‘What the COVID-19 pandemic teaches societies is that, in times of crisis, culture is a major resource for resilience, connection and recovery (even when the forms of engagement for creators, producers and audiences are in flux).’ The UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Culture introduced a 2022 report seeking to ‘reshape’ policies for creativity and cement ideas of culture as a ‘public good’ with these words (UNESCO, 2022: 30). As an ambition, this resonates strongly with the contents and the aims of this collected volume of work.

The nine chapters that follow reflect on and look forward from research conducted during the pandemic that examined the intersections between arts and culture, nature, community, and health and wellbeing. The field of arts, health and wellbeing is a relatively new but expanding field for scholarship, policymaking and service delivery. It is an explicitly interdisciplinary realm that involves health, social and cultural sector colleagues. Activity in this area has been developing over the past three decades with growing numbers of research clusters in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia.

In the UK, a seminal report: Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing was launched in 2017. This documented the widespread use of arts and creative approaches to support a range of physical and mental health conditions, across the lifespan, advocating for their increased use and further research. It arose from a two-year review led by the All-Party Parliamentary Group: Arts, Health and Wellbeing, a cross-(political) party initiative that documented relevant activity and held a series of events, developing and establishing the field. Since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has commissioned a scoping review of literature in the arts and health field (Fancourt and Finn, 2019) and Arts Council England has published a ten-year strategy, Let’s Create (2020), that advocates increased diversity in the sector and acknowledges the role of arts and culture in supporting health and wellbeing. In 2020, the National Centre for Creative Health was established, a charitable enterprise aiming to increase research evidence, to lobby policymakers and to improve practice. To give a sense of the global scale of activity, the National Organization for Arts in Health (NOAH) was established in the USA in 2016 to ‘unite, advance, and serve the field of arts in health’¹ and in Australia the Australian Centre for Arts and Health promotes the use of arts for health and wellbeing. The international journal Arts and Health has a growing audience with a 43 per cent increase in downloaded articles in 2022–23 and an increasing number of submissions from global majority scholars including from India and China.

Alongside these strategic developments in England, the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance provides collaborative advocacy, support and resources across the creative health sector. The National Academy for Social Prescribing (NASP) was launched in 2019 to develop and champion the use of social prescribing, the use of community-based non-medical approaches to support long term and chronic conditions such as loneliness and obesity.

Overall, this activity shows that the field of arts, health and wellbeing is growing and thriving. The research evidence underpinning the field is also developing fast with increased funding supporting larger and more ambitious collaborative studies. International cooperation is benefitting the field by widening definitions of what constitutes arts and creativity, and wellbeing, in diverse populations. This will benefit global majority communities as well as racialised groups and diaspora populations in the West. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique and challenging opportunity to explore the role of arts and culture and its use in responding to a global public health emergency. As editors we have sought to bring together a series of diverse contributions that reference both the creative strategies employed by individuals and communities to manage responses to the pandemic, and the role of creativity, and of arts and culture. Our aim is that this will serve to spotlight learning emerging from COVID response research in this area and, through this, support continued critical reflection on concepts such as ‘coping’, ‘resilience’ and the role and nature of creativity in times of crisis.

The concept of everyday creativity has influenced developments in the field. Everyday creativity or ‘little c’ creativity refers to actions performed daily that involve making and novelty, for example baking and knitting. In 2016, Arts Council England published a report on everyday creativity that aimed to make art and creative practice more inclusive and accessible, to benefit the wider community (64 Million Artists, 2016). The confinement and restrictions that most people experienced during the pandemic led to new light being shone on home-based and community creative practices; it indicated that these venues can provide an important context for instances of everyday creativity that are also shaped by wider social, cultural and economic forces (Mansfield et al., 2022). While this attention may help democratise creative practices that provide and inspire wellbeing, they also reflect and bring to our attention inequalities, for example the impact of poor-quality accommodation and lack of access to green space (Wright, 2022).

