Introduction

In this chapter, we consider 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 (GM), and the social and political relationships that comprise its cultural ecology and policy infrastructure. Greater Manchester is a city region of ten district authorities in the north-west of England, with Manchester at its geographical and political centre (see Figure 9.1). Overseen by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) under leadership from a directly elected metro mayor, GM was established as a city region in 2011 and as England’s first devolved authority in 2014. Considered a test case for the potential for devolution to help counterbalance ‘the powerhouse of London’ (Osborne, 2014), the region’s history of strategic collaboration and policy development, first under the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (1986–2011) and now the GMCA, provides an opportunity to examine the role of place and place-based networks, policy and decision-making in the context of the pandemic.

Figure 9.1Map of Greater Manchester and its ten districts

City-regional cultural governance is characterised by a pragmatic, networked approach to cultural policy and development. As one of our interviewees, a local government officer, explained: ‘We’ve got a long track record of working together to try and promote activity across the city region. We don’t have to do everything in all ten districts. We do what works.’ In the context of the pandemic, this approach catalysed a series of targeted interventions that sought to protect the cultural sector and cultural workers from the most extreme impacts of the pandemic. As another interviewee explained: ‘Although the pandemic was global and it hit nationally … it also hit locally, and while there’s similarities – really big similarities – … each area had to take their own approach’ (local government officer, our emphasis). Efforts to understand the local impacts of the pandemic and to adapt district and regional authority strategy in response contrast with national policy, which initially sought to stabilise the cultural sector through targeted support for the sector’s ‘crown jewels’ (as discussed in Chapter 1). As Banks and O’Connor observe, this approach established a ‘pecking order’ (2021, p. 8) with large-scale, building-based organisations at the front of the queue and no direct provision for freelance or independent cultural workers. In comparison, policy-makers and cultural leaders in GM sought to leverage the breadth of the region’s cultural infrastructure, and the strong ties between local and combined authorities, to find solutions to the regional and local impacts of the pandemic. The city-regional policy response looked beyond the trickle-down economics of national interventions like the Culture Recovery and Capital Kickstart funds and encouraged an interconnected view, linking policy with place, and the survival of flagship institutions with the livelihoods and wellbeing of cultural workers.

This chapter considers this response by taking an ecosystems approach, examining the ways in which collaboration and innovation from cultural leaders and policy-makers were able to leverage place-based knowledge, networks and resources to nuance national policy and offer targeted support for the local cultural sector. We begin with a short introduction to the policy context that preceded the pandemic and formed the background to responses in the region. We then examine how the pandemic ‘hit locally’, including how national policy responses, such as the Culture Recovery Fund (CRF), were received, operationalised and challenged by the different localised initiatives that characterise the region’s response. Finally, through two case studies, the GM Arts Hub and Salford’s Suprema Lex cultural strategy, we explore how these two values-driven approaches (Dunn and Gilmore, 2021) were realised in practice. We conclude by exploring the contributions of the GM case study to wider cultural policy discussion and its implications for how we might think and plan culture’s relationship to place and policy as the sector adapts to the learning and challenges of COVID-19.

Methodology

The year-long study of Greater Manchester’s cultural ecosystem during the pandemic began in November 2020, when we worked closely with our research partners, GMCA, Manchester City Council (MCC), and Salford Culture and Place Partnership (SCPP), to develop a programme of interviews and action research with policy actors, cultural leaders and practitioners across GM’s ten districts. Two waves of qualitative semi-structured interviews (n. fifty in total) documented the varied affects and experiences of policy-makers, cultural leaders and creative practitioners, capturing their responses in real time, and allowing us to map the impacts of these developments onto the wider cultural sector context. Interviewees were sampled via snowballing, following recommendations from research partners MCC, SCPP and GMCA. Supported by a desk-based policy review and quantitative research from colleagues on this project, including analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data (see Figure 9.2), we draw on an ecosystems perspective (Barker, 2019) to analyse the local cultural ecology and the factors that informed and supported responses in the region.

Figure 9.2Workforce size, Greater Manchester (industries)

Source: ONS, Labour Force Survey

In the context of GM, an ecosystems perspective highlights the dynamic, interconnected and scalar dimensions that are invoked at the intersection between culture and place, drawing attention to the flows and processes through which policy, leadership and infrastructure inform and regulate cultural production and consumption within the city-region. Our use of this terminology responds to the limitations of the national policy response and recognises the extraordinary efforts of sector stakeholders to acknowledge the layered relationships and interdependencies of the local cultural infrastructure in their responses to the pandemic. It also seeks to highlight this perspective as a strength that supported the region’s capacity to resist the worst impacts of the pandemic – work and job loss, skills depletion, permanent closure – to innovate productively, even as business models and conventional principles of cultural strategy collapsed.

