Reflections on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts, cultural and creative sectors have been ongoing since the implications of public health and safety restrictions and impositions of lockdowns emerged globally in the first quarter of 2020. Arts audiences, creative producers and culture scholars alike have observed the particular shifts and ‘pivots’ required to sustain the mixed economies and often precarious business models of activities that rely on physical co-presence, state intervention and freedom of movement to survive. As the months, and now years, have passed, the shock and scale of these impacts and the calls from the cultural sector advocating for a ‘new normal’ have subsided, despite the fact that the memories of this extraordinary period, the sector-specific stresses and the wider societal trauma it caused, continue.

In the UK, the mobilisation of government funds targeted at the arts and cultural industries, many of which were already in receipt of grant funding, prevented a far more significant erosion of artists, creative workers and cultural managers’ livelihoods than would have been the case without intervention. Organisational strategies were put on pause, however, as audiences and performers were locked out bar digital participation, with many taking the time to reflect on social missions and visions, while constantly rescoping programming and budget lines as conditions frequently changed. The motivation to document these turbulent times through empirical research, and to consider through analysis potential pathways to resilience and recovery for cultural organisations and those who work in and with them, was therefore obvious. This book is an outcome of such a motivation, one of a number of outputs from the eighteen-month UKRI-funded research that took place in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales between September 2020 and November 2021.¹

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale and context for this wide-ranging research. It outlines its aims and objectives, describing and justifying the mixed-methods methodology and the sampling mechanisms deployed by the research and outlining the areas of synergy between the different strands of the study so as to draw out common objectives and themes between the chapters that follow. Its core aim, therefore, is to set the scene for the rest of the book. It does this by providing a brief analysis of the structural challenges and issues facing the UK’s cultural industries prior to the pandemic that hampered the cultural sector and became exacerbated as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and progressed. The chapter goes on to contextualise and introduce the forthcoming chapters and offer readers a narrative arc to guide them through the book.

Study context and aims

This book presents findings from one of the most comprehensive studies of the impacts of COVID-19 on the cultural sector undertaken anywhere in the world. This national research project was led by the Centre for Cultural Value and conducted by twenty-four researchers from twelve research institutions and four national partners: the Centre for Cultural Value, The Audience Agency, the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, and Culture Commons. This consortium approach meant that the study benefitted from policy and artform experts embedded in different nations and regions of the UK. Those experts represented universities, research centres, cultural agencies and consultants. The study brought together statisticians, quantitative sociologists, art historians and audience researchers with interdisciplinary scholars from the fields of media studies, performance studies, arts management and cultural policy studies.

Based on the findings of this extensive research project, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the impacts of COVID-19 on the UK’s cultural sector and highlights the implications for the sector’s future direction. Over the course of eleven chapters, the book provides a summary of the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis; a statistical analysis of the impacts of these policy responses and of the pandemic itself on the UK’s cultural workforce; and a mixed-methods analysis of audiences’ responses to the pandemic. These insights are nuanced and illustrated via detailed case studies of a number of key sub-sectors of the cultural industries (theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals), via interviews with emerging cultural leaders and via taking an ecosystem approach to the case study of the Greater Manchester city region.

The book identifies the core, recurrent themes that have emerged from the research. It offers a robust analysis of the short, medium and longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on the cultural sector and its audiences, and highlights the implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policy-makers as we continue to move into the endemic stage of the pandemic. The unique contribution of the book lies in its presentation of research findings coordinated to highlight the challenges faced by cultural practitioners, organisations and audiences from different backgrounds, regions and art forms. Using lenses which focus on both macro and micro levels, the book provides fresh insights into the implications for policy and research on, with and around the cultural sector, highlighting possible future directions for arts management, audience research and cultural policy studies.

The pandemic has impacted the creative and cultural industries more globally and traumatically than any other crisis in living memory (Sargent, 2021). It has wrought a seismic shock across the arts and cultural sector in particular. But as Sargent also argues, ‘as always, amongst the loss and damage there has been invaluable learning of new kinds of thinking, new ways of doing things. We need to identify all those new learnings around the world, then build on those new foundations rather than just reassembling the broken pieces from the past’ (Sargent, 2021). It is in this spirit of fostering positive change that we have researched and written this book.

