A light at the end of the tunnel

Just one long year ago, the world turned upside down. Since then, every one of us and every business and community has had to improvise and endure. 

 

For the culture sector, the impact of the first lockdown was immediate and immediately catastrophic. No audience, no places to gather, perform or exhibit. Empty high streets, shuttered theatres, galleries, and museums. And for the freelancers who are the lifeblood of the arts – an overnight loss of income. The vast majority of the culture and entertainment world has no big reserves to fall back on – it relies on selling what it makes in real time, though backed thankfully in many cases by public investment.

With hope and optimism around the ease of restrictions, organisations can begin to get ready for welcoming audiences back and getting on with the plans they have for this year and next.

We are not alone in facing financial pain, of course. But everybody loses when the culture sector does. The national economy, to which the arts contributes nearly £3 billion a year in taxes alone and provides nearly 340,000 jobs. And in every part of the country, cultural organisations are part of the community, part of people’s daily lives and a source of happiness, pride, and well-being for so many. And then individuals themselves lose – those who love culture in their lives and those who make it. The millions who haven’t heard live music for a year, or admired a work of art up close, or taken their children to a Panto. The loss of all those things has been devastating for millions.

Hope for the future came via cash and loan support from the Chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden – the biggest single investment in culture in our history. The day after the first lockdown was announced the Arts Council had committed £160 million to individuals and organisations on the brink of collapse. But we knew much more was needed, so the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund has been a critical lifeline. The first tranche of funding in Government grants and loans, delivered last Autumn, was intended to help the arts simply survive – three thousand organisations from nightclubs to concert halls received help.

An astonishing amount has been produced by creatives of all kinds who were desperate to work and desperate to help the country get through lockdown

The Arts Council supported many commercial organisations so they could make it through a year without income. Not that survival meant mothballing, in many cases. An astonishing amount has been produced by creatives of all kinds who were desperate to work and desperate to help the country get through lockdown. They used their emergency funding to give online music lessons, to stream plays, to offer close ups of great works of art and a thousand other things to keep the nation’s sprits up. Thanks to them – and to everyone who kept making, filming, streaming, writing and playing – the last year has been a time of dazzling invention.

So, for example, the Holbeck based theatre company Slung Low has reinvented itself to provide support for the community that was desperately needed, delivering meals on wheels and food parcels for nearly a year now, as well as outdoor performances for local schoolchildren and the community when they could. And many venues, including the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley and libraries like Redbridge Central in East London have turned themselves into vaccination centres.

Meanwhile from the beginning of the pandemic, artists have found ever more inventive ways to reach out and touch their audiences. Galleries and museums have turbocharged their digital content, musicians have played Bach in their living rooms, actors have put on classic and new plays from Manchester to Cambridge and dancers have taken to the beaches of Norfolk and the boards at London’s Sadler’s Wells. Events like BlackFest in Liverpool moved online and were still a huge success – as well as providing mental health support to freelancers struggling with lockdown. Meanwhile the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield was part of a group of theatres putting on a series of new plays which have been streamed across the globe and won international acclaim. It can usually seat 450 people – but technology has opened its work up to a whole new audience. And in London, the National Theatre’s streams of past hit shows have been downloaded 15 million times during lockdown.

Today, we move on to phase two of support provision: restarting. Thanks to Government financial support and a roadmap for a cautious return to normal life, we can at last begin to think about how culture can, all things being well, make a physical return into our lives. Another £261 million is being made available to cultural organisations to kickstart their plans to get back to work.

With cautious optimism about the ease of restrictions over the coming weeks, we can hope that organisations can return to something approaching normality, to engage freelancers, to create work again, and to share experiences and opportunities widely with audiences, visitors, and participants. For freelancers, especially, this has been a difficult time. One of the immediate benefits of pump priming a reopening this summer is to give them the chance to work again. It’s a virtuous circle: we help those venues, theatres, and galleries reopen; they in turn can employ their freelancers once more; and the public get their cultural life back. But I recognise we, and the organisations we fund, will need to do more in future to invest in the development of our freelance community, as the pandemic has laid to bare both the unique pressures they face and their paramount importance to the creative ambition of the sector as a whole.

I know that plans for reopening this summer are just the start. We can see some light at the end of the tunnel, and we are racing to meet it. But we still don’t know what post-pandemic life will really be like. Right now, there are too many unknowns: will continued social distancing and mask wearing inhibit an audience and reduce box office income? Will there be permanent changes in demand for online content or to footfall in cities and towns and attendance at live events? Even on the most optimistic projections, we know there are many pitfalls in the way ahead, so we will need to be able to support our national cultural life for years to come. Recovery will take time and adjustment, and that’s what the third tranche of Government support is aimed at.

Another £300 million was added to the Culture Recovery Fund at the recent budget to help longer term recovery and details of how that will be spent will come soon.

So, one year in, we at the Arts Council have been proud to play a part in helping our greatest national asset – our culture – survive and now restart. And we will be there to help our artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries to recover in the years ahead. We can all aid that recovery: if you can, buy a ticket to a real or virtual experience. If you feel able, visit a venue when they open their doors. Every one of us can play a part in helping to keep this great national show on the road.