The qualitative methodology for ecosystem case study provided access to the narratives and perceptions of our interviewees, presenting insight into the relational forms of cultural governance in the city-region and real-time reflections on the changes to local strategic objectives as these went ‘out the window’ at the start of the pandemic, leading to an unprecedented period of improvisatory decision-making and policy innovation in the region. Our study is therefore both informed and bounded by the perspectives of our interviewees as research partners and, as such, reflects institutionally informed conceptions of place, context, and the purpose and impacts of policy. This has two main consequences for this research. Firstly, we rely on policy-makers and cultural partners to act as interlocutors for the broader impacts of policy innovation for audiences, communities and other local stakeholders. Secondly, the lens introduced in this study is biased by a political infrastructure that has, historically, privileged Manchester city centre. Though we spoke to policy-makers and cultural partners in each of the region’s ten districts, the discussion presented here should be seen as an overview of policy development in the region that would benefit from further place-focused research at a local authority level.

‘Everything was on an upward trend’: culture before the pandemic

GM has a history of collaborative working across its towns, cities and districts, which paved the way to city-regional devolution. The strength of the relationships within this ‘red wall stronghold’ of mainly left-wing-led local governments working to create the first combined authority in England has raised the city-region’s profile and identity, and has benefitted the strategic negotiation of capital investment related to the Northern Powerhouse, an initiative aimed to rebalance geographic inequalities in productivity and support economic development across the north of England (Gilmore and Bulaitis, 2023). This initiative, choreographed by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and combined with a long-standing advocacy for culture and creative industries, provided visibility for the city-region within Westminster which resulted in £78m of central government investment in The Factory, a new home for Manchester International Festival (MIF), among other component parts of the 2014 devolution deal (Jenkins, 2015).

Manchester itself is an expert in boosterism, with a reputation for strong leadership, place-based working and advocacy at a city-region level (Localis, 2009). City leaders were familiar with the politics and discourse of creative industries and creative clusters, and the technocracy of their extrinsic powers, having come top of Richard Florida’s Creative Class Boho Index exercise in 2003, which ranked UK cities by their propensity to host the ‘creative class’ (Carter, 2003). The city claims a global track record as a cultural capital, particularly in football and music, and has a strong presence of creative industries clusters, concentrated in the city centre and areas of its neighbour city Salford (Siepel et al., 2021; Tether, 2022), including MediaCityUK, the home of BBC North and ITV Granada. The presence of clusters and ‘micro-clusters’ of creative businesses has long been a lever for targeted investment to underpin strategic development, most recently in a pilot Local Industrial Strategy (BEIS/HCLG, 2019). However, this approach exacerbated long-standing concerns around the uneven distribution of cultural investment and opportunity across the city-region, raising questions for district authorities about the value of their investment into the combined authority’s cultural budget. As a representative for Bury observed: ‘In GM, the local politicians feel that the outlying boroughs are basically housing estates for Manchester City Centre, and I think it’s easier for them to leave all that culture stuff to Manchester City Centre, rather than actually investing in it in local terms.’

Weeks before the first national lockdown, GMCA launched the Culture Fund, an investment of £8.6m over two years, designed to support a ‘balanced’ (GMCA, 2020a, p.1) portfolio of thirty-five cultural organisations representing each of the region’s ten districts. Alongside the inaugural GM town of culture (Bury Council, 2020), the portfolio is a key pillar in the GMCA culture team’s efforts to address inequality in the region’s cultural offer and to build links between GMCA, district authorities and cultural partners beyond Manchester and Salford. This progress is complemented by efforts from policy-makers across each of the ten districts to develop local cultural strategies at various stages of maturity at the start of 2020. Local cultural strategies ‘make the case’ for culture, locally and regionally, helping to secure local authority buy-in by identifying opportunities for culture to support local policy ambitions through policy attachments (Gray, 2007) to generate positive outcomes for communities, town centres and the local economy, while providing visibility for local cultural interests and identities as part of region-wide policy discussion. This work is supported by strong lines of communication between the districts and the combined authority, facilitated by bodies like the GM Arts Network, which brings together arts officers from each of the region’s districts with a remit for cultural planning and development.