The research presented in the book is based on the following strands of activity:

1. Policy analysis: review of fiscal and strategic support and relief interventions across the UK at local, regional and national levels, supported by an international review of policy measures related to social security for cultural practitioners.
2. Workforce analysis: scoping, synthesising and appraising existing and emerging data – bringing together a fragmented approach through a meta-analysis to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the cultural workforce.
3. Organisational analysis: case studies of different cohorts and sub-sectors providing a detailed exploration of the impacts on specific organisations and practitioners and analysis of representative case studies drawn from the following sub-sectors: theatre in England, museums and galleries in northern England, festivals in Scotland, media and screen industries in Wales, and emerging cultural leaders in Northern Ireland.
4. Audience research: longitudinal tracking study of cultural consumption and attitudes towards cultural engagement over the course of the pandemic.
5. Social media analysis: quantitative analysis of 9,000 tweets and qualitative analysis of 450 tweets under the Twitter hashtags #CultureInQuarantine and #MuseumAtHome to explore how cultural organisations and audiences engaged and interacted on social media.
6. Ecosystem analysis of Greater Manchester: place-based research with key stakeholders in the city region including local government and regional authority policy actors, cultural freelancers and organisations, and emerging cultural practitioners.
7. Policy engagement: meetings, discussions, interviews, presentations and placements with funders and policy-makers, including the four UK arts councils and governmental teams with responsibility for culture.

The strands of activity were designed to address the following research questions:

1. What were the short, medium and longer-term impacts of COVID-19 across different sub-sectors of the UK’s cultural industries?
2. To what extent did the COVID-19 crisis perpetuate, exacerbate or temper existing inequalities relating to cultural production and consumption? How will this change how the cultural industries engage with audiences in the short, medium and longer term?
3. How and to what extent has cultural consumption and consumer behaviour changed in the short, medium and longer term as a result of social distancing measures and the closure of cultural spaces?
4. What were the drivers and effects of the immediate policy responses to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 crisis on the cultural industries? How will the crisis impact policy-making as the sector emerges from the pandemic? What are the implications of COVID-19 for future cultural policy-making and the broader creative economy?

Research context

To situate the findings of the research in a meaningful context, here we note briefly the underlying structural conditions that characterised the cultural sector prior to the pandemic. The impacts of the pandemic did not occur in a vacuum: many were prefigured by the policy and management contexts that, to some extent, determined them. For example, a poor understanding of the complex ecosystem within which the sector operates and scant knowledge of the relationships between different parts of cultural production from a ground-up perspective meant that decisions regarding how to best target relief funding were initially delayed. These delays added to the sector’s existing uncertainty when the pandemic hit and exacerbated the impact on less protected cultural workers.

When we developed our research questions and design, we were almost certain that the existing inequalities that have long characterised the cultural sector would only magnify the impacts of the pandemic on the sector. These inequalities include the extractive overreliance on freelance workers engaged on precarious contracts and an evident lack of diversity among cultural workers.

Cultural policy scholars (e.g. Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2018, 2020) were highlighting these problems to government in the UK even before the pandemic hit, for example through parliamentary groups such as the Creative Diversity All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). In this sense, the sector went into the pandemic in a poor state of readiness and with its eyes tightly shut. This situation was exacerbated by outmoded and highly risky business models. These structures sat alongside deeply flawed interpretations of personal and organisational ‘resilience’, which extolled earned income, corporate sponsorship and private giving over peer collaboration and the public good (O’Connor, 2020). To make matters worse, and highly significantly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural workforce suffered from long-standing underinvestment and skills gaps in HR and digital production and distribution. Thus, the pandemic acted as a long-overdue wake-up call for the sector and its funders to get their house in order.

