not consumer clusters but cultural contributors, for example:

• Up Our Street are often rich in everyday creativity, grass roots culture makers whose DIY arts, music and informal events are a significant part of community cultural participation, even if they rarely appear in box office data.
• Kaleidoscope Creativity communities are hubs of hybrid, intergenerational and diasporic cultural innovation.
• Frontline Families exemplify the democratising potential of digital platforms (Powell 2012; Edelmann 2022), acting as digital amplifiers and ideal partners for co-creation, digital storytelling, sharing, interpreting and recontextualising cultural activity on platforms that influence broader engagement.
• Home and Heritage are keepers of craft skills, place-based stories and analogue cultural practices who can support intergenerational activities and are vital to sustaining place-based cultural ecosystems.
• Experience Seekers are early adopters and co-creators within immersive, XR and participatory formats, becoming both audiences and active contributors.

Taken together, this remix of Audience Spectrum and Cultural Vitality offers a more representative understanding of cultural participation, one that values everyday creativity, digital production and informal, community-led activity alongside institutional forms. In the field of audience development, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

What could audience development look like if we valued audiences as producers?

Taking a cultural vitality approach invites us to:

1. Expand what we measure. Looking beyond ticketing and surveys to capture digital creativity, informal making, social sharing and hyperlocal cultural activity.
2. Rethink engagement strategies. Reconsidering how our programmes, communications and partnerships can support audiences as co-creators, not just attendees.
3. Design for permeability. The most vibrant cultural ecosystems allow ideas, people and practices to move between formal and informal spaces. How can your organisation open those channels?
4. Recognise and reward cultural labour that has long been invisible. This includes acknowledging community knowledge and skills, DIY culture and online content creation, grassroots culture, intangible heritage and everyday creativity.

A call to action for audience development managers

1. Start mapping everyday creativity in your community. Talk to people where they create, not just where they attend.
2. Use Audience Spectrum as a starting point, not an end point. Layer qualitative insight, digital behaviours and community intelligence on top of your audience segmentation.
3. Build partnerships with local creators, informal groups and digital communities. They are part of your cultural ecosystem—even if they’re not yet in your CRM.

Find out more about the Centre for Cultural Value’s work on cultural vitality

Discover more about the Centre’s work on cultural vitality, the cultural indicator suite and read our interim report.

Read our research digest: Understanding Cultural Vitality.

References

Edelmann, N., 2022. Digitalisation and developing a participatory culture: Participation, co-production, co-destruction. In Scientific foundations of digital governance and transformation: Concepts, approaches and challenges (pp. 415-435). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Jenkins, H. and Ito, M., 2015. Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. John Wiley & Sons.

Holden, J., 2015. The ecology of culture [online]. Available from: https://publicartonline.org.uk/downloads/news/AHRC%20Ecology%20of%20Culture.pdf

Matarasso, F., 2019. A restless art: How participation won, and why it matters (Vol. 15). London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

O’Brien, D, Taylor, M and Brook, O. (2020) Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries. Manchester University Press.

Powell, A., 2012. Democratizing production through open source knowledge: from open software to open hardware. Media, Culture & Society, 34(6), pp.691-708.

Simon, N., 2010. The participatory museum. Museum 2.0.

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Junction Arts was founded in the District of Bolsover, in rural North East Derbyshire, by local people who had “a bit of an idea, to bring some sort of animation to a little town in the throes of change” (Junction Arts Annual Report, 2000-01). Over Junction Arts’ half-century of experience, it has occupied a space of constant flexibility, responding to the social and economic landscape in which it is rooted, and simultaneously working to actively create the space for imagining the future. It’s a place where change is noticed, considered and explored, and done so collectively.

Inspired by the Centre for Cultural Value’s Culture and Placemaking research digest, we want to share more about Junction Arts’ journey in the creative placemaking space. Through sharing our experiences, we aim to address some of the gaps in placemaking research identified in that digest, focusing on the experience of creative placemaking in a predominantly rural area, and from the perspectives of communities facing the multiple challenges of poverty, health inequalities and under-investment.

Responding to economic change and barriers to participation

Creative placemaking in post-industrial communities is deeply entwined with their histories of economic change and social (dis)connection. 1993 saw the closure of Bolsover and Shirebrook collieries, with other local industries, notably in chemical processing and textile manufacture, soon following suit. With them went the network of social clubs, pubs and miners’ welfares that formed the backbone of community togetherness and mutual aid. By 2001, the Census was reporting that Shirebrook, and nearby parts of Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire “display a range of social and economic problems, including high unemployment, poor health, low educational attainment and various forms of deprivation”.

The early 1990s saw Junction Arts throw itself headlong into responding to these economic shifts, asserting confidently in their 1992-93 Annual Report that “in the face of economic decline in our area, it has become increasingly evident that creative activity is of vital importance to people’s lives”. Conscious of the new skills that would be required for the changing economy, Junction Arts positioned creativity as key to “an education system obsessed with literacy and numeracy”, and creative opportunity as crucial to quality of life (Junction Arts annual report, 1997-98). They agreed to focus on a new strand of work specifically tailored to the needs of young people, developing a new “local people, local skills” programme to create work in schools and a lifelong learning programme with specific social, environmental, and educational outcomes.