Despite the influence of historical conditions that have tended to privilege the city of Manchester, there was, as a regional policy-maker observed, a strong sense that culture was ‘on an upward trend’ in the months before the pandemic, both in its legitimacy as part of wider strategy and policy development across the region, and in the inclusion of the diverse districts and communities that make up the region. Though the creative cluster model has undoubtedly helped bolster the case for culture in the region, and continues to receive political and financial support, there are clear efforts at district and combined authority levels to extend thinking about culture’s relationship to policy beyond the ‘winner-takes-all urbanism’ (Florida, 2017, p.6) of Florida’s creative class. The GM Culture Fund was led not only by the principle of economic redistribution, but also by the conviction that a healthy cultural ecosystem should transcend the values held by a small number of flagship institutions. Along with region-wide schemes like Great Place GM (2018–2021), a joint funding scheme by Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund which aimed to capacity build cultural place-making, there have been significant efforts to formalise strategic relationships between culture and substantive outcomes in other policy areas within GM, from municipal cultural strategies to the local industrial strategy for GM, which foregrounded cultural venues and creative industries clusters as economic drivers (Gilmore and Bulaitis, 2023). As a local government officer explained of their district’s plans for culture prior to the pandemic: ‘it was all about trying to establish a cultural ecology across the borough and to engage stakeholders in what that cultural ecology blueprint could and should look like’. Such initiatives were in progress at the start of 2020 and indicate a direction of travel rather than an established policy environment. Nevertheless, they reflect the approach and ambitions that were in place towards the end of 2019 and the conditions that informed the region’s response as the pandemic developed over the following years.

‘An overwhelming sense of anxiety and concern’: local impacts of a global pandemic

Established relationships between cultural organisations, supported by the region’s history of strategic cultural development, allowed for a coordinated response across the city-region, with a number of publicly funded organisations closing their doors on 20 March 2020, in advance of national guidance. Nevertheless, our research found strong similarities between the initial stages of the pandemic within GM and the broader national picture. As interviewees observed, the early weeks of the pandemic were characterised by shock and panic as cultural workers and policy-makers tackled the complete shutdown of venues and in-person activities, and a profoundly uncertain future as they waited for government advice. As the executive director of a Manchester flagship organisation explained: ‘The way that the pandemic and the restrictions that came in were handled threw everybody … into a sort of flat spin because of the lack of guidance or clear direction or structural timing.’ Local policy objectives and organisational strategies were quickly rendered untenable and alternatives during these early weeks were described as ‘kneejerk’ reactions, driven, as a combined authority representative observed, by a ‘sense of powerlessness’ reflected in testimonies from cultural workers and policy-makers across the four UK nations.

Local efforts attempted to respond to the impacts on work and jobs and the vulnerability of the freelance workforce, effects observed elsewhere which were combined with structural issues that preceded the pandemic (as described in Chapter 2). The exacerbation of already precarious conditions for large parts of the cultural sector was acknowledged by the rapid response of high-profile organisations such as the biennial MIF, which was preparing for its next festival in 2021 and prevented by the pandemic from moving to its new home, the flagship Factory building. By 18 March 2020, five days ahead of the announcement of the first national lockdown, MIF had launched a programme of online drop-in sessions for artists and freelancers offering support and resources (MIF, 2020). This was prompted by the reliance of the festival on freelance labour, but also signalled the collective concerns expressed by the proliferation of cross-organisational, cross-district initiatives that emerged in parallel in GM. As a member of the GMCA culture team explained: ‘There was the running around like headless cultural chickens, and then we go: okay, actually, we’re all doing this … Why don’t we do this together?’

As Figure 9.2 shows, the pandemic had a significant impact on workforce size for the creative and cultural industries, especially for venue-based activities during the first three quarters of 2020. Results from MCC’s annual Cultural Impact Survey suggest a 95 per cent decrease in audiences and an 84 per cent decrease in productions between 2019 and 2020 (Cultural Heritage in Action, 2022) and, as Figure 9.2 shows, sectors such as music, performing arts, visual arts, museums and galleries, where business models are most reliant on in-person participation, were those that showed an overall downward trajectory of workforce across the four quarters of 2020. Additionally, the central government’s tiered approach to managing case numbers disproportionately impacted GM as much of the northwest region was placed in ‘special measures’ with more stringent travel and social distancing restrictions for most of the second half of 2020. These conditions placed particular strain on cultural organisations and on the wider events and hospitality sector, significantly exacerbating the impact on the freelance workforce. As a local authority officer noted, the claimant rate for Universal Credit in the city increased by 100 per cent in 2020, suggesting that ‘a lot of that is younger people who might work in the creative industries but are also supplementing their incomes by working in cafés, bars, restaurants, etc.’. Workers in the cultural sector are more likely to hold two or more jobs than those in other sectors (Pasikowska-Schnass, 2019, p.8) and, as our interviewee observed, many creative workers were doubly impacted as additional, often more stable, income streams were cut off as complementary sectors such as hospitality, tourism and the night-time economy also remained closed.