The supply side was not the only problem. Pre-pandemic, report after report, study after study, for example the influential Warwick Commission Report (Neelands et al., 2015; Taylor, 2016), evidenced the stark lack of representation of all socio-economic groups and forms of cultural diversity within audiences for the arts in the UK, calling for urgent change. Decades of generally well-intentioned and expensive so-called ‘audience development’ initiatives and related policy interventions had seemingly failed to diversify who engaged with publicly funded arts and culture and to address pressing notions such as the deficit treatment of everyday participation and cultural value (Miles and Gibson, 2016), cultural democracy (Hadley, 2021), and the politics of participation and ‘non-participation’ in culture (Stevenson, 2019).

At the same time, relationships between cultural organisations and audiences were becoming increasingly superficial and transactional within policy and practice, hampered by an overreliance of product-led marketing and a poor understanding of evolving modes of engagement (Walmsley, 2019). Beyond the walls of cultural institutions, the sector suffered from a patchy and arguably disingenuous approach to civic engagement, driven by outcomes-led funding which often brought its core purpose and social relevance into question. These issues inevitably arise in each chapter of the book. We return to them in a more summative and future-focused way in the final chapter, where we highlight the myriad implications for policy, for the cultural sector and for research.

Methodology

Given the immediacy of the context, the research project was inevitably both highly empirical and reactive in nature. Designed over an intense period at the start of the pandemic, it responded to a specific urgent call from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to investigate the phenomenon of COVID-19 across society. As such and given that the research context we found ourselves in was unprecedented, there was limited time to embark on an extensive literature review (there was of course in any case very little literature published on culture in a pandemic).

Over the course of the project, cultural funders and policy-makers urged us to share our findings in real time so that they could react and respond as quickly as possible. This was not a usual or comfortable place to find ourselves in as academic researchers: the pandemic certainly opened doors with policy-makers and forced academics to work at a different pace. While this made us feel vulnerable and exposed at times, it also provided momentum and the impetus to identify the most pertinent research questions that would engage as many relevant stakeholders as possible in the limited time we had.

Informed by the structural issues facing the sector, our core research question was to explore the extent to which the pandemic might replicate, exacerbate or perhaps even temper existing inequalities in the cultural sector. We hypothesised that, like most crises, COVID-19 would highlight existing problems and speed up changes and evolutions that were already taking place, such as the digital distribution of creative content, for example. Although the focus of this study was not theoretical, the time between the end of the empirical research and the drafting of the book has enabled us to reflect on our findings and to situate and theorise them within the context in which they unfolded. Hindsight has also enabled us to reflect on the broader implications of what occurred in the sector for the fields of arts management and cultural policy studies. In particular, there are important lessons for the future of collaborative and engaged research within these disciplines.

The twenty-four researchers who contributed to this study collectively formed a cohesive multidisciplinary team that provided expertise in a rare and rich mix of complementary research methods, including statistical analysis, social media analysis, ecosystem analysis, case studies, population surveys, semi-structured depth interviews, and policy analysis and engagement. Early on in the research design process we decided to deploy a mixed-methods approach to properly evaluate the variety of impacts of the pandemic on the cultural sector. This approach also enabled us to capture the strategic and emotional implications for cultural workers and audiences dealing with the crisis on a daily basis in both qualitative and quantitative detail and from macro and micro perspectives. However, other methodological considerations also needed to be addressed. The most prominent of these was the need and determination to capture the impacts of the pandemic across the UK from a representative range of different art forms and sub-sectors of the cultural industries, and to represent a diverse range of sector voices and organisations.

Difficult choices had to be made with regard to the sampling of art forms and sub-sectors. In order to narrow the parameters of the research to make it as cohesive and feasible as possible, we decided to focus on the arts and cultural industries rather than the broader creative industries. Some of our statistical analysis does include comparison with sectors such as advertising, architecture, publishing and IT, but the core of the analysis is focused on the arts and cultural sector.

We hypothesised that the impacts of the pandemic would be more comparable across the cultural sector than across the creative industries, given that some of the latter, notably IT software and computer services, may have benefitted from the explosion of online activity and thus fare in a fundamentally different way from sub-sectors largely reliant on live audiences. We were also aware that resources would not allow for qualitative work with every sub-sector of the cultural industries and that sectors such as live music were being studied elsewhere. In the end we opted for four of the largest sub-sectors: festivals; media and screen; museums and galleries; and theatre.

