Clustering together

London is the heart of the creative industries in Britain, dominating almost all of the creative sectors, according to new research from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA). ‘Creative Clusters and Innovation’, the outcome of a two-year collaboration with Birmingham and Cardiff Universities, maps the ‘creative hotspots’ across Britain and considers why creative organisations ‘cluster’ in this way. The nine other hotspots are Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Guildford, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Wycombe-Slough.

The study examines the local and regional role that the creative industries play, covering music and performing arts, arts and crafts, and video, film and photography, as well as advertising, architecture, fashion, publishing, software and computer games, and radio and TV. It reveals a regional division of creative labour, with London specialising in ‘core’ creative activities, and other regions and nations “providing complementary inputs (such as raw materials and production technologies) that feed into the creative process”. Music and the performing arts is the most evenly distributed sector across the country, while advertising is concentrated in London and Manchester.

To date, there has been little analysis of the direct contribution of creative clusters to local areas, although the report notes that policy has tended to see them as useful to urban regeneration. The research also points out that although some policies have focused on the creative industries “as drivers of local economic growth, and provided them with business support… they have rarely focused on them as a source of innovation”. The research aims to rectify this, by illustrating that creative industries are “an active force for innovation” and building an evidence base to help with the formation of local, regional and national policies around the contribution that creative industries make to innovation and economic growth.

NESTA is publishing its detailed dataset online, and will update it annually to provide a resource for local areas seeking to understand and support their creative industries. The first data are available on NESTA’s website now.