Ingredients for change

Appetite is an arts programme that aims to get more people to experience and be inspired by the arts in Stoke-on-Trent. We are led by the New Vic Theatre (Staffordshire’s producing theatre), in partnership with B Arts, Brighter Futures, Partners in Creative Learning and Staffordshire University. In 2012 we were awarded £3m from the National Lottery via Arts Council England as part of the Creative People and Places (CPP) programme. CPP targets areas of England where engagement levels in the arts are significantly below the national average. The funding period is three years but each consortium is expected to set the foundation for a 10-year vision. Although there are no direct references to regeneration, the funding is regularly used in that connection.

Many of the performances had an ‘interventionist’ quality as the idea is for people to stumble upon art while out and about

Known as the Potteries due to the area’s once global thriving ceramics industry, Stoke-on-Trent is now a classic British post-industrial city marked by empty factories, such as Spode and Royal Doulton which used to employ tens of thousands of people. There is a wealth of sobering statistics that show the socio-economic challenges, such as having fewer people in paid employment than anywhere else in the sub-region and pupils coming bottom nationally in combined Key Stage 2 tests. In 2012 the council launched a regeneration scheme to sell houses for £1.

Despite these challenges, we aim to use the arts as a main ingredient in finding some answers to these problems. By seeing the beauty and brilliance in the everyday and mobilising existing assets, we are using the arts to affect change. Change is difficult and does not happen overnight, but by placing people at the heart of everything we do, we are inspiring people who previously had little or no experience of the arts to develop their own cultural programmes and affect change from the inside out.

Key to our mission is to ensure that the arts are relevant and representative of a community’s own needs, skills and aspirations and making the most of what already exists. Parks, hospitals, empty shops and factories, pubs, shopping centres and the bus station are just a few of the places that have been used for arts activity in the first 18 months of the programme. Many of the performances had an ‘interventionist’ quality as the idea is for people to stumble upon art while out and about in town or a park. These include The Big Feast, a three-day arts festival in the city centre, a dance performance in a new playground in Bentilee (one of the Europe’s largest housing estates) and a six-month art programme within University Hospital North Staffordshire.

We are challenging the negative perceptions of the city by introducing people to these new positive experiences, to help them see and feel the benefits of this type of activity for themselves. Over 170,000 people have experienced our events in the past 12 months and we are already beginning to demonstrate tangible changes in the city. Audience members highlighted how the arts can change the feeling of a place to enhance and complement the physical regeneration of city. Here are a few comments: “A massive contribution to the feeling of the town centre and I would like to see more of it. I don’t think people will ever forget this.” And: “It makes you realise it’s not just for shopping and can be used as a performance area and it’s great you’ve got things in different spaces.”

The role of inspiration and opening up ways for people to experience the arts is key to changing their behaviours and attitudes towards the arts. They have the power to lift hearts and minds from individuals to whole cities. One audience member sums up this change perfectly: “Feeling proud of the city that I normally despise. Seeing people in a place that is normally empty.”

Karl Greenwood is Director of Appetite.
www.appetitestoke.co.uk