The Art School and the Culture Shed

Published by The Centre for Useless SplendourKingston University, Grange RoadKingston upon ThamesSurrey KT1 2QJ Talk organised by Dean KenningAssisted by Sian Milliner & Aleksandra ZavjalovaSound recorded by Natalia RemfeldTranscribed by Gloria Bassoli

Edited by John BeckBook designed by Rebecca Halverson Printed in England by Aldgate Press, London Texts © the authors 2014Photographs © Matthew Cornford 2014First Published 2014Edition of 500

ISBN 978-1-908811-09-7

Supported by:University of Brighton Kingston University The Stanley Picker Trust University of Westminster

The Art School and the Culture ShedJohn Beck and Matthew Cornford

This book grows out of a talk given as part of the 2012 Stanley Picker Public Lectures on Art programme hosted by the School of Fine Art at Kingston University. John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s project to find the lost art schools of Britain had its origins in an unexpected encounter. While on a trip to Great Yarmouth, Matthew visited the local art college he and John attended in the early 1980s, only to find the abandoned and dilapidated building up for sale. This got them thinking – what had become of other local art schools around the country? Where were these relatively unknown and under-discussed places? And how many existed prior to decades-long processes of institutional amalgamation, academic standardisation, local authority sell-offs, and privatisations? John and Matthew’s ongoing project opens up a hidden world, one which connects the study of art to specific places, to local industries and communities, in ways which seem quite alien to us today. And yet these images of often very beautiful art school buildings, now reused, boarded up, privately owned, or absent from the spaces they once occupied, should not lead one to read John and Matthew’s project as an exercise in nostalgia. As emblems of something lost, they speak of matters closer to hand.

In contrasting the demise of the local art school with the rise of the ‘cultural quarter’, John and Matthew show how changes in the landscape of art education are not separate from wider neoliberal developments in the UK. As they point out, regeneration through an appeal to ‘culture’ often has little interest in nurturing forms of organically emerging art or culture, but usually involves manufacturing

Introduction

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highly controlled spaces intended for retail and high-yield property development. Such spaces conform to what David Harvey once described as a shift of emphasis in local planning from the amelioration of conditions in a particular ‘territory’ to the speculative construction of ‘place’ as leverage for private capital investment. Iconic public art works, prestigious contemporary art galleries, and all manner of ‘culture sheds’ have appeared up and down the country in the last two decades. Such developments may put an area ‘on the map’, but often at a significant cost to sections of the local population and small businesses driven out by rising property values and rents. Since the recession, funding for the arts has been radically cut and is now rationalised purely in terms of financial returns, while the fee hike to £9000 a year for undergraduates, sold as a personal investment on the promise of higher earnings in some unspecified future, makes the already precarious proposition of an arts career untenable for many. Both the withdrawal of the government block grant to universities and the current devaluation of art and design in secondary education conspire against art provision in poorer institutions less capable of ‘competing’ for students. It is not just the old art schools that have gone but also the spirit of publicly supported art education that enabled them to function.

What seems particularly valuable about John and Matthew’s analysis of the local art school is the way it conjoins two distinctive features which are too often viewed as opposed: locality and difference, the everyday and the extraordinary. A marketised and deregulated

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educational environment that uncouples services from the duties and responsibilities of a genuine public sector does not have to, and is therefore unlikely to, foster a sense of social embeddedness and non-instrumentalised creative adventure. So while some of the new ‘alternative’ art courses may promote a more ‘old school’ creative ethos or even hold radical pedagogical ambitions, the danger, if not the inevitability, is that they remain cut off culturally, accessible only to those with a high degree of existing symbolic art capital. By contrast, what the local art school – whether in reality or as an idea – once pointed toward was the possibility, in towns up and down the country, of exploring, through art education, a range of skills, values, and practices that might constitute a creative way of life that was not partitioned off and franchised out as a cultural facility. While the demise of the local art school began decades ago, the current drive to privatise arts and humanities education sharpens our sense, as John and Matthew suggest, ‘that we are standing among the ruins of publicly endorsed and publicly situated art schooling and all that might mean in terms of critical and cultural enrichment and diversity’.

Part of that enrichment is the chance to be stationary, to assume an eccentric or intransigent position in relation to supposedly inevitable change and adaptation to ‘present day realities’; it is the rooted stance required for critical contemplation, and the persistent attention to something which may lead nowhere, which may present itself as lost or devalued, but which nevertheless seems important. For Walter Benjamin it is the imperative not to get caught up

in the storm called progress. In the field of education in the UK today, we all know what ‘progress’ means. By contrast, what art tutors sometimes tell their students, that the time they spend on the course represents a (perhaps unrepeatable) ‘luxury’ – the time and space allowed to experiment, to get lost in thought, to make mistakes, to follow intuitive pathways and to invent oneself – should be understood in the best possible sense of the word. We would do well to extend, rather than diminish, the time of critical questioning, material transformation, creative invention, heterogeneity and non-conformity that art education at its best enables. John and Matthew’s project explores what there was and what there is; what we need are real alternatives to both.

Dean Kenning, November 2013

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JOHN BECK: Matthew has worked in art schools continuously for the best part of 30 years, whereas I’ve spent about the same amount of time in university English departments. When I left school, though, I went to Great Yarmouth College of Art & Design in Norfolk. I had never thought of going to university, but growing up in Great Yarmouth this building next to the park was a powerful presence during my formative years. Stuff was going on there that didn’t seem to be going on anywhere else. The art school was near where I lived and everything that interested me seemed to somehow be housed in that building. It was close at hand, an affordable place to study, and it was full of people like me – I thought – that might send me off somewhere else. So, unlike most 18-year-olds today, university really wasn’t on my mind but art school was.

Matthew and I have been thinking more intensively of the place of art schools in post-war British culture for about three years, and it started with this shared experience of small-town art schools and the formative influence of those environments. We were aware of how pervasive the influence of art school has been throughout British popular culture, especially in the post-war period, and we also had a sense of how strange it now seems that most towns in the UK used to have an art school like those we attended. Both of us had long since moved away from this early educational experience, and to a large extent repressed it. It was off the CV, superseded by notionally more credible institutions and qualifications. Yet most people with any kind of art school education,

The Art School and the Culture Shed

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until recently, would have started their studies somewhere near at hand like Great Yarmouth. These entry-level institutions might have been the first step towards further study at more prestigious art schools, but for many people this was the main or only experience of further or higher education. Art school was not necessarily a stepping-stone; it was the place to gain practical training in preparation for work.

So while the big metropolitan art schools get all the attention, British creative activity for many years was, as we came to see it, seeded in towns all across the country, in unlikely places like Great Yarmouth. Like our own forgotten art school beginnings, however, the details get very sketchy after that point. If you dig around online in the biographies of artists, designers or musicians, formative educational experiences are often unspecific and hazy. It’s not uncommon to read lines such as ‘after studying at the local art school he went on to the Royal College of Art’; or ‘she attended the local art school before taking up a place at Chelsea College of Art’. But where are these local art schools? ‘Art school’ becomes this generic signifier of some kind of absent local presence. Why wasn’t anybody talking about these places and why have they become invisible?