In the flurry of sector concern as the impact of the pandemic unfolded, a proliferation of surveys circulated in the spring and summer of 2020 with the aim of establishing priorities for action and mitigation. Many of these were poorly designed and sampled, producing at best a very fragmented and at worst a wholly invalid set of results. The importance of accessing comprehensive, standardised and robust data on the impact on creative and cultural work was clear and pressing. As a result, we prioritised analysis of the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey, representative of the UK workforce, to investigate the impacts on the cultural sector’s workforce and its different sub-sectors. The findings of this analysis are provided in Chapter 2.

We were also aware that most of the emerging studies of cultural consumption focused on existing audiences, and hence were failing to capture how the population at large was engaging with and thinking about culture during the pandemic. In light of recent policy interventions to develop and diversify audiences, we were particularly interested to explore whether the ‘pivot’ to digital culture might attract new cultural audiences and even democratise cultural consumption. We therefore opted for a large-scale population survey and contracted The Audience Agency to deliver the Cultural Participation Monitor. This was delivered in six waves across 2020–2022 with samples of up to 6,057 UK residents.² An analysis of the findings and a full discussion of their implications is offered in Chapter 3.

To understand how the pandemic impacted psychologically on cultural workers and in order to fully appreciate the implications for organisations and their respective art forms or sub-sectors, we undertook a large series of professional or ‘expert’ interviews. Our interviews were modelled to elicit guided introspection from participants (Wallendorf and Brucks, 1993) to produce the kind of context-dependent analysis (Rubin and Rubin, 2005) and thick description (cf. Geertz, 1973) that we knew we needed to capture the nuances of cultural workers’ lived experiences of the pandemic. In total we conducted 238 semi-structured depth interviews of forty-five to sixty minutes with a diverse sample of cultural sector professionals ranging from freelance technicians to CEOs of national companies. Our organisational interviews were sampled to account for size, scale, model and location. For example, in our study of theatre organisations in England, we interviewed staff from small touring companies, a range of regional venues and the National Theatre. For each of our four sub-sectors we developed a series of organisational case studies which are presented and discussed below in their respective chapters. Case study analysis is a tried-and-tested method for retaining a ‘holistic and real-world perspective’ (Yin, 2018, p.5), especially, as in our study, when the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon within a real-life context (Yin, 2018, p.15). The case studies offer readers a holistic view of how the pandemic looked and felt within very different types of cultural organisation.

One particular aspect of organisational activity that we were particularly keen to explore was how organisations engaged and interacted with their audiences and communities on social media. Social media generates an abundance of what Zappavigna (2011) refers to as the ‘searchable talk’ of social networks. Analysis of such public discourse can enable more dynamic and meaningful forms of cultural participation and foster a more productive relational and ethical trajectory for the institutions which engage with it (Kidd, Nieto McAvoy and Ostrowska, 2022). Our study involved analysing data collected from Twitter from the hashtags #CultureInQuarantine and #MuseumAtHome during the first six weeks of the UK lockdown (March–April 2020). These two hashtags were used by museums and galleries during this timeframe as key connective devices and produced 9,000 tweets which were analysed quantitatively by the team using Twitter’s metadata to draw out recurrent themes, before a random 5 per cent sample of 450 tweets was qualitatively analysed using NVivo. The emerging sentiments and themes shed light on how audiences were using culture to navigate the pandemic, as is presented alongside the population study in Chapter 3.