Our qualitative research provides nuance to the impacts of these conditions on the region and on the pressures facing creative and cultural workers. As an executive director of a large-scale cultural organisation in Manchester observed: ‘Where we saw the biggest and most immediate impact was just an overwhelming sense of anxiety and concern from artists and the whole arts supply chain in terms of technicians, crew, freelance producers.’ These anxieties were exacerbated by the lack of clear leadership or prompt decision-making from central government in the early stages of the pandemic and continued when guidance on social distancing and public events was repeatedly revised throughout 2020 into the first half of 2021. Characterised as an exhausting series of ‘false starts’, these conditions not only made it impossible for cultural organisations to establish a coherent strategy around reopening, but eroded audience confidence as events had to be cancelled or rescheduled at short notice. Additionally, while centralised policies such as the Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) were universally welcomed, they failed to address the needs of the most vulnerable cultural workers in the region. As one freelance artist explained of the central government’s response:

There were more ‘care-full’ efforts by local government to find pragmatic solutions tailored to the needs of the region. GMCA, for instance, consulted with cultural sector partners to make an early decision to suspend agreed funding requirements for their Culture Fund portfolio, arranging immediate advance of 2020–2021 funds. MCC took similar action. As a representative explained:

For most organisations that received local funding, these steps allowed them to enter the initial stages of the pandemic with a degree of financial stability. Though anxiety over the potential longevity of the pandemic was high, these provisions clarified the expectations of their local authority partners, signalling their intention to continue support and underlining a flexibility that allowed organisations to think carefully and critically about their resources and how they might be deployed.

Described by a Manchester museum director as an ambition to ‘serve the city properly’, for most this involved a turn towards place and locality, drawing on relationships with audience groups and stakeholder communities to understand how their surrounding population was experiencing the pandemic and how the cultural sector might mitigate the worst of its impacts, even when they were outside of scope of the organisation’s normal business. This values-led response positions the cultural sector as a public service in the context of the pandemic, with unambiguous financial support from government authorities releasing various forms of social and cultural capital in support of the local population. The policy response to COVID-19 often blurred the line between cultural and social provision, including a proliferation of advice sessions for artists and creative workers; creative packs sent out to families, young people and people experiencing social isolation to keep them entertained at home; and a variety of online activities and projects including quiz nights, play readings and community groups for older people and refugees. As the artistic director of a Bolton theatre explained: ‘for some people it’s a real lifeline …. We felt very keenly the responsibility … to entertain and connect people remotely during this time.’

These informal strategies were reflected in policy responses within the city-region. GMCA’s plan for cultural recovery, published towards the end of 2020, included revised guidelines for its Culture Fund organisations that encouraged them to use their resources to ‘support the wider GM Cultural sector’ (GMCA, 2020b, p.12) by supporting individual artists and freelancers, emphasising cultural opportunities for hard-hit communities, providing opportunities for young people and reducing structural inequality in the cultural sector. Manchester’s Cultural Leader’s Group, a de facto steering group of venue and organisation directors and leaders for culture with responsibility for delivering the city’s Cultural Ambition strategy (MCC, 2016), expanded their membership, reaching beyond the city centre’s flagship organisations and subsidised sector to incorporate new members from museums, dance, comedy, marketing and photography. Activities shifted from delivering the pre-pandemic conviction that ‘international art and culture brings the greatest local benefit’ (MCC, 2016, p.1) towards local communities’ concerns and policy attachments to reinforce the relationship between cultural institutions and social goals. As a Manchester-based company director explained: ‘it feels like going local is going to be the anthem of our time when we emerge from this’.

This led to some extraordinary coordination across the sector and the city-region, including initiatives like the GM Arts Hub, to be considered shortly. However, the value of the relaxed funding restrictions for MCC Portfolio and GMCA Culture Fund organisations varied significantly depending on the circumstances of organisations and districts at the start of the pandemic. As a representative for a Manchester-based theatre explained:

For organisations that fell in the gap between local support and the introduction of national programmes like the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, Arts Council England’s emergency funding and CRF (see Chapter 1), the organisational impacts were significant, involving redundancies, scrapped work and high personal and emotional costs.

The picture varied for different local authorities. Not all ten districts had established culture teams at the start of the pandemic, and, in many cases, already limited teams were reduced further as officers were redeployed to other duties. As a representative from Wigan Council explained, ‘quite quickly we lost about 60 per cent of our team to frontline critical service delivery’. While a values-led approach to managing the pandemic helped establish what one GMCA representative described as a ‘coalition of the willing’, infrastructural issues relating to capacity and resource at organisational level limited the reach of these efforts and their benefits. As they explained: ‘when you don’t have people, that’s when it trips up … because we’re all enthusiastically on a joint mission with a completely shared purpose, and then you’ll have a district where they haven’t got staff’. The ambition to ‘serve the city’ drew on place-based networks to support understanding of the pandemic’s impacts and the sharing of knowledge, resources and expertise in ways that made a meaningful difference to organisations and to those most impacted by the pandemic, within and beyond the sector. The conditions of place, however, also defined the reach of these projects and policy interventions, indicating the limit point at which chains of communication, resource and shared value begin to break down. In the following section, we consider the relationship between the pandemic and place in more detail, looking at two projects that sought to establish and extend place-based networks in strategic response to the pandemic, and consider their impacts for cultural sector organisations, workers and audiences.