As recently as the 1980s, Simon Frith and Howard Horne could still write that in Britain every small town had its art school, but there are now only a handful of dedicated Schools of Art & Design in the UK. All the others have been amalgamated, relocated, re-used, closed, sold off and demolished. Matthew and I know this because we’ve

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set about trying to find them. In many cases, they’ve completely fallen off the map. Old course directories provide lists of institutional addresses and local history publications often have the odd photograph, but beyond that the record is very thin. While the material sites have been forgotten, the kind of life that went on inside the art schools is even harder to locate. What interested Frith and Horne in the 1980s was not the complex reality of maintaining buildings, balancing budgets, retaining students or developing research programmes. Instead, they were interested in the environmental and affective aspects of the local art school environment, and the way that ‘Art School’, as a term, carries a significance greater than the institution it actually describes: a sense of possibility or world view, what they call ‘commitment to a working practice, to a mode of learning which assumes the status of a lifestyle’.1 The term lifestyle has become degraded since Frith and Horne were writing in the early 1980s, and it’s become synonymous with consumption, but I think what they are really talking about here is lifestyle as a culture in the best sense of the word; that art school embodies a certain distinctive cultural formation. This is close to the definition of culture given by someone like Raymond Williams, who suggests that culture is ‘a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour’.2 So the stress on lifestyle by Frith and Horne is intended, we think, to describe an embedded, organic experience or practice-driven creativity. The idea of art school as a culture, as a way of life, is why, especially in the post-war period, ‘Art School’ as a signifier in the UK

has come to mean much more than the often quite prosaic day-to-day experience of being at art school suggests. The idea of art school permeated British culture to a large degree because there were so many, because they were available, and because so many people went there. While large cities don’t necessarily need art schools to foster the kind of creative lifestyles that Frith and Horne are talking about, small towns are another matter. The removal of the art school from British town centres, however it is justified in economic and educational terms, has, we think, eliminated a vital space where exploratory creative practice could be sited inside the everyday, positioned both as an extension of and as a challenge to, the quotidian. And it is the loss of this civic function of the art school that we believe is the greatest: the loss of the mode of working practice that assumes the status of a lifestyle.

Although the dismantling of provincial art schools in the UK was already occurring in the 1960s, the privatisation of Arts & Humanities education currently being imposed on us sharpens, I think, the sense that we are standing among the ruins of publicly supported and publicly situated art schooling and all that might mean in terms of critical and cultural enrichment and diversity. What Matthew and I have been doing is investigating where the art schools were, and what they are now.

MATTHEW CORNFORD: I have a photograph of Great Yarmouth College of Art as it was when John and I attended it in the early 1980s, and another as it was in 2008. After many years away I was shocked when I

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returned to see that the building had fallen into quite a serious state of disrepair. The art school had been closed for a number of years, the beautiful stained glass windows had been smashed, and most disturbing for me was that it was actually for sale for £700,000. So the building where John and I and a number of friends began our careers – not to mention the thousands of others who had attended the art school over the previous 80 years – was now on the market.3 This spurred us on to ask whether what had happened in Great Yarmouth was a just a one-off or part of a national picture.

We needed to get a handle on how many art schools there had once been in the UK. We could remember and name only a few, mainly the well-known London art schools, but we found in a directory in the Institute of Education that there had once been 180 recognised art schools and, to put it into perspective, 28 universities. In 2011, by our estimation (though these categories are a bit slippery), we reckon there were just 11 specialist Art & Design institutions and approximately 119 universities.4 So began this quite random tour of the state of the nation’s art schools, tracked down from the addresses in the directory.

What we found is that many of the buildings are still there but they have been repurposed or else left in a state of disrepair or dereliction. A lot of art schools have been converted into so-called luxury flats, such as Bromley College of Art in South London. One of the flats was for sale when I visited the site, and they really are quite expensive. You can often, when looking out for these

buildings, see frescoes, which tend to depict things like palettes and easels: signs of what once was. Not all old art schools have been converted into residential properties; others have been put to use in other ways. The building that was once Dover College of Art, for instance, is now used for document storage for the FE college, which is located behind the art school building.

Bilston School of Art in the West Midlands is a good example of Victorian art school buildings, constructed at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and funded by local industry. Many of the buildings of this period were seen as very important for the manufacturing base of these towns. Bilston is in a very poor state of repair and has yet to be renovated. The Mid-Essex Technical College and School of Art has also been allowed to fall into a fairly serious state of disarray and the site is actually for sale. The study of Art & Design has not disappeared in Chelmsford but, as in most other towns, specialist institutions have amalgamated into bigger further education complexes or into higher education institutions. As a consequence, the distinctiveness the art school had in these towns is no longer visible.

Moseley School of Art, on the outskirts of Birmingham city centre, is another building that has not found a new purpose and is in a poor state of repair. The West Midlands was one of the areas with the highest concentration of art schools in the UK, due to the manufacturing base of that region during the boom time for art schools in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era.

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One of the first things we thought when we began this project was that someone must have done it before. It seems like an obvious thing to do given the important place of art education in UK cultural history, so I made a trip to the English Heritage Archive in Swindon. I spent two days in the archive, and I found about three photographs of art schools.

So far on my travels I’ve been quite fortunate; the buildings are usually still there. In some cases, however, the art school has entirely vanished. Faced with this, we wondered what the best course of action might be in terms of documentation. Our conclusion was simply to document the site, whether or not the building remained. Reigate and Redhill School of Arts & Crafts, which suffered through being merged and amalgamated with various other local colleges, was not converted into flats, but the land on which it stood was sold off and used for residential purposes. Sidcup School of Art is also no longer standing. Sidcup is famous for being the art school where Keith Richards studied, but sadly the building was demolished and the site is now a Morrison’s supermarket. There appears to be no photographic record of the original art school, which was built in 1934.

Worthing had an important inter-war art school, almost Bauhaus-like in design. The building was actually still there until about four years ago, just before we began the project, but then, surplus to requirements, it was demolished and the site is now a home for assisted living. The former Municipal College and Art School

in Southend-on-Sea is now an HSBC bank and Odeon Cinema. The site of Horsham School of Art in Oakfield Road is now wasteland. Horsham School of Art was a listed building, but there was a mysterious fire and the building was subsequently deemed to be unsafe and was demolished; a property developer now owns the land. I found a pen and ink drawing produced by a local artist who had studied at Horsham, however, that gives some idea of what the building would have looked like.

Some art school buildings have actually been preserved, such as the very grand, Ruskinesque Stroud School of Art. This is a Grade II listed building, as are a number of others. It’s in quite a good state of repair, but is now owned and operated by a private education college; I’m not sure whether art is on the curriculum.

Although our project is not directly concerned with architectural significance, some art schools are, like Stroud, architecturally quite distinctive. Thanet School of Arts & Crafts on Hawley Square in Margate is one of the inter-war Art Deco, purpose-built art schools. There were a number of others, but they’ve all been demolished and this is one of the very few still standing. This is no longer functioning as an art school but it is at least still owned by the Kent Education Authority and they continue to teach students in the building. The library in Margate has a very good local history collection and they have kept the original souvenir brochure, which suggests something of the prestige attached to having an art school in the town. I always think this looks like a 1930s radio set.

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Certain art schools have a significant place in the history of British art and design, such as the one in Ipswich which is famous firstly because Brian Eno studied there, but more importantly because Roy Ascott, after leaving Ealing, set up the celebrated Ground Course there.5 Ipswich School of Art had been empty for quite a few years, certainly not used for art instruction, but it hosted an exhibition of new art from the Saatchi Gallery in 2010, so for a while anyway became an outpost for the Saatchi Gallery. That might be a fate that befalls a number of these buildings.