Coping is a psychological construct that encompasses cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage and overcome stressful situations. It is often categorised in terms of the types of strategies used by individuals which can be either emotion or problem focused. Emotion-focused coping includes internal responses to minimise stress such as avoidance and reappraisal whereas problem-focused strategies represent active behavioural attempts to address a stressor and find solutions such as seeking information or taking action. Problem-focused strategies are often thought to be more successful than emotion-focused coping. However, it is much more nuanced than that as factors such as developmental stage and culture play an important role. There is a body of evidence supporting the important role that coping plays when humans experience stress and trauma that can otherwise overwhelm them.

Various research studies explored coping used during the pandemic. These showed, for example, that experience of financial worry was associated with problem-focused and avoidant (emotion-focused) coping while overall, social support was used less which may reflect the social isolation that many experienced (Fluharty and Fancourt, 2021). People took to walking in green spaces as a way of coping during the pandemic (Mental Health Foundation, 2020), and the WHO issued #HealthyatHome guidance advising individuals to use and maintain their social support networks and to minimise or avoid alcohol and drug use. Arts, craft and creative activities were taken up by many as part of coping lifestyles, used to distract from anxiety and to manage stress (Bradbury et al., 2021).

Resilience – how we recover from trauma and our capacity to bounce back from stressful conditions – is another key psychological concept of relevance to this text. As the UNESCO Assistant Director-General’s quote with which we opened attests, culture should be viewed as ‘a major resource for resilience’. According to the American Psychological Association, resilience refers to ‘the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands’.²

Within the mental health field, it is recognised that building and maintaining resilience is important to protect an individual when stressors are experienced, to help them cope successfully and to recover. As well as helping us successfully respond and adapt to stress and trauma, resilience can involve personal growth such as re-evaluating one’s priorities, as many people did during the pandemic, for example establishing a better work-life balance. Therefore, it is possible that our lives can change for the better after experiencing trauma; this is referred to as post-traumatic growth (Joseph, 2012). A South American study undertaken during the pandemic indicated that creative activities that were practised during lockdown, supported psychological resilience (Elisondo, 2021). Several chapters in this volume reflect on the understanding that as a concept, ‘resilience’ is not uncontentious, particularly when applied beyond the realm of individual psychology, since structural conditions will severely limit the capacity of individuals to ‘bounce back’. For example, the idea of ‘community resilience’ is examined in depth in Chapter 5 and the politics of the term in relation to the pressures placed on healthcare staff in Chapter 8.

Each of the following chapters demonstrates, how, during the pandemic, arts and creative practitioners and cultural and community organisations worked to promote interaction or connection and to create spaces with the potential to support coping or to enable individual and community recovery. In doing so, they identify important lessons for policy and for practice in the arts as well as for provision of health and care. Readers will find many of these highlighted in the ‘Key insights’ sections at the end of each chapter. The impacts of COVID-19 on health and wellbeing have not been felt equally across society. Threaded through all the contributions is an attentiveness to the experiences and voices of people marginalised or rendered vulnerable during the pandemic because of their lived experiences of structural inequalities, or because of mental or physical ill-health or age. Several authors ask explicitly that readers consider how society and its structures might build on these experiences; specifically, they present case studies and detailed examples to show how arts, culture and other community assets can be mobilised to enable greater and more equal access to resources and skills beneficial in helping develop resilience now, and if or when we face similar crises.

The volume is divided into three thematic sections. The first deals with isolation and its opposite, connection or ‘togetherness’. The second includes explorations of some places and spaces in or through which people met, moved, or engaged in cultural or creative activity together to support their wellbeing. The third and final section outlines some lessons for future practice.

As we note above, research has shown that increased individual engagement in creative activities of many kinds was both a response to lockdown conditions and a tool used by some to successfully enhance their health and wellbeing. Through participation in virtual creative communities such as online choirs or art groups, it also served to maintain and even increase social connection. Enforced and repeated lockdowns encouraged creative practitioners used to in-person working to find new ways to work with or alongside their participants. In the chapter by Rabya Mughal and colleagues the focus is on how creative, community and cultural activities helped to combat loneliness and social isolation for individuals considered most ‘vulnerable’. The Community COVID project examined the creative experiences of people who self-identified in this way during the pandemic, along with the experiences of social prescribing practitioners and voluntary and community sector organisations working to connect people with and through creative activity. The authors reflect on these experiences, their meaning for individuals and what they tell us about how to identify the value of creative activity. Their conclusions provide insights to inform the use and positioning of community assets to serve those facing severe inequalities of health and opportunity now and in the future.