Place-based partnerships

The examples considered here are the GM Artist Hub, a region-wide network of cultural organisations established to support independent artists in response to the pandemic, and the Salford Culture and Place Partnership (SCPP), a cross-sector steering group for culture in Salford that launched its first major policy initiative, Suprema Lex (SCPP, 2020), eleven days before the first national lockdown. Though distinct in their aims, they illustrate common interests associated with place-based thinking, networks and decision-making to highlight the role and potential of an ecosystems perspective in managing sector response during the pandemic.

The GM Artist Hub was established in the early weeks of the pandemic in response to impacts on the livelihoods and wellbeing of independent artists. As a representative explained, the Hub was designed not just to offer financial support, but to provide a point of contact for artists whose relationships with the sector had been cut off: ‘they haven’t just lost income, they’ve also lost support …. They’ve lost their ability to draw on us to understand what the bigger picture might look like.’ Led in its initial stages by The Lowry, the Hub relied on partnership work undertaken by their artist development team prior to the pandemic, bringing together fourteen organisations including Manchester-based institutions such as the theatre venues of HOME and Contact, the Manchester International Festival (MIF) along with smaller partners from districts across the city-region.

Initially, the Hub was resourced through the in-kind commitment of its members, relying on contributions of knowledge and time that would adjust as the pandemic developed and in response to the circumstances of individual organisations. Described by one of its members as ‘collective responsibility, flexibly delivered’, the diversity of scale and art form across the Hub’s partners was key to the project’s ambitions, facilitating access to a range of artists, networks, resources and expertise that no single organisation would have been able to provide. This approach allowed for the rapid provision of targeted advisory, skills and information sessions, delivered by Hub members over Zoom, and longer-term fundraising initiatives that resulted in a £60,000 grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. These funds were redistributed through a series of programmes co-designed with the Freelance Task Force and the Disabled Artists Networking Community (DANC). In the eight months between April and November 2020, the Hub was able to support over 500 artists and provide group and one-on-one advisory sessions, hardship bursaries and seed-funding awards targeted at under-represented groups (GM Artist Hub, n.d.).

This was the first time that these organisations had collaborated on this scale or in these numbers; it was noted that previously there had been a tendency for building-based organisations to confine themselves to their ‘own little bubble’, with little strategic interest or relationship with other organisations in the area. This perspective is emphasised by another Hub member who identified ‘competitive barriers between organisations’ as obstacles to cross-organisational discussion around programming, development and artist support, highlighting a proprietary relationship between organisations and artists. The innovation behind the Hub was not its interest in freelancers or individual artists per se, but in the reframing of the health and resilience of local cultural ecology as a responsibility in common. As a representative explained: ‘We had to … agree that we were going to collectively work to support the artists in our community, and that that was a shared commitment.’ The outcome of this approach was not just the support of artists in need, but a reflexive reconfiguration of the local cultural ecology itself that cut across pre-existing hierarchies and divisions to deliver a collective responsibility to sector sustainability. The Hub’s logic was an inversion of Dowden’s ‘crown jewels’ paradigm (Dowden, 2020) (see Chapter 1), which aimed to shore up the cultural sector by channelling money to its most high-profile institutions; the Hub exploited the social and cultural capital of its most prominent organisations to release resource and support for the sector’s most vulnerable stakeholders. As a member explained:

By contrast, the SCPP is a network of cultural sector stakeholders established before the pandemic. An attempt to address what was described as a ‘fragmented’ local cultural sector, the partnership was established in 2019 as a strategic body for culture, linking cultural organisations such as The Lowry and Walk the Plank with corporate partners MediaCityUK and the Peel Group. Led by a dedicated partnership manager and chaired by Salford’s elected city mayor, the partnership was described as a ‘connective tissue’ for the local cultural ecology, linking the diverse interests of its partner organisations through a values-led commitment to people and place. Named after Salford City Council’s motto in Latin, ‘let the welfare of the people be the highest law’, the partnership’s cultural strategy, Suprema Lex, reflects these ambitions, committing partner organisations to ‘a vibrant and sustainable creative ecology in which experimentation, collaboration and culture are the raw materials for change-making with Salford’s people and in Salford’s places’ (SCPP, 2020, p.6).