JB: What started to become obvious to us while gathering the photographic documentation of art school buildings was that we were also involved in examining how the built environment of British towns and cities had been transformed in the last 20 or 30 years. What had started as one kind of research project – identifying and collecting evidence of the sites of art schools – was turning into something broader. Discovering not only old disused art schools but also luxury apartment complexes, assisted living facilities, supermarkets, and as yet undeveloped plots of land where art schools used to be, made us think harder about history and context. What we seemed to be accumulating was a narrative about the transformation of public space in the UK, especially since the 1990s, and we started to see convergences between what we were doing and other kinds of current critical urban exploration, from Iain Sinclair’s history of the East End and the debunking of the Olympic Project and Owen Hatherley’s guide to the relics of British state modernism to Anna Minton’s assessment of the privatisation of public space

in her book Ground Control.6 What we found on the ground was compelling us to think beyond the empirical question of where an art school was or used to be and towards consideration of broader social and political themes concerning the management and engineering of contemporary urban space.

Writers like Sinclair, Hatherley and Minton share a concern over how often rich communities and long-standing ways of life, public facilities and private residences, have been ignored or devalued in order to justify large-scale redevelopment and regeneration. What this often means in practical terms is the demolition or repurposing of neighbourhoods and the relocation or dispersal of populations to make way for grand projects that purport to provide opportunity for wealth creation and growth. The economic justifications for such projects have, of course, been cast in a much more dubious light since the recession, but during the 1990s and the early 2000s the structure and texture of many UK towns and cities were transformed by projects often pitched as culture-driven enterprise. Many of the areas targeted for regeneration were described as under-developed or otherwise undesirable; places and, by extension, populations were deemed to be underperforming, a drain on resources and potentially a threat to public order.This narrative is not merely about the invasion of private speculation into public spaces, although it is that, but many redevelopments were, as Minton makes clear, facilitated and driven by local councils with the power to consolidate property through compulsory purchase. At

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worst, the development of business districts, shopping centres and so-called cultural quarters around the country has been motivated by the significant economic gains to be made through rising land values and property prices in the regenerated areas. The finance-driven boom of the 1990s and 2000s, with the availability of easy credit, made this a no-brainer for many council speculators. This is not to say that improvements have not been made in some areas – who wants to go back, for example, to the state of British coffee before Costa? – but the severity of the recession has sharpened the sense, confirmed in a whole range of socially divisive Coalition policies since 2010, that regeneration often means huge opportunities for the few while accelerating and extending social exclusion and poverty.

Our recovery of the history of the provincial art school now started to look increasingly like a critique of current education policy and dodgy cultural entrepreneurship as much as an emerging archive of a lost world. Who would have imagined 20 years ago that places like Gateshead, Middlesbrough or West Bromwich would have big, modern art galleries? In a way that’s a remarkable upturn, you might say. Who doesn’t want more spaces for art? But it’s also hard to believe that somehow these big new spaces are evidence of growing cultural sophistication and a hunger for advanced contemporary art among the British public. The economic argument for cultural quarters, let alone the cultural one, is also, now more than ever, hard to swallow. It seems like centuries ago, but it was only a few years, that Tony Blair imagined a British ‘café culture’ enabled by the redevelopment of run-down and unwanted

areas of towns, made safe for loft-dwellers benefiting from relaxed licensing laws. And we know how that’s played out, don’t we? Many town centres in this country are now unsafe at various points in the week after dark.

The pre-recession arguments made in the early years of the 21st century now read like messages from a strange fantasy world. As an example, consider this article published in 2003 by John Montgomery, an urban planner, economist and author and the managing director of Urban Cultures Ltd. This is how Montgomery opens his pitch for the idea of the cultural quarter:

Most great cities have identifiable quarters to which artists and cultural entrepreneurs are attracted, whether it’s Soho in London, New York’s Lower East Side, or the Left Bank in Paris. Such places have a long history and appear to have happened by accident, or at least in the general development of a city over time. What’s new about the development of cultural quarters in recent times is that they have been, and are being, used as a deliberate model for urban regeneration of declining inner urban areas. In other words, they have been adopted as policy mechanisms for urban regeneration.7

Somehow Soho, the Left Bank and the Lower East Side can be used as the model for a regeneration of urban spaces all over the UK. Every town can now have its own version of the Lower East Side. What is not mentioned, of course, is that Soho was the sex capital of London for

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200 years, that the Lower East Side was a multi-cultural, working-class neighbourhood where no one else would dare to go, and that the Left Bank similarly was inhabited by artists because it was the cheapest and most squalid part of the city. The point of the examples Montgomery draws upon is that they were undeveloped, unwanted and outside of regulation and policy. Artists and other exotic creatures lived in these neighbourhoods not because they were de facto artistic quarters but because they were the only plausible areas available. There is something ludicrous but also quite disturbing about the idea of trying to engineer simulations of these long-dead bohemias in towns across the UK. Yet this is the kind of thinking that permeated the discourse of regeneration at the end of the 1990s and into the early years of the 21st century. It is hard to find anybody involved in these debates with anything critical to say, as if the opportunity is just too good to pass up. This is not to say that there is no criticism at all, but it tends to come from outside the policy loop. Oli Mould, for example, a lecturer in Geography at Royal Holloway, has produced a revealing Google map of 30 cultural quarters of various kinds in the UK that have sprung up in the last ten years or so.8 In Cardiff, Leicester, Manchester, Warrington, Leeds, Stoke, Doncaster, Wolverhampton, Bolton – you name it, there’s a cultural quarter either in place or on the way. Or there was, at least, until 2008.

The idea of the cultural quarter started to emerge in the 1980s but really took hold in the 1990s when ‘cultural industries’, ‘creative industries’ and ‘knowledge economy’ became buzzwords in government, driven by

the conviction that the post-industrial world needed to find new ways to regenerate urban space. The absence of sceptical voices is, as I’ve noted, quite remarkable. Simon Roodhouse, one of the main commentators on the development of cultural quarters, points out: ‘Since the 1970s there has been little or no debate by administrators and policy-makers about the purpose, value and nature of the arts, but rather a focus of attention on how the arts and heritage can meet national and local government policy in the areas of the economy, urban regeneration, regionalism, social cohesion, and community development, to name a few.’ The other issue, he says, that ‘complicates these debates and again is rarely discussed in public, is how society decides what art is, including a shared view of aesthetics. In other words,’ he goes on, ‘many of the public agencies such as the Arts Councils are charged with promoting the arts as excellence [that familiar weasel word], making excellent art accessible and educating society in the excellence of the arts.’9

What we have, then is a government policy which is driven by cultural industries, the creative industries and the knowledge economy; driven by art, in other words, without there being at any point a serious discussion of what ‘culture’ is, what ‘creative’ means, what ‘art’ might be, what ‘excellence’ is, who decides what ‘accessibility’ means; without, in fact, any kind of reflection on the key terminology that’s used to justify these multi-million- pound enterprises. In the absence of any proper debate about what these terms might mean, other commentators have pointed out that clichés and outworn stereotypes

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take their place. Where there is a vacuum in terms of enlightened debate, what we end up with is policy being driven by a bunch of ridiculous ideas.

In a 2005 article on the cultural industries and policy, David Hesmondhalgh and Andy Pratt argue: ‘For all the growth in the cultural industries, cultural policies concerned with them are still affected by long-standing assumptions prevalent within cultural policy.’ Then they list the assumptions:

● the romantic notion of the isolated artist genius who works for the love of art, typically suffering poverty in a garret room.● culture is a pure public good, one that should be equally available to all.● the true value of art is transcendent and can be determined by experts, commonly accompanied by the idea that the monetary value of art is false and the market cannot decide.● an idealist humanist notion that culture is good for the soul, and that exposure to culture has a civilizing effect.10

Bereft of serious reflection on what culture, creative excellence, and so on, might mean, these clichés and stereotypes have filled the gap, and this is what in fact is driving cultural policy and why we end up with the kinds of ‘cultural quarters’ that we have ended up with. What art schools have been doing for much of the 20th century is asking precisely the kinds of questions about what culture

is, what creativity means, what the position of art and the artist is in society, that the policy-makers have avoided or fudged. They have been asking those questions on a daily basis inside the very buildings that we’ve discovered are mostly closed. Instead, in the absence of those spaces, what we have now is what we like to refer to as the ‘Culture Sheds’ of post-Blair Britain. What happens when you turn the camera around from the art school and look at the environment in which you find those buildings?