Junction Arts’ success in enabling people to embrace new opportunities is built, in part, on their work recognising and addressing the barriers potential participants face. Some of these barriers are deeply practical: bus routes, the financial costs of attendance and event timing are all carefully considered. Other barriers are social and emotional. For example, some participants need access to quiet spaces away from the hustle and bustle of a busy session, while for others, the act of sharing food has proved effective in both meeting the immediate needs of those who arrive hungry, while also creating opportunities to get to know one-another.

Taking care to address barriers and enable participation has proven impactful. Young people joining Junction Arts’ creative groups report feeling more confident to try other activities, such as drama clubs, art classes and sports activities. Moreover, confidence spills over into other areas of life. They have been more interested in college and exploring post-school options, and demonstrated a greater awareness of their mental health, proving more able and willing to reach out for additional support when needed.

Building pride in place through co-creation

Alongside equipping people with the skills to navigate their changing social context, Junction Arts took seriously its founding purpose – to create ‘animation’ in and for its communities. Junction Arts positions creativity as a way to realise a vibrant, optimistic future for Bolsover. A flagship public art sculpture, Bolsover Gateway, by artist Liz Lemon, and commissioned by Junction Arts, welcomes folk to Bolsover with the slogan “the past we inherit, the future we create”.

This vision of a positive, ambitious future needed high-profile moments of togetherness, an opportunity for the people of Bolsover to see the place as somewhere that things happen, and a place with a future that could be created collaboratively. Bolsover Lantern Parade, founded in 1994 and celebrating its 32nd edition this year, offered a way to realise that vision. Created each year from scratch by hundreds of local participants supported by community artists, the lantern parade is a highlight of the town’s annual calendar, drawing in visitors from across the region, as well as creating a real sense of pride for local families, many of whom have now taken part across multiple generations. The willow and tissue-paper creations grow more elaborate each year, with the parade representing the glorious diversity of the town’s community groups, schools, passions, interests and creative inspiration. Embracing everything from Buzz Lightyear to steam trains, smoke-breathing dragons and astronauts, this is a place where all ideas are enthusiastically embraced into a noisy, joyous celebration of local creativity.

This sense of a community’s pride in their place, and sense of agency to shape it, is enabled by Junction Arts’ approach to co-producing creative activity alongside participants. This illustrates in practice the findings from the Centre’s research digest: that placemaking practices are inherently ‘collaborative in nature’, and in a grassroots context are ‘as much about social processes than tangible outputs’. For Junction Arts, this means that programmes of activity aren’t fixed in advance, but rather shaped by and with participants. Creative practitioners may introduce new ideas, artforms, practices and approaches, but participants are given every opportunity to choose which direction the activities take, adopting leadership responsibilities in sharing skills and supporting new attendees, and in making decisions about what their provision looks like. As such, no two groups or activities look the same, each growing and evolving in response to the needs and aspirations of its participants. In doing so, creative placemaking becomes led by the community, rather than something imposed upon it from the outside.

Navigating demographic change and divided communities

Whilst the end of mining in North East Derbyshire marked the end of one era, new jobs brought their own challenges and opportunities and made their own mark on the shape of this community. Most prominent amongst new local employers was Sports Direct, whose headquarters and distribution centre opened in Shirebrook in 2013. Bringing 4,000 new jobs, the new opportunities also attracted some 1,500 people relocating to Shirebrook, many of them arriving in the UK from Poland, Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria. A 2016 parliamentary report found that many of the new Sports Direct workers were offered zero-hour contracts, for low pay and in frequently exploitative conditions, presenting “a disturbing picture” of “appalling working conditions and practices”.

The arrival of new people and demographics led to a new approach to community-building and placemaking. A refresh of Junction Arts’ strategic priorities in 2001 identified community cohesion as a key focus, with projects “designed to tackle the problems we face of social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal, and cultural diversity” (Junction Arts annual report, 2000-01). For community artists, working with the diversity of stories within and between communities is nothing new. The community arts movement had grown from a desire to share the less-told stories of those excluded from dominant narratives, and from its earliest days, Junction Arts developed projects to reflect the ‘special needs’ of women (founding a vibrant women’s choir and printmaking group), disabled people and teenage parents. Today, projects similarly showcase the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people, celebrate the thriving creative groups led by the area’s diverse ethnic communities and create space for people from all kinds of backgrounds to build relationships, navigate differences and engage constructively with ideas about our past and future. In doing so, this work builds on the research digest findings that complicate binary narratives of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ development, instead illustrating how placemaking initiatives from a range of actors have evolved alongside, in response to, and in dialogue with each other.

What stands out from Junction Arts’ experience is the importance of time and the long-term support required for building trusted relationships with changing and sometimes complicated or divided communities. Relationships develop over time, and building trust with those who might feel cautious, ignored or sceptical is a long-term, ongoing process with no shortcuts. The Junction Arts ethos is to move “at the speed of trust”; as one community artist reflects: “You can’t expect you are going to start and get massive numbers [straight away]. The work involved in getting young people even confident enough to attend the sessions is big… they need smaller steps and encouragement to engage”.