In addition to the imperative to engage with sector policy-makers and the potential to inform their critical interventions through empirical data and analysis, the study offered a unique view of how the activities of the cultural sector are valued, protected, promoted and regulated by cultural policy. The pandemic presented an opportunity to understand the sector’s perceived value to policy in the unprecedented context of its survival, acting almost like a contingent valuation exercise, where a proxy of the value of public good can be derived from the costs of saving and sustaining it. We therefore knew we needed channels with which to consult with policy-makers as well as to undertake research with and on them, and to this end we formed a policy reference group and worked closely with local and national policy bodies, including the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Creative Scotland, culture officers from the Welsh Government and Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities, and representatives from local councils including Leeds and Salford. The group met three times and further engagement opportunities were also provided by regular workshops with DCMS, providing the chance for dialogue and reflective practice, and a series of policy placements at regional and national level towards the end of the study, which embedded researchers within various policy contexts. A narrative account of the timeline and evolution of policy responses over 2020 and 2021 comparing the devolved nations of the UK is presented in Chapter 1.

The research was augmented by the inclusion of a case study of Greater Manchester’s cultural ecosystem, which began in November 2020, working in consultation with Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Manchester City Council and Salford Culture and Place Partnership to develop a programme of interviews and action research with policy actors, cultural leaders, and practitioners across the city region in the north-west of England. The resulting two waves of qualitative interviews (fifty in total) provided unique insights from a creative and cultural ecosystems perspective, which offered a lens on the intersection of local networks, initiatives and strategic priorities with the efficacy (or otherwise) of national policy responses.

Creative and cultural ecosystems analysis recognises the complex and interconnected matrix of actors involved within creative and cultural ecologies to consider relationships between different nodes of networks, made up of individual actors and institutions (Barker, 2019). The term’s appearance in UK policy discourse is concurrent with John Holden’s promotion of ‘cultural ecology’ as a model for the ‘intensively interlinked’ (Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2015, p.2), cyclical, generative characteristics of cultural and creative production. It aims to avoid a linear production chain model that focuses solely on connections between inputs and outputs, distinguishing between values-driven policy approaches and those that seek to generate values as an outcome. In this way, it encompasses a spectrum of interdependent qualities across and between public and private spheres, formal and informal strategy, and amateur and professional practice. Although not bound to geography, ecosystems approaches provide useful frameworks for local cultural policy analysis. They make visible the processes through which capitals are mobilised, taken up and generated across networks and relationships. By doing so, they show that places are not simply sites that policies affect, but rather that places have their own effects on policies as situated practices (Durrer, Gilmore and Stevenson, 2019), which require the negotiation of boundaries and capabilities that are attached to place (Gross and Wilson, 2020). We discuss key findings from the cultural ecosystem case study in Chapter 9.

The ethical context

Planning this significant body of engaged research in the context of a global health pandemic inevitably raised significant ethical issues that the research team had to address and navigate. The most obvious of these, perhaps, was the risk of causing further psychological harm to cultural practitioners by asking them to reflect in online, depersonalised interviews on what had clearly been traumatic lived experiences. Although informed consent was always secured well in advance and interviews were conducted with the utmost sensitivity by sector specialists, our approach at times felt extractive and some participants understandably broke down in the course of their interviews. The experience of conducting interviews was deeply humbling, and although mitigation of ethical issues also extended to the researchers themselves, who occasionally found themselves in the role of the quasi therapist, overall the interviewers felt a heightened sense of privilege to bear witness first-hand to participants’ personal journeys through the pandemic.

As a research team we shared a sense of responsibility to tell our interviewees’ stories accurately and authentically, and to capture the reality of their lived experiences in a way that might eventually effect positive change. We can only hope that we have achieved this; but ultimately, the only valid judges of this will be them as participants in our research and you as readers of this book.

Structure and overview of the book

The structure of the book is intended to let the research findings breathe a little and to offer a tailored route for individual reader interests through the different chapters, which are organised by work strand or art form/sub-sector.³ The exceptions to this are this introductory chapter, and the final chapter, where we summarise the core findings and highlight the implications for future research, policy development and cultural sector practice as we emerge from the pandemic.