MC: Well, let’s start with a street in Walsall. As I was going out on these field trips to find, photograph and dig up some history about local art schools, John suggested I take some photographs of the buildings around the art school, document what else is there. Because the project has taken me to many places I don’t intend to visit often, it seemed like a good idea. Sometimes the art school building can be found in a quiet suburb or back street, but often they are located in the centre of town next to the town hall, library and post-office. The art school building in Walsall still has ‘School of Art’ written on the front, even though the building is now divided up into small office spaces. So there isn’t an art school in Walsall anymore, but the sign says there is.

If you walk through the streets of Walsall, you will eventually come to the New Art Gallery Walsall, which was one of the first of what I suppose we might call the millennium galleries when it opened in 2000. It’s a very elegant building in many ways, and it’s certainly one of the more impressive in terms of its reference to

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local histories. Designed by Crusoe St John, the cost was £21 million of which about £16 million came from the National Lottery. I remember going to the evening opening (not the afternoon opening, which was attended by the Queen) and, as is common, there were a lot of well-known people from the art world there: critics, artists, etc. How many of those people have gone back, I don’t know, but Walsall is still actually seen as quite a successful art gallery and of course the idea was that this would be the beginning, the pioneer stage of what was going to become the cultural quarter. What is often meant by that is not subsidised studios for artists and workshops, and so on; what it usually means is real estate oportunities and shops. The company responsible for a lot of work in so-called cultural quarters is Urban Splash, which Owen Hatherley has referred to on a number of occasions. When I photographed the Urban Splash sign in Walsall in Summer 2011, the sign had clearly been there for many years. Behind it was a wasteland, where the cultural quarter was still waiting to happen.

West Bromwich School of Art was a very elegant building, designed by a local architect and built from relatively local materials, with many of the features common to other art school buildings of the period; it’s got the fresco on the front, it’s red brick and looks like a civic building. Like many other art schools, it was built at the same time as the post office and the library. The Victorians were responsible for building many libraries and educational institutions, and they would be built in very close proximity to each other, creating vibrant public spaces: where people are,

where they go, pass through, where they might attend evening classes. West Bromwich School of Art has a particularly elegant fresco, but it’s closed.

Walk a little bit further through West Bromwich and you arrive at The Public. The Public has probably, wrongly or rightly, received more attention, and more criticism, than many of the other large-scale galleries built over the last 20 years.11 One of the reasons is probably the sheer cost of the building – around £70 million. West Bromwich doesn’t have a mainline railway station; it doesn’t have a swimming pool. And in the architectural press at least, there’s been some fairly heated commentary around the purpose and design of this building. It’s a very odd and complicated building to be in because it was not designed as a straightforward gallery but as an interactive environment, so it has very little actual gallery space. What’s strange about The Public is that it’s like going to one of those very large IKEA-type places, which has then turned itself into a nightclub. You can imagine how this feels on a Tuesday morning in West Bromwich: it feels wrong. There were great claims made for The Public, and what it was going to do, and one of the tragedies about it at the time was that it came out of a community-engaged arts organisation called Jubilee Arts, which had been in existence for many years. I think what happens with buildings like this is that, having made the decision to invest in and build them, there’s an overwhelming will for them to work, almost at whatever cost. One of the questions I always ask about these ventures is who has benefited from the building being built? The first person to benefit is the architect,

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who got paid. Will Alsop was no doubt paid a reasonable fee for designing the building and he also got – which is what every architect wants – an iconic building with his name on it. The people appointed to direct and curate also benefit, fair enough if they stay around. But there have been some notable instances of directors leaving not that long after the building opens. The new contemporary galleries unwittingly, but not altogether unsurprisingly, acting as stepping-stones towards London and the international art world.

A lot of people went to Margate last year, not to visit Thanet School of Art but to see the new Turner Contemporary art gallery, designed by David Chipperfield, who also designed the recently opened Hepworth gallery in Wakefield. The Margate building is elegant but it is also the classic culture shed. The rationale for building an expensive art gallery (£17.5 million) in Margate is that the town has for many years been in decline. The hope is that this building will be a draw for people from London coming down on the high-speed train, who will then spend money in the various shops and restaurants in the area around the gallery. If they’re supposed to generate money for local shops, cafés and restaurants, though, why do galleries have shops and cafés in them? It doesn’t seem to make sense.

Like The Public, Turner Contemporary was opened by the Queen. At the opening, the artist Michael Craig-Martin said it was a beautiful space where any artist would be happy to exhibit. He’s not wrong, I’d be happy to have

a show there. Here’s a quotation from the time of the opening: ‘Arts institutions and other third sector bodies should not rely on being “helped” or “saved” by the state – just because they are, or think they are, “doing good”. In broad terms, Darwinian rules should apply’.12 This is from the Chair of Turner Contemporary, John Kampfner, which I thought was a revealing statement to make.

At the opening of Turner Contemporary, Tracey Emin was asked: ‘What do you think Margate will be like in 10 years’ time?’ Her conclusion: ‘I think there will be an art school here’. You can watch that on YouTube.13 Margate is also, of course, the home of Dreamland, a derelict amusement park. But it does have aspirations; I think they’re going to rebuild it as a heritage theme park.14

The following photographs represent a selection of those shown during the talk. The value and status of the art school buildings and the galleries continues to shift unpredictably, and in some cases buildings have been repurposed or closed since May 2012. We have remarked upon these changed circumstances, where relvant, in the notes and captions.

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Great Yarmouth College of Art & DesignTrafalgar Road, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Designed by prolific local architect John William Cockrill, this Grade II listed building was opened as the Municipal School of Art in 1913. The building was recently

renovated and converted into 18 flats for the Flagship Housing Group and the Homes and Communities Agency.

Bilston School of ArtMount Pleasant, Bilston, West Midlands

Designed by C.L.N. Wilson, this Grade II listed building was opened as a Technical School in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. As of 2010 the building is in a poor state of repair and empty.

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Designed by John Sulman, the building was opened in 1878. Grade II listed, the building is now divided into private flats.

Bromley College of ArtTweedy Road, Bromley, London

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The School of Science and Art, the Museum, and the Public Library were opened in February 1906. The building was closed at the end of the academic year 2005/6 and sold to a private developer; as of June 2011 the site was vacant.

The Mid-Essex Technical College and School of ArtVictoria Road South, Chelmsford, Essex

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Horsham School of ArtOakfield, Hurst Road, Horsham, West Sussex

Situated near Horsham Railway Station, the college remained an art facility when it became part of Northbrook College in 1986. As part of a review of cost-effectiveness and

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course duplication the site closed in 2005. The building was sold to a property developer but after a fire in 2008 it was deemed a danger to the public and demolished.

Designed by William Henry Bidlake and located on a busy commercial street directly opposite the public library and public baths, the school opened in 1900 and closed in 1975.

Moseley School of ArtAlcester Road, Balsall Heath, Birmingham, West Midlands

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Sidcup School of ArtGrassington Road, Sidcup, London

Opened in 1934, Sidcup was later amalgamated with Bromley and Beckenham to become Ravensbourne College of Art & Design. As of 2010 the site is occupied by a large supermarket and car park.