Inverting the notion of isolation, Matthew Reason has chosen to interrogate the meanings and experiences of ‘togetherness’. Deployed in ‘we’re all in this together’ slogans and political rhetoric to convey the need for individual sacrifice to enable national public good, the idea of ‘togetherness’ became contested ground during and following the pandemic, given the manifest truth that its impacts were far from equitable. Working in contexts that included learning disability, mental health, care homes and young people, during COVID-19, the Creative Doodle Book project expanded community arts activity through online workshops and into autonomous and private spaces. Reason shows how the careful relational processes used by practitioners involved in the project helped to create authentic moments of connection, employing novel online and physical modalities. The results, he argues, are suggestive of how arts practice can better enable inclusion but also pose difficult questions about practices that exclude and isolate.

From discussions of how creative arts practice connected individuals through building valued temporary communities during the pandemic, we move into our volume’s middle section where the focus is on places and spaces. In these chapters we explore urban green spaces, environments that can be ‘walked’, museums and literary heritage sites. Authors describe independent engagement in and with these spaces. They outline activities and opportunities and that were facilitated or mediated through artists, and through cultural and voluntary sector organisations. Inequalities of access and adaptations that had to be made to address these in response to pandemic conditions, are common themes.

The section opens with a chapter from Dee Heddon and her fellow authors, reporting on research exploring how adults across the UK experienced walking during the pandemic and the role played by creativity in their walking practices. Employing the concept of ‘just walking’, the authors address questions of equity and justice in examining some of the systemic barriers that face those who walk or wish to walk. Creativity is shown to have been integral in challenging such barriers and in opening up spaces and creating opportunities for individuals and groups to connect with each other; the chapter includes discussion of commissioned art projects foregrounding public and private acts of walking and reflection upon these.

Green space and whether or not people had access to it took on particular significance during the pandemic; in urban environments, public green spaces became vitally important places in which people could exercise, meet socially in ways that were planned or serendipitous and in which they could seek to relieve stress. Qian Sun and colleagues discuss the challenges and opportunities involved in making greater use of natural urban spaces to support wellbeing. In a detailed case study of Walsall in the West Midlands, their research uncovers a fascinating and complex ecosystem of overlapping jurisdictions, collaborations and sometimes competing interests that are governing how natural urban spaces are viewed and valued by different stakeholders as well as how they are managed and used.

When lockdowns forced museum and gallery buildings to close at various points during the pandemic, the work of their staff did not cease. Many museum organisations focused on the digital space and some pivoted ‘towards purpose and people’, leaning into their participation and engagement strands and taking their work out and into their surrounding communities (Walmsley et al., 2022). Friel and colleagues invite readers back into the physical space of the museum itself; they examine the potential contribution of cultural and heritage spaces to recovery in the context of the pandemic and past and future crises. The projects the authors describe took place in Northern Ireland, and the authors ask us to consider what the conduct of this thoughtful work reveals about how spaces within museum buildings could and – perhaps should – be constituted as ‘restorative’: places in which trauma can be ‘held’ and individual and community stories safely told and retold.

In the final chapter in this section, David Rudrum and Helen Williams describe the impacts of the pandemic on the literary heritage sector, demonstrating how it continued to offer experiences of value to its visitors despite long periods of physical closure. Alongside virtual tours, the sector increased its use and promotion of outdoor spaces such as gardens, grounds and natural landscapes. In doing so, organisations were able to embrace the public’s evidenced increased interest in exploring interior psychological spaces of imagination and memory through books and reading and their desire to escape physical pandemic restrictions by moving into the outdoors. The wellbeing benefits of reading and engagement with natural environments are well understood, and this chapter suggests significant opportunities for the literary heritage sector to continue building on these understandings. Organisations are encouraged to engage more deeply with their local publics in blurring the divide between culture and nature.