An important public document signalling collective intent, Suprema Lex is the result of careful partnership development between the project’s members, articulating a responsibility to the city and its communities that cuts across sector and organisational boundaries. As a partner member explained: ‘There were lots of voices, but I think we all listened to each other and realised the power of collaboration. … It definitely came from the community, I think. There wasn’t one person driving it.’ It also offers a counterpoint to outcome-driven cultural development: by taking a deliberately broad and open view on what constitutes ‘culture’, including green and blue space and food heritage, Suprema Lex resembles the breadth of New Labour local cultural strategies in the early 2000s (see Gilmore, 2004) without the accompanying performance management framework. Linking the collective ambitions of the project’s partners to the production of value(s) for Salford residents, the strategy also recognises inequalities of access and participation in the proposed benefits of creative economies, and the lack of inclusion for Salford communities, some of which neighbour the large creative cluster at MediaCityUK. As an interviewee observed, Suprema Lex provides a ‘way for everybody to frame their thinking’, eroding the ‘invisible lines’ between sectors, geographies and agendas within the city.

The strategy was launched less than two weeks before the first national lockdown. Intended as a roadmap for cultural programming and investment across the city, it was rapidly reframed as a set of shared principles to guide the emergency decision-making of SCPP members. The success of this adaptability is most visible in the context of Salford Quays. Part-owned by the Peel Group and home to MediaCityUK, the Imperial War Museum North and The Lowry, the Quays has long been an important pillar in local development, implanting culture and creative industries in the place of the Quays’ former role as one of the busiest docks in the north of England. First singled out for redevelopment in 1985, the district council’s most recent plan for statutory development (Salford City Council, 2017) continues to identify the Quays as a key site for inward investment and an essential component of the city’s green infrastructure and recreational offer. Described by a district council economist as a ‘place-based sector’, the Quays was particularly vulnerable to the layered impacts of the pandemic as the visitor economy faltered and office workers in the large media and creative industries cluster stayed home. Additionally, the site has not always been accessible to city residents. Bordered by areas of high deprivation, social and economic barriers have historically limited access to the site’s cultural assets and outdoor space, while, as a representative for a Quays-based cultural organisation explained, funding relationships with GMCA have incentivised collaboration with partners in other districts in ways that have arguably disadvantaged Salford audiences.

Two projects indicate the role of the partnership and Suprema Lex in addressing these challenges. Box on the Docks sought to offer support for local artists by driving up footfall to the Quays. Led by the commercial partner MediaCityUK, the project commissioned artists to design self-contained outdoor dining spaces for safe, socially distanced use by Quays’ hospitality tenants while their premises remained closed. As a representative explained, the relationships established by SCPP were essential to the project, facilitating access to cultural networks that allowed them to work with local artists for the first time, and providing necessary knowledges about how to commission, contract and collaborate with creative workers. As they note: ‘I took lots of guidance from them on, like, the correct fee to pay somebody, making sure that the work was paid for, how we contract artists …. I learned a lot through that process.’

A second project, Mystery Bird, was a light and sound installation that travelled on the back of a flatbed truck to the streets and estates of Salford neighbourhoods. The project was led by Quays Culture, the organisation responsible for public arts engagement at the Quays, including free-to-access outdoor events such as the annual Lightwaves light festival. As the representative noted, the pandemic presented an opportunity to ‘kind of blow that all apart’, positioning Suprema Lex as a framework which looked beyond the geographical boundary of the Quays and found new ways to bring accessible art out to communities, in line with the policy’s commitment to putting ‘people at the centre’ (SCPP, 2020, pp.20–21) of cultural planning and delivery. While Quays Culture had long been concerned with ‘audiences that might never have felt that Salford Quays was for them’, it took the pandemic to create the impetus to recalibrate audience development and take arts investment out to residents within their neighbourhoods.

Discussion

These examples demonstrate creative local responses to the varied impacts of the pandemic and the ways in which they map onto local and regional characteristics of place, including people, networks, geographies and policies. They also illustrate the ways in which the pandemic made visible otherwise implicit interdependencies that characterise cultural ecologies and point towards the longer-term implications of the pandemic for the regional ecosystem. Following Peter Haas, the networks considered above indicate the significant presence and influence of ‘epistemic communities’, defined as: ‘a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’ (Haas, 1992, p.3).

As Haas notes, in contrast to national level policy analysis, the framework of epistemic communities is preoccupied with human agency, ‘articulating the cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems’ (1992, p.2). The effects of the pandemic galvanised epistemic governance within GM, creating vehicles such as the GM Arts Hub and activating the principles of Suprema Lex and the SCPP in bringing local expertise to inform decision-making and create place-based responses which aimed to overcome the increased precarity of creative workers and the entrenched issues of accessibility within the city-region.