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Stroud School of ArtLansdown Road, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Designed by W.H.C. Fisher and built by J.P. Seddon in 1891, the Grade II listed School of Art and Science was amalgamated with Cheltenham College of Art in September

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1959 to form Gloucestershire College of Art. At present the building is used by Waldorf College, a private education provider working in partnership with Cirencester College.

West Sussex School of Art & CraftUnion Place, Worthing, West Sussex

The original building by Hayden P. Roberts opened in 1911. It was radically extended and rendered in a modernist ‘Art Deco’ style by C.G. Stillman in 1933. The building was demolished in 2008. The site is now occupied by private ‘assisted living’ retirement flats.

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Walsall School of ArtGoodall Street, Walsall, West Midlands

The Municipal School of Art in Walsall moved from Bradford Place to the Goodall Street building in 1908. It was known as the Municipal Technical School of Art between the World Wars, then as the Municipal School of

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Art and Crafts, from 1967 as Walsall School of Art and Crafts, and from 1974 as Walsall College of Art, by which time it was one of only three centres for leathergoods training in the UK.

Walsall town centre, Summer 2013

In May 2013, Adrian Andrew, the chief councillor in charge of regeneration, said: ‘We are determined to get Primark and Co-op into the town, it will be a huge boost for the long-term.’

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The New Art Gallery WalsallGallery Square, Walsall, West Midlands

Built by architects Peter St John and Adam Caruso at a cost of £21 million, the New Art Gallery Walsall was completed in September 1999. ‘Extraordinary and extraordinarily good’, Hugh Pearman wrote in the Sunday

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Times upon its opening in 2000; in Museums Journal John Stewart-Young saw ‘an architectural indulgence’. The gallery was one of the first cultural organisations in the UK to take on a Creative Apprentice in 2009.

Urban Splash advertisement opposite the New Art Gallery Walsall, Summer 2011

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West Bromwich School of ArtLodge Road, West Bromwich, West Midlands

Otherwise known as the Ryland Memorial School of Art, the Grade II listed building was designed by Wood and Kendrick of Birmingham and opened in 1902. As of 2011 the building was unoccupied.

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The PublicNew Street, West Bromwich, West Midlands

The Public is a multi-purpose venue and art gallery designed by architect Will Alsop, who left the project in November 2004. Flannery & de la Pole took over the detailed design of the £72 million building. The Public opened two years behind schedule in June 2008. In August

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2013 Sandwell Council leader Darren Cooper announced that the council could no longer afford to keep The Public open: ‘The overall cost to the council is currently about £30,000 a week,’ said Cooper. ‘That is nearly £1.6m a year’. The building closed in November 2013.

Derby School of ArtGreen Lane, Derby

Designed by F.W. Waller of Gloucester architects Waller and Son and first opened in 1877, the Green Lane site became the Municipal Technical College for education in science, technology and art in 1899. After many name changes over the years, it

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became part of the University of Derby in 1992. The Metro cinema, which was housed in the building for 26 years, relocated to Quad in 2008; in 2012 the University, which still owns the building, announced that it is to be restored and adapted for use by Derby theatre.

QuadMarket Place, Derby

Designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects at a cost of £11.2 million, Quad opened in 2008 as a part of a £1.5 billion regeneration of Derby city centre. In 2009 Derby Civic Society awarded Quad first prize in the new-build category of the annual George

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Larkin Brighter City of Derby Awards. Society vice-president Robin Wood claimed that Quad ‘is a statement of 21st century architecture’. Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, called the building a ‘grotesque misuse of funds’.

Thanet School of Art & Crafts Hawley Square, Margate, Kent

Opened in 1931 as a purpose-built art school, the building is currently used by Kent County Council as an adult education centre.

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Turner ContemporaryThe Rendezvous, Margate, Kent

Designed by Stirling Prize winner David Chipperfield Architects, construction on the £17.5 million gallery started in 2008 and was completed for the opening in April 2011.

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DreamlandMargate, Kent

Described as the heartbeat of Margate, Dreamland was one of Britain’s oldest and best-loved amusement parks. In January 2003, the owners announced that the park

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was to close and be redeveloped. The Dreamland Trust is currently working towards an Easter 2015 opening.

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DEAN KENNING: Thanks very much for that. That was fantastic. Your focus on the local resonates with me. I did an Art Foundation course at Hounslow Borough College (now West Thames College) which, whilst not a specialised art school, operated their art courses partly in a beautiful nineteenth century house at the back of the main buildings. The college was a normal and accessible part of the area where I grew up, for example running evening classes or offering free haircuts. But it wasn’t my first choice – that was Kingston, and I didn’t get in!

Is there a sense in which it’s too easy to make that differentiation between these old art colleges which are wrapped up in nostalgia and modern galleries? How would you respond to someone running one of the new art galleries who’s doing the best that they can in the real circumstances that we’re living in?

JB: People have to make do in the same way that they would in any other business I suppose, but the assumption that was made during the economic good times that art galleries could drive social regeneration and create economic opportunity puts a huge and unnecessary burden on art. You don’t go to art galleries to find out what the business case is. We’re not interested necessarily in the great architecture of the old art schools, but there is a powerful visual message in the endless images of buildings that have been re-used, demolished or simply abandoned.

MC: It is odd when you travel around the country and see 40 to 50 closed art schools and then see a building

Q&A

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in West Bromwich that cost over £70 million. I’m not a cultural quarter planner, but someone interested in art and art education, finding out what has happened. What does it say about the times we’re living in? One of the things our project reminds me of is that the buildings in which John and I started out were places where we could do something. It wasn’t a place to go and consume culture, it’s where I could actually go and start mucking about myself and meet some people and make something. That’s very different from going to Margate to look at ‘the great works of the great artists of our time’. It’s a significant difference. As I said earlier, it’s not the case that Art & Design education has been banished from the land – there’s probably more opportunity to study Art & Design than there’s ever been – but it’s no longer embedded in that idea of difference and distinctiveness. Art & Design is slotted in along with all the other courses rather than in its own distinctive building next to the public library or town hall, which is something else. Art School was an alternative to other kinds of education and other kinds of activity. I think we’re in a time when we need alternatives.15

DK: I’ve got another question. I should say I met John and Matthew at an event I was also part of called The Corporate Occupation of the Arts at an old bank, which had been squatted by the Occupy London people, who have since been thrown out. What I was really interested in then, when you gave a much shorter presentation, was this notion of how an art college could be embedded within the local area and culture, and you were talking about the connections to industry or craft at that time,

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evening classes, and just the way it seemed to fit into the locality. These new iconic galleries seem like they’ve been beamed down rather than developing out of a particular place. I wondered if you could expand on that aspect.

JB: One of the reasons I was so struck by that quotation about using Soho and the Lower East Side as models is that they are real neighbourhoods. Regardless of all the clichés, for lots of students part of the attraction in going to art school is that you can create your own local version of that bohemian space which isn’t reliant upon lots of externally manufactured culture; it’s something that you do yourself. What’s striking about the big gallery buildings we’ve talked about is that they are pitched as destinations rather than as places where you do stuff. It’s somewhere to go and then go home, linked into the heritage and tourist industries rather than being a space where you might actually produce something distinctive from inside.

The discussion of the cultural quarters suggests two ways these places can be understood: there are those that are organically produced out of local entrepreneurship and ex-students who set up studios in old warehouses and so on, and those that are engineered from the outside.16 But I think that the outcome has been in many cases the same. The construction of the space is such that these become destinations rather than hubs of entrepreneurial activity, and I think that is really different from the idea of a local art school where local people attend in order to learn to do something that they then continue to do, possibly for the rest of their working lives.