Shaping and being shaped by places

The learning from this work underlines:

• the need to address participants’ practical, emotional and social barriers in projects that respond to the full complexity of people, lives, places and communities;
• the value of co-production to allow participants to shape interventions that respond to their needs and aspirations;
• the importance of time and long-term support for building trust and allowing places, priorities and relationships to evolve.

Through these processes, matured over 50 years, you get a place and an organisation that are inherently of one another. Junction Arts would not be the same if it had begun somewhere else, but it’s also true that Bolsover would not be the place it is today without the constant presence and gentle creative provocations of Junction Arts. It may be true that the only constant is change, but the consistency, stability and longstanding experience of one of the UK’s oldest and most established community arts organisations strongly positions the District of Bolsover communities to be able to navigate change – past, present and future, together.

Kathryn Welch (she/her) is a freelance creative practitioner working at the intersection between the arts and social change. Current and recent roles include C0-Director of Culture Counts (Scotland’s advocacy network for arts, heritage and creative industry organisations), and as Programme Lead for Culture Collective (Creative Scotland’s flagship funding programme for participatory arts). Now based in Central Scotland, she grew up in Bolsover and was a participant of Junction Arts’ creative programmes throughout the 1990s. Connect with Kathryn via her website or on LinkedIn.

To support, follow, or learn more about Junction Arts, take a look at their website or connect via Facebook or Instagram.

To find out more about how the Centre for Cultural Value’s work provides insights into culture and placemaking, take a look at these resources:

Research digest: Culture and placemaking
Research digest: The role of the artist in society
Research digest: Lifelong cultural engagement
Essential Reads: The politics and possibilities of artists working with communities
Arts Professional: Culture and place: Why we need to look beyond cities

This case study from Junction Arts also reflects many of the themes now being explored in the Centre for Cultural Value’s work developing a cultural indicator suite. We’re seeking to understand and measure the cultural vitality of places in ways that recognise everyday creativity, inclusivity and the role of culture in shaping place identity and wellbeing. Learn more about this project.

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Working with The Audience Agency and supported by Research England, the Centre for Cultural Value has been leading a project to develop a Cultural Indicator Suite, a new framework that helps to communicate the holistic everyday cultural vitality of the places we live.

What do we mean by cultural vitality?

Cultural vitality is central to understanding the cultural and artistic health of the places we live. It involves understanding the dynamic interactions between cultural activities and opportunities, participation, diversity, access, and infrastructure, which collectively shape the identity and well-being of our communities.

Cultural vitality encompasses not only formal cultural institutions but also everyday, informal and grassroots expressions of culture. Policymakers, funders and practitioners need tools that capture this full range of activity to inform strategy, track progress and demonstrate value across sectors such as health, education, local development and environmental planning.

Sharing our findings

We have reviewed recent research and literature and interviewed representatives from Local Authorities across England, covering urban, rural, and coastal regions. Our interim report, lays out a practice-relevant vision for how the UK cultural sector can more effectively understand and support cultural vitality.

The report brings together key insights, including:

• Traditional indicators have overemphasised ‘high culture’ and formal participation, underrepresenting informal, local and community-driven cultural life.
• Culture should be approached ecologically – not siloed – capturing interactions between formal institutions, community spaces, policy contexts, infrastructure and everyday creativity.
• ‘Resilience’ is an outcome of culturally vital communities. As such the seven dimensions of cultural vitality presented in the interim report represent key thematic areas for exploring and measuring this.
• There’s an urgent need to develop rural cultural vitality measures, address diversity and access gaps and understand the cultural sector’s contributions beyond economic growth, including wellbeing and belonging.

Download the report

Watch a recording of the Launch event

Centre for Cultural Value director, Stephen Dobson, says:

“Cultural vitality captures something greater than just numbers or outputs. It reflects the depth, relevance and connectivity of cultural life in our communities.”

He adds:

“At the Centre for Cultural Value, we have seen a pressing need to provide a more nuanced, context-sensitive and practical framework that helps those shaping cultural policy to understand what cultural vitality looks like on the ground, what contributes to it, and how it connects to building resilient, inclusive and thriving communities.”

Watch this video from Policy Leeds, to learn more about the project findings to date:

Next steps

We want to take this project into its next phase with the support of a wider network. This emerging network will help us explore and support the many interconnected factors that shape culturally vibrant, socially cohesive places to live and work.

At the same time, we want to work towards refining the Cultural Indicator Suite framework, ensuring it’s a practical tool for local and regional decision-making, helping to balance priorities and ultimately benefit communities.

If you would like to be involved in the next stage of this project, or simply stay updated on the next steps, please sign up for our email newsletter. We’ll be sharing updates, opportunities, and developments very soon.

Should you require the interim report in an alternative format, please email us at ccv@leeds.ac.uk.

Image credit: Mafwa Theatre. Community Garden Event. 

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