Mind the culture gap: Do Londoners take the arts for granted?

Standing at the bus stop the other day, I bumped into an acquaintance who had been working outside London for the last few years. When I asked how he liked living in Bristol, and then Liverpool, he reeled off a list of positives before saying, “but culturally, there were only ever one or two shows or exhibitions on at any one time – I missed the variety of culture in London.” What, I asked, is the best thing he had seen in the six months since he’d been back? “Er, to be honest, I haven’t been to anything but it’s just knowing it’s all there if you know what I mean,” came the reply.

This conversation, and reading Craig Taylor’s critically acclaimed book ‘Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now, As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It’, made me think about the disparity between the pride Londoners take in the city’s cultural life and their actual patronage of it.

Taylor’s critically acclaimed tome is a bravura piece of editing, a selection of the over 200 interviews the writer conducted over five years with the broadest range of Londoners imaginable, from a manicurist and market trader to a barrister and hedge fund manager. His interviews focus on very individual experiences of the city, covering both its extremes and intimate aspects. Yet outside the arty chapter, ‘Putting on a show’, there were very few allusions to the effect free galleries and museums or the quality of arts centres or theatre have on city life.

Now, I’m guessing that if Taylor had interviewed a bunch of people who work in the creative industries – fashion, the media, design etc – the benefits of London’s arts scene would have featured more prominently in people’s stories. But aside from the group of people that arts marketers would refer to as ‘aficionados’, perhaps it is out-of-town visitors and tourists that make up the weight of London audiences.

Research would appear to back this up. In a 2009 report created for the London Development Agency, researchers found that 36% of Londoners cited the city’s parks and gardens as a very important factor in their decision to take a day trip into town. In contrast, museums and galleries drew 23% and music, theatre and arts performances only 17%. Of the latter category, an astonishing 48% said that performing arts were not important to them.

Does any of this matter? Most Londoners are busy making ends meet and looking forward to the next meal out or night in the pub. Neither the time to saunter round an exhibition or money to see a West End show is always forthcoming. Yet it is important for all sectors within the arts to attract as many Londoners as possible because the cultural institutions of a city have to reflect its inhabitants to thrive in the long-term. I like the attitude of an artist interviewed by Craig Taylor in ‘Londoners’. His interview begins: “I was trying to think about London; about how you could take and unify everybody.” That’s something our arts institutions need to think about.

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• Ben Edwards

  Shut up, Tarquin.

• http://twitter.com/DeusXM James Boley

  The other issue is museum opening times.

  As a ‘Londoner’, I work 8.30-6, five days a week. I have a half hour commute each way so between 8 and 6.30, I’m ‘engaged’, as it were. Come 6.30, I’m hungry and probably want to get out of the office. So I either go home and cook dinner, or go for a meal with friends. 

  Meanwhile, most museums and galleries are open between 10 and 5. The theatre is open later, yes, but on weeknights I’m probably not really in the mood to watch a play.

  So that leaves me with the weekends to go and see things, and invariably all the other things like doing the shopping or fixing stuff round the house or visiting friends gets in the way.

  The only time I’ve really got daylight hours purely to do something I want to do is on my holiday time. And I want to use that to go somewhere other than the city I live. 

  You want museums, galleries and so on to be patronised by more Londoners? Open at night and stick a half-decent bar/restaurant next door. 

• baddneighbour

   fark lahndan an all that sail in er

• immiscibility

  I’ve been in London for around 12 years now, and have been to most of the major (and some of the minor!) art galleries and museums, yet only a few have won my return patronage (mainly the British Museum, the Museum of London and the Natural History museum). I suspect I am too thick to “get” most Modern art, and tradtitional art interests me the first time but I have no desire to see again. Historical artifacts, however, that I can identify with and understand their place in the world in general will always pique my interest. I’ve lot count of the number of visits I’ve made to the Eqyptology section of the British Museum.

  Regarding theatre, I’d love to go more but it’s for purely financial reasons that I’m lucky if I get to a show once a month (it’s more like once every 3 months at the moment).