MC: At some art schools it wasn’t just local people. Students would often travel some distance to go to art school, like I did to Yarmouth, and stay in the town for the duration of the course. So Yarmouth had an influx of, say, 200 students a year who would actually make use of the bed & breakfast accommodation that was vacant out of season. They had a pretty good, for the time, visiting lecturer programme, so there were a lot of people coming in for the day to teach, give talks and so on, and there was a scene, be it a very modest one. Certainly it wasn’t the Left Bank, nor would we have wanted it to be! But there were little clubs and there was a bookshop, a record shop – all generated because there was a student population that was changing on a yearly or two-yearly basis. And you could make a case that if Margate was very interested in creating a cultural hub, then making use of that really rather elegant and iconic art school, with its history going back to the 1930s, by introducing a series of courses which people would need to spend some time in Margate to do, might be a quite effective way of generating their cultural quarter. There’d have to be an art supply shop for instance, and all the other things a student population needs. The reality of going to Turner Contemporary was, for me, that I got the train, the train was delayed, it took about two hours, there was an interesting exhibition which took about an hour. I then have a coffee and catch the train home. That isn’t going to regenerate Margate.

DK: Following on from that, do you have any suggestions or ideas about what could happen. For example, there seems to be a way in which a lot of artists themselves have

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bought in to this idea that you ‘defend’ art by defending the idea that it brings in money. Something that I’ve written about before is the Save the Arts campaign against government cuts to the Arts Council budget, which was a total failure because they didn’t ‘save’ anything or prevent any cuts. But it was mostly celebrity artists and what a lot of them were pleading for was to save the arts because it brings money to the national economy. Save the arts because Britain is a creative brand. It was almost as if the whole history of pop music and visual arts in the UK could be reduced to a commodity export or a way to get tourists and corporate investment into Britain. So I’m wondering what you think would be a progressive move towards an alternative vision.

JB: That’s a difficult question. What I was struck by when I was reading the material on cultural quarters is that there was very little useful criticism, as I said. In the face of all the marketing positivity I think there’s a need for negation. Do we need to spend millions of pounds on these big buildings? We don’t want what kind of cultural legacy there might be from previous generations appropriated as cultural capital for UK Plc. It’s important to say what you don’t want as much as what you do want, and what we have is evidence of endless institutions that have been let go, and what we’ve got instead is big sheds. We’re not policy-makers and we’ve come to this with a sense of extreme puzzlement and bewilderment as much as anything. What are we being asked to buy in to? We are the people who work in universities and art departments, who are supposed to be the people who are embedded

in this so-called culture industry. If we don’t understand it, who does? So I don’t know. Our interest thus far is less in imagining what the positive alternatives might be and more about questioning the validity of what has been done already. Being asked for alternatives shifts the responsibility for solving problems away from those who created the situation and onto those on the receiving end: we’ve built this big building for you: what do you want? Well, we don’t want that.

MC: Many years ago, in my practice as an artist with David Cross – I think out of exasperation at being asked to fill in yet another course monitoring report – we proposed to the Chisenhale Gallery that we turn it into an art school. They turned down that proposal, but I’ve been interested to see that that idea hasn’t died and there’s been a re-emergence of the idea of the gallery becoming the art school, and the idea that the art school ethos can be realised within the gallery. So one of the options you could explore, with something like Turner Contemporary, would be to turn it into an art school. In fact you could do that with all of these buildings. They actually might function quite well as art schools. That clearly isn’t going to happen, but you do wonder how they are going to manage when it’s likely that not just the Arts Council but, I should imagine the entire Department for Media, Culture and Sport will be closed down the way we’re going: how they will be able to sustain themselves? The problem is you have built a ‘world class building’ but you’ve got the budget of a very modest regional art gallery to run it. The other thing that’s hidden is not just the cost of building The

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Public or Turner Contemporary but the fact that these buildings cost money to run, a lot of money in terms of maintenance, security, cleaning, upkeep, and so on. These are going to be seen as rather big drains, so I think there will have to be some nimble footwork – otherwise they’ll end up being mothballed.

AUDIENCE: I was just wondering if you found any information in your wanderings about the actual decisions that were made about the individual colleges: when the decisions were made to actually close them, what the justification was?

MC: I had to develop a methodology for this as we’ve gone along. One aspect of the project is going to the local library to see what information they’ve got – and it’s completely arbitrary. Some local librarians have a belief in or passion about the local art school and they keep all the cuttings – in Worthing, for instance, there are reams of information; in other towns there’s nothing at all. While there seems to be, as in Margate, some literature and evidence of celebration around the opening of the building, closing of buildings is something that people don’t want to talk about so much. There is usually a modest and heartfelt protest by current students and staff, photographed on the steps by the local press, and a brief article announcing ‘Art School to Close’, and then it closes. That seems to be it. We did a talk at Tate Britain where I was speaking quite strongly about what I thought about the closure and the demolition of Worthing School of Art. In the audience was one of the people involved in

the management of Worthing College, and she felt that it was sensible that all the arts and all the people should be in this new, state-of-the-art campus. I didn’t share her view; I felt that that the loss of this iconic art school building was a tragedy. Once you’ve studied somewhere, the fact that it still exists is important. If Kingston University was to be demolished and turned into a car park, I’m sure a lot of people would feel that the stature of that institution had been diminished. I feel that way about Yarmouth closing. I think it’s wrong, and I think it’s a great shame that if you went to somewhere like Worthing College of Art, there’s no longer a physical connection to that past.

Coming back to the decision-making process, it is very difficult to get hold of the whole story in most cases. Horsham, which was part of the umbrella of colleges within West Sussex, was deemed to be financially unviable, whatever that means, even though it was very popular and a lot of people enjoyed going there. Because of its closeness to London, real estate values are very high, but who wants an old art school? It would be much better to have it at a new site, so guess what? The building’s empty for a year; fire; demolished; land sold. Within the local archives, in terms of libraries, it does take quite a bit of digging and the information is not always there. What we’re working with in many instances is local press cuttings.

JB: The broader context is the opening of polytechnics in the 1960s and the pedagogical argument that it would be better for art students to work in a bigger, more centralised institution where they would rub shoulders

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with people doing different kinds of subjects. There’s obviously an economic argument there as well, but also at this point, in the 1960s and the early 1970s, the rationalisation of curricula and the introduction of the BA in practical subjects was part of broader tendencies in British education policy toward consolidation into generic institutions, polys and then universities. There’s a drift in that direction which is quite long-standing. But as Matthew says, in individual cases that’s not always easy to pick apart from the broader story.

DK: I’ve got a final question, which is on slightly different topic. I wondered how you thought about the status of what you were doing, your research. I was showing the poster for this talk to someone earlier, and they were like: ‘Oh yes, that looks like a perfect AHRC grant; you’ve got an artist, you’ve got an academic’ … and he’s being a bit cynical. But my question is not so much that but it’s more about how you actually consider this. Do you consider this as an academic piece of research? Do you consider it as something closer to an art project? Or do those categories or distinctions not make much sense to you?

MC: At least to start with, we were making it up to some extent as we went along. We’re finding things out. It’s an exploration first and foremost.

DK: I think what’s interesting is that you both went to the same art college. Because from an outside perspective you’ve got these positions in separate institutions and then you’ve come together on the project from a shared

experience. As you were talking it’s almost like this reunion for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Do you feel you have to deal with the loss of that together or something?

