The poverty trap

We’re into the final few days of the preparations for the Bloomsbury Festival and life in the Hidden Cities office is at its most hectic! Uniquely, for a Festival of this scale (130 partners involved, delivering a multi-disciplinary programme in 57 venues), all the organisations involved are local.

The programme is entirely free, meaning that the Festival is all about collaboration, crowd-sourcing and network building – but in an era of social media, the Festival remains a geographically based, physical experience. It offers a rich programme, but is also, and perhaps most significantly, an exercise in community building and face-to-face meetings. In light of this summer’s riots, the role the arts can play in developing coherent communities – communities people identify with, and feel passionate about- is more important than ever, and must be protected from the threat posed by the funding cuts.

Bloomsbury still carries overtones of the early twentieth century, Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, for many, but it is one of the most dynamic cultural environments in contemporary London, with a mix of museums and galleries, one of the world’s leading academic environments, and many of the country’s best creative academies situated here. Contemporary dancers from The Place train up the road from actors at RADA, a new generation of architects at the Architectural Association, and visual artists at The Slade.

It is also one of the most diverse areas in London, if not the world; over 150 languages are spoken in the area thanks to the combination of international students, and a residential population which reflects a very different aspect of central London. The housing estates which you’ll find if you venture behind the garden squares and lovely boutique-filled streets are home to a multi-ethnic population which includes strong Bengali and Somali groups. They are also home to a worrying – if not unfamiliar in Central London – demographic of young people growing up in families with no working parent.

There is something particularly troubling about young people being caught in a poverty trap when they’re growing up within spitting distance of such creative opportunity. But many local young people neither realise that so many facilities on their doorsteps exist and are free – or that they would be welcome there. Instead the youth groups in the area speak of turf and post-code wars which are all too familiar from the press.

There is, of course, a huge desire amongst organisations to bridge this gap, and events like the festival can help provide a context in which the necessary dialogues can begin. We work with numerous youth groups who provide safe space, mentoring and creative opportunities, and which have increasingly been developing connections with local cultural organisations over the past couple of years. These partnerships have resulted in some extraordinary projects which have seen eyes opened on all sides: a film made by young people in collaboration with academics at the Human Rights Consortium about local people’s lives for example, or street-dance taking place in the grand spaces of the Wellcome Collection building, bringing a whole new dynamic and perspective; Wellcome are now pro-actively developing what is promising to be a very exciting, dedicated youth programme.

There are of course countless other organisations proactively investing in community building through the arts. The Shoreditch Trust is one outstanding example of how the arts have been used to develop a local dynamic, and a theatre like the Young Vic has a vibrant, youthful outlook at least in part because it is so strongly rooted in its local community as well as the wider arts world.

But it is becoming harder than ever to get these kind of projects off the ground. Almost every organisation involved in the Festival this year is delivering on tighter budgets and with fewer staff, and it is the youth organisations which have been hit the hardest; at the beginning of the year they could no longer afford the staff time needed to deliver partnership based work; now many have heard that they will have no core funding from Camden next year – a position that puts them in very serious danger of closure.

If the youth groups go, it will be extraordinarily hard for the larger organisations to make meaningful connections with young people, and the opportunities which can define young people’s asipriations and futures will fade away. In a year that has seen the most serious rioting in the capital for decades, it is mind boggling that this should be the case.

We all know the power of the arts to communicate, excite, outrage, and delight. As audiences they offer us the chance to open ourselves to new perspectives and immerse ourselves in someone else’s dream. Those perspectives are never more important when they are the perspectives of our neighbours and our future. We should be doing everything we can to foster the development of those perspectives at the heart of our community and cultural life.