Chapter 1 traces the key developments in cultural policy across the four UK nations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides an overview of policy responses and interventions at regional and national levels, charting the national policy landscape over the timescale of the pandemic and highlighting the implications for cultural sector recovery. The chapter draws on desk-based policy analysis at a national and regional level, consultation with key policy stakeholders, and interviews with policy-makers, cultural workers and freelancers representing perspectives from music, museums, festivals and theatre across the four UK nations. It finds that while there are commonalities between their national government responses, even as the turmoil and changing conditions of the pandemic disrupted the ordinary process of policy decision-making, there were also differences guided by the distinctive organising logics or ‘policy assemblages’ (Prince, 2010).

Chapter 2 explores the cultural sector through the lens of longer-term trends in the workforce, primarily focused on the long-standing and structural inequalities characteristic of culture in the UK. The chapter shows the impact of lockdown, and the subsequent attempts to arrest the spread of the virus, on differing parts of the cultural industries, noting the distinct patterns in publishing, film and television and the performing arts. The analysis reveals how each sub-sector experienced different consequences, for example increased demand for working from home in publishing compared to significant losses of employment in the performing arts, with different dilemmas for the organisations, businesses and workers who constitute these sectors.

Chapter 3 investigates how audiences and the wider UK population have engaged with cultural content during the pandemic, in both live and digital spaces. It presents, contextualises and discusses the findings of the Cultural Participation Monitor, a bespoke longitudinal tracking survey of the UK population that analyses changing digital engagement habits and attitudes towards re-engagement in live events. The chapter also offers an analysis of Twitter data shared across two hashtags, #CultureInQuarantine and #MuseumAtHome, in order to explore the parameters of engagement between cultural institutions and members of the public over the pandemic. It explores the popularity of content through a thematic lens, as well as by tone, before exploring how the sample connects with other debates at the time. This research is significant because it reveals what seemed to work, and what worked less well, as strategies for engagement during the pandemic. It tells a story about the kinds of content and interaction users found valuable and unpacks how we can understand and articulate that value during a time of crisis. It also suggests how cultural interaction may have shifted during the pandemic in ways that could be meaningful in the longer term if institutions have the capacity to build on those developments. The chapter concludes by assessing longer-term trends in audience behaviour and engagement and by exploring the implications of these trends for artists, cultural organisations, funders and policy-makers.

Chapter 4 investigates how England’s theatre sector fared over the course of the pandemic. During the COVID-19 crisis, the sector was forced into making and accelerating changes to the strategies and modes it uses to make work and to engage with its audiences. This unsurprisingly involved a strong focus on digital distribution and adaptation, which, alongside the enforced and repeated closure of buildings, challenged organisations of all scales to make radical decisions about their business models and to tackle issues of productivity, quality, capacity and skills that will have significant implications for policy, management and training.

Lockdown experiences of making and consuming theatre have raised important questions around the role of physical spaces, of shared or synchronous experience and definitions of authenticity, and regarding audience perceptions of the relative value of digital and live performance. They have drawn closer attention to inequalities of access of all kinds. Some organisations have ‘leant into’ their learning and participation functions with the aim of maintaining and sometimes deepening audience relationships that otherwise may have been fractured during the crisis. This activity reflects the intensified attention that has been paid towards the social and civic role of theatre. Chapter 4 examines this evolution, highlighting some of the convergences and divergences within the theatre sector and between it and other cultural sectors. In so doing, it builds on research engaging with the concept of cultural value and the public role of arts and culture, and with the ‘relational turn’ in audience engagement (Walmsley, 2019).

Chapter 5 traces the impact of COVID-19 on cultural festivals in Scotland. It is based primarily on a series of interviews and conversations carried out in 2020 and 2021 with festival producers, directors and organisers. The chapter presents findings that illuminate the different responses that festivals implemented during the pandemic from moving to hybrid models of live and digital content to fundraising for local foodbanks. These shifts in working practices have fundamentally brought into question the role of festivals within their communities and this chapter considers how digital and hybridised programming, performing and gathering have changed festivals’ approaches to future planning, strategy and audience engagement.