JB: We’re not saying that all art schools were universally good, or that some of them didn’t deserve to die. The sort of provision across the country was pretty wildly varied and you can understand why some local authorities might have wanted to close down certain places. The problem with not being regulated by umbrella institutions is that people pretty much could do what they liked for quite a long time, and that’s both good and bad. I suppose in terms of looking back on that, there may be, to some extent, nostalgia, but there’s also an awareness of how unsatisfactory some of those places could be as well. We’re not interested in making a case for the ‘good old days’. Coming back to the question of whether this is an academic or an art project, it has elements of each in that it’s driven by a need to gather and evaluate information and to put forward a plausible explanation as to why we’re poking at these issues. But at the same time we’re not interested in developing alternative policy initiatives and we’re not equipped to do that. The project is a response to the environment and to the world we find ourselves in.

MC: In a way, this exploration of the cultural quarter is something of an offshoot of what we thought the main project was: where were these art schools and what’s happened to them? That’s still ongoing and there’s a lot more work to be done. But in following through this main objective, other things like the cultural quarter issue keep

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emerging. We have ended up with something that speaks to what the UK is now, what its towns look like, what their shape is, what buildings are in them. Spending a couple of days walking around many British towns and cities can actually be quite dull and depressing. As for what the project is, I guess that it has so far been defined by the opportunities that have been presented to make it public. We have been asked to give quite a lot of talks. The final objective, though, is to investigate and photograph every art school site in the UK.

AUDIENCE: It seems to me that the key thing you’re saying is not that there’s no Art & Design teaching, but that it’s been put under the same roof along with all sorts of other changes like there being a BA in Art. It seems like the key thing in your talk is how the art college was the place where people would have thought critically about those terms, and how those terms are being used now. You’ve still got places where people make things in the universities, like the Engineering Department, and you’ve still got places where people think critically, but the art college was somewhere where you would think critically and also make something, so you’d bring together thinking and making which to me means the possibility of changing the world in a really direct way. So you think, oh how about making something like this, and then you’ve got the workshop there to make it. And I think even the art colleges that still exist, you know the big famous ones, they do sometimes make it difficult to put those two things together; thinking critically and access to a workshop. So I wondered what you thought about that.

MC: I would agree with that to a large extent. The old art school buildings were not designed and constructed to be centres of radical thought, critical thinking and experimentation. They were often quite dull, mundane places in which people learned to do sometimes quite repetitive tasks. What’s extraordinary is how after World War II and the expansion of publicly funded education, British art schools became these amazing sites of artistic and social transformation. The why and how of this transformation is complex; it obviously didn’t happen in a vacuum, wider and broader enviromental and social forces had an effect. It’s a historical fact that art schools were at the centre of many of these changes; loads of interesting and curious ideas, people and things came out of them. Art schools have been called the universities of the 60s, which sounds about right.

One part of the transformation in art education was due to the changes in trades taught at somewhere like Bilston. Many of these traditional trades would, by the 60s, be either redundant or transformed by technology; now there were different concerns in the same old building. Art schools existed as an alternative to university. It’s a curious position; I never went to university, wouldn’t even get on the course I now teach on. Ironic. And I worry about what happens to future generations of those who don’t fit. The art school alternative is gone. We’re not really focused, as you can tell, on the famous art colleges like Chelsea, the Slade, and the Royal College. There are already books and research projects focused on these. What we’re interested in are these small, local colleges where it begins, where

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careers start. Because without art schools in places like Yarmouth and Bilston how do we ensure that famous art colleges maintain a diverse mix of students?

JB: It’s also worth bearing in mind that for a long time, right up until the early 1980s, you could start at art school at 16 not 18, not post-A levels, but straight off the boat as it were. There’s a big difference in experience and expectations between people entering college at 16 to study art and design and those who have spent two years on A levels before university. Once you fold one group into the other, something happens; there are gains and losses. One of the arguments that was often made in the 1960s was that it would be good for art students to be working alongside scientists and language students and so on, and that’s the dream that continues to some extent within higher education; that there is knowledge transfer across all the different disciplines. But however much universities try to engineer that, it doesn’t always work. It can be highly artificial and, by and large, people cluster together in certain ways and they’ve got a particular worldview shaped by the demands of their discipline. The separate art school created an intense version of disciplinary specialisation where students identified as art students rather than just as students. The local specificities of the art school further intensified this distinctiveness: to be an art student in Margate or Yarmouth, miles from anything like a university, is to be engaged in a very particular kind of activity. It’s a distinctive, perhaps even peculiar, kind of education and very different from higher education as it is now understood.

AUDIENCE: I was interested in this idea of lifestyles that you spoke about. Maybe there were two different ideas of lifestyles: one was pertaining to be all the art schools, whereas a new idea of lifestyle was pertaining to manufacturing. Could you elaborate on that?

JB: Frith and Horne used the word ‘lifestyle’, which since then has become a fairly degraded term. I think what they were after was the idea of culture, the notion that art school was a place where learning itself constituted a way of life. That is very different from simply getting an education. Students of English literature, for example, do not necessarily think of themselves as writers. They may become writers but it is not an expectation or purpose of the course. It’s not a full-time job, it’s a course of study. Art students often have a different view of what they’re doing whereby the activity is itself a function of, and productive of, a certain kind of identity. It’s a way of life rather than something where you clock on and clock off. Art schools intensify and magnify that sense of lifestyle as a way of life over and above what is being learned. The cultural quarters are the other side of that, where you’re being invited to buy in to something.

AUDIENCE: The idea of politics hasn’t been mentioned. I think in a certain sense, looking at the broader picture, there’s an ideological framework as well as the idea of manufacturing a kind of bohemian space where people can hang about and have coffees and cake. It’s part of that manufacturing of a lifestyle. And I noticed that as you see some of the pictures of the old schools that are

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disappearing, it almost becomes a metaphor for a retreat of the public sphere, and instead we get manufactured cultural spaces.

JB: Well certainly for me that’s exactly what it looks like. We’re in the middle of a wholesale restructuring of what public space might mean. Hopefully what’s come across is that we don’t find the new models so attractive. Who wants to go to some manufactured bohemia and imagine that you are hanging out on the Lower East Side?

AUDIENCE: It’s amazing there’s no public outcry, no voice of resistance. There was a gallery built, was it The Jerwood in Hastings? A lot of people were not really in favour of the gallery but they had no say. There were some council meetings where a few voices of protest were allowed to come in, and basically they were just disregarded anyway. So while they’re building The Jerwood gallery in Hastings, and while all these other contemporary cultural projects go ahead like the art sheds as you call them, in the meantime they’re closing down community centres, artists studios and workshops that could have done with a cash injection. So I think in a sense this goes back to the idea of lifestyle. It’s been de-politicised in order to adapt to an overall ideological push towards an intensification of capital, an intensification where everything has to have a price or commercial purpose; everything has a position already within a manufactured ideology. There are a lot of things going on there, but on a broader scale I think that’s why we feel a little bit impotent.

JB: It’s quite difficult to say: ‘I don’t want you to build an art gallery. I don’t want a new museum. I don’t want a new theatre’. There’s a way in which terms like ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ and ‘accessibility’ are used as a legitimation for private enterprise backed up by public sponsorship. Those words are alibis for commerce, not least because lots of cultural quarters are propped up by retail opportunities. The big signature buildings like the Baltic in Gateshead are flanked by luxury apartments, where the real money is being made. What you’re saying is absolutely right; what public outcry there is, is often ambivalent since no one wants to oppose the building of galleries and museums.

AUDIENCE: I think you asked a very simple question, which is, who do these projects benefit? And I think as soon as you ask that question it becomes political again. So useful questions can emerge from the project.

