Going to town: Why entering UK Town of Culture is a no-brainer

As the lights were dimming on Hull’s 2017 year as UK City of Culture, a Labour MP on the other side of the Pennines was working to put the nation’s towns under the spotlight by setting up a new think tank.

The Centre for Towns described itself as an independent non-partisan organisation dedicated to providing research and analysis of towns in the UK. It was the brainchild of data analyst Ian Warren and Wigan MP Lisa Nandy and aimed to give the viability and prosperity of our towns as much attention as to our cities.

Eight years on, it’s hardly a surprise that Nandy has flexed her might as Culture Secretary to create a specific competition for UK Town of Culture, claiming that towns have been ‘written out of the national story’.

Challenging place-based perceptions

There must be hundreds of places that would benefit from being written ‘back into the story’ and receiving the kind of attention that, in Hull at least, challenged some one of the most stubborn tropes that had dogged the city for so long and, according to evaluators, “raised the question whether Hull’s poor reputation had ever been a fair judgement on the city”.

And who would say no to the kind of financial rewards which followed City of Culture contests in Derry, Hull and Coventry (the total additional investment across the three is thought to be £1 billion)?

But Lisa Nandy’s ‘culture towns’ aren’t anything like cities. They are not even large towns like Portsmouth, Burnley, or even Wigan. They are small/medium-sized towns with a maximum population of 75,000 – many of them run on the resources of a district council with a pared back leisure services department and little capacity to imagine, let alone deliver, the kind of compelling cultural vision needed to stand out. Particularly if they don’t have a National Portfolio Organisation or other cultural anchor to get things going.

The task ahead

Abi Gilmore’s From ‘crap towns’ to ‘creative places’ – local cultural politics and policy transfer study from more than decade ago prompts similar thoughts and concludes that transferring cultural policies designed for cities down to ‘crap towns’ is not a straightforward business, even in places with relatively high rates of cultural participation.

Referencing one of the three towns in her study, she adds: “There is a lack of confidence, or competence, on the part of the local policies for stimulating visitor economies to attract the capital of tourists, or to create spaces or third places to support further economic development from resident creative enterprises.” Would she have found many other towns equally lacking?

There are other challenges to delivering and sustaining the intended benefits of a UK Town of Culture competition. The economic success of the City of Culture competitions gets ascribed to a ‘hub and spoke’ model where surrounding local authority areas within or next to the winning conurbation reflect and reinforce the impacts of the programme. What happens to a town not lucky enough to have such neighbours?

A game-changing sum

For all this, entering UK Town of Culture competition makes absolute sense. The winner is promised a generous £3.5m to help develop and deliver its programme – but even longlisted towns get £60,000 to refine their outline bids. Then for three best bids not selected there’s the handsome £125,000 consolation prizes to ‘help them to take forward elements of their bid and deliver real change for their local area’.

It’s the money that makes all the difference – I don’t recall UK City of Culture bidders being afforded such generosity – and makes entering the UK Town of Culture a no-brainer for the nation’s small towns.

For DCMS, it is an opportunity to do something different. As the housing crisis fuels a whole new generation of new towns, UK Town of Culture is a chance to explore the role of towns today, but it is more than that.

Towns on the cusp of transformation

It is a chance to breathe hope into communities that really do feel left behind and ‘written out of the national story’ and that can too easily become easy pickings for those stoking extremism.

It is an opportunity to recognise the deprivation and opportunity that exist in parts of the country beyond the post-industrial north and share very different stories. What about coastal resorts and ports like Lowestoft, Falmouth and Clacton, or inland towns like Leominster, Kettering or Gosport?

Or somewhere like Trowbridge, Wiltshire’s most deprived town but a place bursting with potential from new cultural relationships with the National Theatre, a £9m refurbishment of its town hall arts space, a rich 1,000 year-old history covering everything from weaving to spitfires and sausages, and the crazy property prices of Bath pushing commuters ever further east up the train line towards Bradford-on-Avon and beyond?

Towns like these which lie on the cusp of transformation need a nudge to create new and compelling narratives about where they came from, where they are now and where they are going.

Whether UK Town of Culture can deliver lasting change for them is questionable but no UK City of Culture bidder has ever regretted throwing its hat into the ring and it’s hard to imagine towns feeling any different. If nothing else, they will have fostered a new sense of local pride and found a new and exciting way of presenting themselves to the world beyond. That would be something worth celebrating.