Chapter 6 traces the impact of COVID-19 on arts and cultural activity in Northern Ireland through the lens of emerging and collaborative approaches to leadership. It draws principally from a series of practitioner interviews and discussions carried out in 2020 and 2021, combining the knowledge of a range of organisational leaders with that of creative freelancers and policy-makers. The authors examine the role and nature of what constitutes leadership within the Northern Irish cultural economy. Although exacerbated by the crisis, the tensions of how cultural leadership is recognised and defined pre-date the pandemic and are intrinsically linked to concerns of representation and consideration in regional, national and subnational policy structures and within the systems of arts and cultural practices. By pointing to where leadership has emerged in new or more strident forms, the chapter equally points to where it has been absent, excluded or ignored. Through analysing these emergent forms of collaborative leadership, the authors suggest ways in which these practices could shape the future direction of cultural policy-making in Northern Ireland.

Chapter 7 investigates the effect that the pandemic, lockdown and the subsequent support measures had on the screen sector in Wales. It does so by focusing on the challenges facing the workforce, including the impact of COVID-19 on people’s working practices, financial situations and mental health. The chapter also analyses different organisational approaches to lockdown, the emergency funding made available to film and TV professionals in Wales, and the emerging signs of polarisation in the sector.

Chapter 8 builds on and contributes fresh empirical research to the existing discourse on cultural value by examining the heightened civic responsibility identified in arts institutions in the north-east and north-west of England in response to the pandemic. The north of England was hit particularly hard by the pandemic, experiencing extended lockdowns and high-tier restrictions. From interviews with over thirty gallery, museum and arts workers in these regions, including freelancers and artist-led organisations, the authors identify an increase in community engagement and outreach from galleries and museums in the north of England during periods of lockdown. The chapter examines the community engagement and outreach activities provided by these institutions and asks: How do galleries and museums provide support during unprecedented times? Whom do galleries and museums serve? Who benefits from this provision, and can it be sustained in the long term? What are the implications for the workforce, management and business models of galleries and museums? How do these practices inform new narratives of ‘levelling up’ and post-pandemic recovery within areas already highlighted for investment? In responding to these fundamental questions about the civic responsibility of arts institutions in times of crisis, the chapter undertakes a close analysis of three case studies. These include a large gallery, a group of museums and a small interdisciplinary arts organisation, all based in the north of England.

Chapter 9 considers the impact of COVID-19 on the arts and cultural industries from a place-based perspective, focusing on a specific geography, the city region of Greater Manchester, and the social and political relationships that comprise its cultural ecology and policy infrastructure. Following a cultural ecosystems approach, which recognises the complex and interconnected matrix of actors involved within creative and cultural ecologies, the authors explore how the pandemic has affected the delivery of local cultural strategies within the first devolved English city region, and how national policy responses, such as Culture Recovery Funds, have been received and operationalised locally.

The chapter focuses on three intersections of policy, culture and place to interrogate further the political, socio-economic, spatial and locational dimensions that underpin the response and recovery plans of local governance. These ‘mini case studies’ concern: (a) models of cultural leadership and coordination within the local sector to support freelancers; (b) policy-led responses to support creativity within social care and voluntary settings, through creative care kits; and (c) site-specific cultural recovery planning and cultural programming, including the development of Creative Improvement Districts in Greater Manchester district towns.

The concluding chapter draws together the core themes emerging from the analyses presented in the previous chapters. It offers a critical overview of emerging findings; highlights notable areas of synergy and divergence between different sectors, art forms, sizes, scales and locations of cultural organisation; and identifies the implications for cultural management and policy. Reflecting on the broader socio-political context, the chapter reviews the global context of the pandemic and discusses the extent to which the UK context and experience might be said to be exceptional. It investigates aspects of divergence and convergence between different art forms and how these relate to instances of continuity and change, for example by highlighting the continuity of inequality in the sector and noting that the pandemic has not changed the seemingly entrenched economic rationalism of cultural policy.

The final chapter also reflects back on the key findings of the research, including the sector’s pivot to civic engagement and digital distribution, and draws out the implications of such phenomena for policy, management and future research – not least for cultural data and leadership. Finally, it discusses how the sector might become more relevant, representative, equitable and ‘regenerative’ (Walmsley et al., 2022).