The attributes of epistemic communities matter not only in sharing expertise within relational networks (as is described in Chapter 6 in the case of Northern Ireland) but also in attracting further resources, such as the CRF. Analysis of Rounds One and Two of the CRF shows that of the grants distributed up until April 2021, the GM city-region dominated the broader north-west, receiving 60 per cent of all funds awarded to the region (Barker et al., 2021). As interviewees in local and regional government explained, this success was not a coincidence. Rather, significant, coordinated attention was turned towards maximising funding for the region. As a representative for MCC explained: ‘ahead of every round of CRF we organised webinars for our cultural organisations in the city to give them advice on how to apply and what to apply for … they were targeted mainly at small, independent organisations which may have never applied for Arts Council funding before.’ We saw these efforts repeated across local authorities, with sector-led bodies such as the GM Arts Hub and the Manchester-based Cultural Leaders Group undertaking similar work. Distributed across 175 organisations, almost 75 per cent of funds awarded to the region went to organisations based in Manchester, of which over 25 per cent comprised capital for building projects, including £21m for the flagship Factory venue alone. Some organisations also accessed public funds for the first time, with 75 per cent of funds to the city centre going to organisations that were not regularly funded by Arts Council England through their NPOs.

More broadly, however, recovery funding followed where funding had gone before, with twenty-nine of forty-one NPOs and twenty-five of thirty-five GM Culture Fund organisations receiving awards from the first two rounds (Walmsley et al., 2022, p.3), with this pattern represented more broadly across England (see Figure 9.3). To some extent, this analysis indicates the presence (or absence) of existing arts and cultural infrastructure, and the efficacy of this national policy in bringing funds to areas and organisations in need. It also highlights the realities of the ‘pecking order’ identified by Banks and O’Connor (2021), with resources channelled to organisations with the highest levels of cultural, political and economic capital. The establishment and privileging of knowledge networks within places – in this case Greater Manchester and, particularly, Manchester itself – has been critical in promoting the sector regionally and supporting the local ecosystem during the pandemic. These conditions also indicate a correlation between epistemic communities and the reproduction of structural, place-based inequalities.

Figure 9.3Relationship between Arts Council England funding to National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) and Culture Recovery Fund, in each English local authority

Our case studies illustrate the ways in which sector response during the pandemic might be seen to disrupt this equilibrium and the possibility of longer-term change in the epistemic registers that structure and inform cultural policy and ecologies at the regional level. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, community is always a strategic discourse of inclusion and exclusion, offering visibility and agency to its members while making epistemological, if not actual, enemies of those on the outside (2006, p. 14). The projects considered above trouble the long-standing logics, networks and values that have historically determined thresholds of inclusion and exclusion in GM’s epistemic communities. Operating as an arm’s-length body for culture within its own district, SCPP brings together organisations such as the outdoor arts company Walk the Plank, whose thirty years of practice can be linked to the legacy of the British alternative theatre movement and the counter-cultural ambitions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Peel Group, one of the region’s most prominent property developers. Where contemporary policy contexts can often be characterised by economic priorities that dictate culture’s value and significance (Throsby, 2010), SCPP makes explicit the relational and interdependent qualities of cultural policy to bring different value systems together by inviting stakeholders from across the local cultural ecosystem into the same room. This opens up the range of perspectives on how culture is understood and managed in the district, positioning policy as a responsive, dynamic outcome of the partnership itself. As a member noted: ‘everyone seems to have a voice at the table … it feels democratic in that way to me … it feels supportive’. The GM Arts Hub, similarly, sought to extend local epistemic boundaries by repositioning cultural workers as stakeholders in the health and survival of the cultural ecosystem. Another member explained that breaking down competitive barriers between organisations was key to increasing the representation of artists within the decision-making processes of the Hub and Hub members:

In both cases, these projects extended the practices of inclusion and representation that challenge or complicate the ‘normative behaviours’ that Haas (1992) suggests are characteristic of epistemic communities and their approach to managing change: while epistemic communities are usually legitimised through the training, prestige and reputation of their members, here the reputations of GM epistemic communities are being used to authorise new discourses in value, decision-making and policy.

The experiences of our interviewees suggest the pandemic facilitated, or perhaps more aptly wrenched, a dynamic reconsideration of values and productivity relationships across the local ecosystem. The GM Artist Hub explicitly promoted an interconnected view of cultural sector activity, positioning a commitment to collective responsibility as a barrier to entry for the project’s partners. In contrast to the discrete organisational agendas that were characteristic of the region’s cultural ecology prior to the pandemic, the Hub positions the support and welfare of independent artists and freelance workers as a legitimate outcome of organisational activity. More broadly, this shift echoes Holden’s framing of the cultural sector as a ‘cycle of regeneration’ (Holden, 2015, p.27), in which the outcomes of investment are not lost but are recirculated within the wider cultural ecosystem.