The three chapters in the volume’s third and final section provide in-depth examples of adapted creative practice during COVID. There are distinct lessons here for health and care delivery, for researchers, for arts and cultural organisations and for policymakers. People living with dementia were among those to have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. They experienced high levels of illness and mortality, and many were denied the social and physical contact that is essential to wellbeing during successive lockdowns and because of COVID mitigation measures. Arts and cultural practitioners and organisations have worked closely throughout with people with dementia and their professional and informal carers with the aim of alleviating some of the pandemic’s worst effects. In their chapter for this volume, Asker and colleagues examine what we can learn from Culture Box, a project that provided care home residents and staff with stimulating creative activities and resources designed to enhance social interaction. The chapter explores how these resources were used and their effects for people living with dementia and their professional carers. It also highlights the methodological innovation required of researchers in capturing these understandings. The authors outline an agenda for future practice that encompasses care, creativity and research.

Healthcare is an emotionally and physically demanding profession, and during the pandemic healthcare professionals found themselves facing often overwhelming pressures, with implications for their own wellbeing. Many reported that communication and relationship building, key elements of good patient care, were being compromised by the safety and infection control restrictions brought in during the pandemic. Building on many years of practice working in the field, the chapter from Suzy Willson and her colleagues (a combined team of researchers, artists and healthcare professionals) presents the findings of a project exploring the use of arts-based strategies derived from the skills and knowledge held by poets, theatre-makers, musicians, digital artists and dancers to address some of these challenges.

Moving from examples of innovative creative practice within health and care settings, in our final chapter, we highlight a project that takes a whole city region as its subject. The work of Josie Billington and her fellow authors highlights how the arts and cultural sector across Liverpool responded to the pandemic, including through novel solutions designed to support those already facing health and mental health inequalities. Mapping these responses across large civic institutions to small grassroots enterprises, their research also gathered the views of those benefitting from ongoing provision about how their mental health and wellbeing had been impacted because of changes to arts and cultural provision during lockdowns. What emerges is a picture of a dynamically responsive regional arts in health infrastructure, capable of adapting at speed and of delivering positive outcomes for individuals and communities.

Arts and humanities research conducted during the pandemic has illustrated how, through re-orienting and adapting existing resources and creating new ones, arts and cultural organisations and grassroots voluntary and community groups were able to address issues relating to wellbeing, mental and physical health and social support of individuals and of communities during the crisis. As the summaries above suggest, the chapters included in this volume will provide an insight into the breadth and depth of this research activity, but they do only represent a subset of it. Other projects not represented here but brought together under the umbrella of Pandemic and Beyond explored how families and individuals used and adapted their domestic spaces. Researchers studied the creative adaptations made by faith communities, and they sought to understand the social benefits of ritual during the pandemic. They examined the impact of the shift to the digital on arts workers and on young people taking part in arts activity. They supported young people and community groups to develop their criticality, agency and feelings of belonging through developing creative skills. Despite such diversity, it is important to recognise that there were limitations created by the nature of the funding call and the Pandemic and Beyond project itself (details of which are described in the series introduction which opens this volume). Although you are about to read chapters from authors who were based across the United Kingdom, many funded projects were conducted in England or had an English focus. And while we are certain they will hold implications for work internationally, the research we describe here is UK-based.

Taken as a corpus however, these essays speak to calls that, as a society and globally, we should learn from the pandemic by strengthening and expanding community-led social and local cultural infrastructures because they can support services that are vital to health and wellbeing (including health, care and education), as well as by valuing the everyday creative skills that have proved fundamental for many in negotiating their way through the crisis. Communities that went into the pandemic with this infrastructure already developed and networked through historic investment were better placed to respond and recover when crisis hit (British Academy, 2021; Walmsley et al., 2022). Whether or not these calls are answered with action remains to be seen, however the examples presented by work in this volume support a sense of cautious optimism. In part this is because they so convincingly demonstrate the capacity of cultural, creative and community practice for adaptation and change, and for compassion, when called upon to support those needing it most.