MC: Yes, I obviously wouldn’t want to deny the political readings or dimensions to what we’re doing, and I think our aim is to research what’s happened and make our findings public. With the introduction of significantly increased student fees, you could have some universities struggling to attract enough students to remain viable. In relation to that, these new cultural buildings may start to look like a luxury. Which would you choose to survive: a local university or a culture shed? [laughter]

DK: John and Matthew, thank you very much.

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Notes

1. Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), p.28.

2. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p.57. This quotation is also used by Simon Roodhouse in his study of cultural quarters. See Simon Roodhouse, Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), p.20.

3. The art school in Great Yarmouth first opened in 1913 as the Municipal School of Art. After a period of closure during the Second World War, the school reopened in 1948 and by 1960 was teaching 1500, mainly part-time, students. The college merged with Norwich School of Art in 1986 to form the Norfolk Institute of Art and Design and the Yarmouth building finally closed in 1996. The Grade II listed building remained derelict until being renovated as social housing in 2011. Restoration of the front of the building revealed beautiful tile-work, obscured for decades. The building now announces itself, as it did in 1913, as the ‘Municipal School of Art’. Inside are 13 one-bedroom and five two-bedroom flats.

4. The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills actually lists 160 ‘recognised bodies’, institutions which have been granted degree-awarding powers. This list includes specialist institutions such as the Royal College of Art and the Royal Veterinary College; discounting these institutions still leaves well over 100 universities, though the precise figure is unstable, even on (irregularly updated) official websites.

5. Ascott was head of the Department of Fine Art at Ipswich Civic College between 1964 and 1967. For Ascott’s explanation of the behaviourist and cybernetic aspects of the Ground Course, see Roy Ascott, ‘The Construction of Change’ (1964), in

Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. Edward A. Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp.97–107.

6. Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011); Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London: Verso, 2010); Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-first Century City (London: Penguin, 2009).

7. John Montgomery, ‘Cultural Quarters as Mechanisms for Urban Regeneration. Part 1: Conceptualising Cultural Quarters’, Planning, Practice & Research 18.4 (2003): 293–306, pp.293–4.

8. Oli Mould, ‘The UK’s Cultural Quarters,’ taCity.co.uk (2011). Available at: www.tacity.co.uk/2011/03/01/the-uks-cultural-quarters (accessed September 2013).

9. Roodhouse, Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice, pp.21–2.

10. David Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt, ‘Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy,’ International journal of Cultural Policy 11.1 (2005): 1–14, p.7.

11. In his follow-up to A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, published a month after this talk, Hatherley considers a number of the new art galleries and provides a fairly balanced view. ‘Especially since the crash,’ he writes, ‘there’s been a tendency to suggest that the building of art galleries in non-London areas of the country was somehow a bad thing in itself, rather than an uncontroversial idea that had far too much regenerative baggage invested into it – as if a gallery were able to single-handedly reverse local decline by creating jobs for

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baristas/‘creatives’ (delete according to optimism). Flash, expensive architecture and the goofy advertainment that often came with it didn’t help the case much.’ On The Public in particular, Hatherley has this to say: ‘The immediate “context” in this corner of West Bromwich is little more than arterial roads and sheds, car parks and kipple. The Public responds via a gigantic, purple Big Shed, the sort you’d find housing Big Yellow Self-Storage or the like. But despite the utilitarian references, and like many of the era’s buildings, few ever seemed to be clear about what exactly The Public was for. It was supposed to house the local trust Jubilee Arts, providing them with a venue for performances, exhibitions and “creative technology”. By 2006 The Public had gone into administration before it had even opened, largely due to the building’s spiralling expense; although Big Sheds like this are thrown up en masse at extremely minimal cost, which made that a very puzzling outcome. For its many detractors this financial chaos is enough to damn The Public, although they tend to forget that the Georgian schemes they adore – Clifton, or Newcastle’s Grainger Town – were left unfinished, trailing bankruptcies and corruption convictions in their wake. The claim that nobody knew what The Public was going to be used for could equally apply to all manner of civic buildings, from the Harris in Preston to the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If there’s something wrong with The Public – and there is, there really is – then it must be to do with the building’s conception itself.’ Owen Hatherley, A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain (London: Verso, 2012), pp.118, 119–20. In August 2013 Sandwell Council announced that they could no longer afford to keep The Public open at a cost of £30,000 a week (almost £1.6m a year). The building was closed to the public in November 2013.

12. John Kampfner, ‘Margate Proves Investing in our Culture Makes Economic Sense’, The Independent, 26 April 2011. Available at: www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/john-kampfner-margate-proves-investing-in-our-culture-makes-economic-sense-2274751.html (accessed September 2013).

13. Margate is one of the towns considered in a recent Centre for Social Justice report on deprivation in coastal towns, along with Rhyl, Clacton-on-Sea, Blackpool and Great Yarmouth. Asked about the prospects for regeneration in the town, Councillor William Scobie notes ‘that while the Turner Gallery was “nice”, such reforms were merely “the facade of regeneration that went only as far as you could see from Turner and that didn’t make a big difference for people living a block away, who still couldn’t find work”’. Turning the Tide: Social Justice in Five Seaside Towns (London: Centre for Social Justice, 2013), p.15.

14. As of June 2013 it appears that the promised regeneration of Dreamland will go ahead, with plans to open in 2015. See Sarah Butler, ‘Margate set for return to Dreamland as part of seafront regeneration’, The Guardian, 7 June 2013. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jun/07/margate-dreamland-seaside-regeneration (accessed November 2013). The Dreamland Trust plans to refurbish the ruined Scenic Railway and other old rides, though ‘there is a chance legal action by the site’s current owners might stand in theway’. One likely partner in the regeneration is Tesco, which is currently seeking planning permission for a store next door to the Dreamland site.

15. Towards the end of his recent chronicle of the post-war London counterculture, Barry

Miles provides a succinct assessment of the collapse of art school culture into a codified cultural sector: ‘The eighties are seen by many people as the beginning of the end for non-commercial art in London. Under Thatcher, artists, galleries and museums were encouraged to get private sponsorship rather than rely upon government grants, even though the country made enormous amounts of money from the art business through auction houses and Cork Street, and through museums and galleries as tourist destinations. This had the predictable effect of restricting the type of exhibition held by the public institutions to those approved of by big corporations and led to the “blockbuster” shows where people shuffle past “great art” on timed admission tickets. It led to a greater commodification of art, and the creation of work that pandered to the public taste. This is exacerbated by the disastrous move of amalgamating the art colleges into universities and colleges so that instead of having the freedom to experiment and explore dead-ends, to make mistakes and chop and change, students are now subject to regular assessment and evaluation as if they were studying maths. The aim is now to produce workers for the “arts industries”, a ghastly new hybrid created by arts consultants who know nothing about the actual creation of art.’ Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 (London: Atlantic, 2010), p.409.

16. See, for example, Jim Shorthose’s comparative study of Leicester and Nottingham. Jim Shorthose, ‘The Engineered and the Vernacular in Cultural Quarter Development’, Capital and Class 84 (2004): pp.159–78.

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Contributors

John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on 20th century literature, art and photography. He is the author of Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (2009) and co-editor of American Visual Cultures (2005).

Matthew Cornford is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton. In 1987, while studying at St Martins School of Art, London, he met and began working in artistic collaboration with David Cross. Since then, Cornford & Cross have undertaken a wide range of art projects in the UK, Europe and the USA. A monograph on their work, Cornford & Cross, was published by Black Dog, London in 2009.

Dean Kenning is an artist and writer. His artworks include kinetic sculpture, posters and video, and he has been involved with projects at the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate. He has written for journals including Mute, Third Text and Art Monthly. Kenning is Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University and also teaches at Central St Martins.