SCPP might be allied with similar developments. As a representative for MediaCityUK observed, Box on the Docks provided ‘proof of concept’ to corporate partners that investment in culture could be mutually beneficial. More specifically, it traced these benefits onto place, as a demonstration case which links financial investment from private partners with positive outcomes for city residents. As the interviewee observed: ‘There’s a realisation from developers – property developers – that actually the days have gone where you can just rent an office without stuff happening in the actual place.’ Notably, what this project proposes is a multivalent interpretation of value that promotes simultaneous benefit for corporate investors, city residents, artists and the wider cultural ecology as a principle of future policy development. Though these developments emerged in specific response to the conditions of the pandemic, the prominence of the cultural sector in the city-region indicates a potential for significant, sustainable change. As an interviewee with responsibility for city-centre development observed: ‘the cultural sector very much leads itself and our job is to support it in the way that they want to be supported’. These newly configured communities, then, have the potential to build on the strength of the cultural sector prior to the pandemic to devise a future for local cultural policy that remains attentive to the relationships considered here.

Conclusion

Taking a qualitative ecosystems approach to the exceptional case of GM (Dunn and Gilmore, 2021), this chapter has described how the pandemic lockdown restrictions and the abrupt end they brought to business as normal in GM shifted the balance of power from national policy responses of the central government in England, characterised by indecision and by inadequate consideration of the precarious situation of the freelance creative and cultural workforce, to the local epistemic communities involved in cultural programming, resource allocation and strategic decision-making. Through rich, in-depth qualitative research with policy practitioners, political representatives and arts and cultural leaders which drew on the collaboration of research partners, we have identified the significance of approaches that recognise creative and cultural ecosystems and their complexities as a heuristic framework through which to identify interdependency. Importantly, the relational dynamics of ecosystems revealed by taking this approach, alongside this protracted period of uncertainty, facilitated conditions for experimentation, unlikely new allegiances and collective action. They also foregrounded values-led responses which, given the economic instability created by the pandemic, shifted policy rationales from economic and private interest to the cultural sector’s role as a public service, supporting local communities through acts of care and the animation of Covid-safe public spaces and individual creative practitioners with opportunities for employment and subsidy.

The cultural networks and partnerships extant in our case study ecosystem were facilitated by strong political buy-in from a predominantly left-wing complex of local and city-regional government, familiar with narrative discourse on both economic and social returns of arts and cultural investment and mobilised by the challenges of the pandemic to seek collective solutions that could demonstrate further value to both public and private interests. These were represented by local authority policy attachments aimed at addressing not just cultural matters but also economic deprivation, isolation and social exclusion, the strategic aims of national funding bodies such as Arts Council England, whose job it was to effectively distribute public funds to sustain the sector through the crisis, and also the corporate interests of major asset holders and property developers, alongside private companies within the creative industries, events, hospitality and night-time economies.

We argue that the presence of epistemic communities and their connectivity through local partnerships, hubs and networks allowed policy innovations attempting to address existing problems which were surfaced by the pandemic. These included the contingency of creative and cultural production on freelance workers, with their attendant lack of protection for labour and economy, and the inherent problem within arts audience development created by the expectation that audiences should overcome spatial, social and economic barriers by leaving their neighbourhoods to attend dedicated flagship buildings. We also argue that the presence of these networks of expertise and their support by local government aided increased resource development as CRFs were successfully attracted to the city-region, albeit disproportionately favouring Manchester’s city centre. Furthermore, we identify how the involvement of corporate partners within some of these partnerships has led to the sharing of new practices and knowledges that may inform future strategic collaboration, overturning the lack of attention historically given by landlords and property owners to the potential of cultural animation and inclusive place-making for mutual benefit to people and place.

There are caveats and limitations to these observations, however. The return to ‘normal’ operating conditions after the lifting of restrictions in July 2021 has seen an exhausted and somewhat traumatised cultural sector attempting to sustain these innovations alongside the ‘digital pivot’ and ‘pivot to the civic’ (Walmsley et al., 2022), amid continued uncertainties over audience return and retention, turmoil in national government and immanent economic recession, never mind global concerns of climate change, food security and international diplomatic relations. Further challenges remain both locally and national, such as the entrenched structural inequalities of the creative and cultural sector (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2020; Comunian and England, 2020), an overreliance on ‘trickle down’ and the ‘gravitational pull’ of elite institutions and their presence (and absence) in cities and towns which continued to skew arts investment even during the pandemic (Johnson, Gilmore and Dunn, 2021; see also Chapter 2). Likewise, public–private partnerships for cultural and high-street recovery require caution as identified by the critics of cultural policy instrumentalisation (e.g. Gray, 2007; McGuigan, 2009; Belfiore, 2020), as well as careful regulation and intervention from local governance to ensure that social responsibility rather than profit is the primary motivation for participation and to avoid the pitfalls of gentrification and social exclusion. These are continuing challenges for cultural policy locally, nationally and internationally as post-pandemic place-based approaches aim to maximise the benefits of cultural funding for broader regeneration and economic recovery, and arts and cultural organisations hope to find sustainable ways to plug income gaps and innovate their business models. Such approaches can, we argue, learn valuable policy lessons from the exceptional case of GM and the relations of its creative and cultural ecosystem.