1 2 4 27 3 CONTENTS Introduction What people want 6 30 The neighbourhoods The process behind this report 7 31 Living with ‘a reputation’ In Hangleton & Knoll 9 32 Arts engagement in East Brighton In East Brighton and Hangleton & Knoll 33 10 Get in touch Barriers to the arts 14 The Benefits of the Arts 17 Unspoken creative dreams and regrets 20 Arts attendance 22 Next generation 24 A piece of community-led research with Thoughts and Advice for Arts residents in Hangleton and Knoll and Organisations and Funders East Brighton, on their access to and experience of arts and culture. Brighton and Hove is a city famous for desire from them to connect and shape its arts and culture, but the persistent formal arts opportunities and to develop 4 INTRODUCTION inequalities in access to and participation community led arts activity in their in the arts are as alive here as they are in neighbourhoods. other parts of the country. The analysis of the interviews and data in We know that involvement in the arts this report has been done by the team at enriches people’s lives, has a positive Brighton People’s Theatre. We have done impact on health and improves quality our best to represent people’s views and of life. 1 We also know that not everyone experiences from the perspective has the same access to the arts and so of the people who have engaged it’s real and powerful benefits are not felt with this research. equally across our neighbourhoods and communities. We do not claim to speak for everyone who lives in East Brighton or Hangleton In 2019 Brighton People’s Theatre was and Knoll. Instead, we have tried to tell the commissioned by Brighton and Hove story of people’s relationship with the arts, City Council to work in partnership with where possible, in their own words. We community organisations in Hangleton have changed people’s names to protect and Knoll and in East Brighton, in order their identity. to gain a greater understanding of these inequalities and the desires of residents to At Brighton People’s Theatre, we are be creative. This work has been carried out committed to developing and deepening by, with and for local residents as part of our relationships with people in these the City Council’s Cultural Framework. 2 neighbourhoods and with people living in social housing in other parts of the city. The work grew out of our partnership with We will be actively fundraising to open up Brighton Festival, the Hangleton and Knoll arts opportunities for people to be creative Project and Due East, delivering Our Place, with us over the coming years. a weekend of co-created arts activity in each neighbourhood during the Festival in What will you do? May each year since 2017. This report, Open Up Arts, summarises the key findings of this research. It shows, 1 Brighton and Hove City Council. (2017) Annual Report Director of Public Health 2017/2018, The Art of Good Health. [Online] Available through the voices of residents from at http://www.bhconnected.org.uk/sites/bhconnected/ files/181120%206477%20PH%20Annual%20Rep ort%20v10.1%20 both areas, the systemic failures, missed with%20links.pdf opportunities and barriers that create 2 Daring to be different: Brighton and Hove Cultural Framework. inequality in the arts. It also paints a clear [Online] Available at: picture of people who have high levels https://cultureinourcity.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/online- pdf-cultural-framework-final.pdf of creativity in their everyday lives and a We were in the final edits of this report that conversation and the priorities that when the Covid-19 crisis hit. As we pressed emerge from it. We ask that you take the 5 pause on finalising the document, we have stories that people have so generously watched as the true precarity of the arts shared with us into your planning for sector has been revealed. the future. The whole cultural sector has been Many of you reading this report may affected, there have been redundancies recognise what is described here from and there will be more, many freelancers your own life experience. are facing their own financial instability Many of you may not. and those without financial safety nets may need to leave an industry they’ve Whatever your personal background, we worked hard to get into. hope that Open Up Arts will prove useful in thinking about why, how and what the arts Without a doubt, the new Covid-19 context sector can do differently in the future. we find ourselves in has highlighted and exacerbated the inequalities that are Naomi Alexander, Artistic Director, articulated in this report. Many of the Brighton People’s Theatre, June 2020 barriers to involvement in the arts that are expressed here, are due to complex, structural inequalities in society that the arts sector is not responsible for. However, the way in which the arts sector operates and is funded frequently reinforces and recreates social inequalities. This report clearly articulates, in the words of people who feel most excluded from it, the reality of these inequalities. So, as arts institutions fight to survive, there is an opportunity to pause and reflect on how they might change and adapt in this strange new world. It is clear that returning to business as usual will continue to fail many working-class people in this country. It is within this context that we offer this report now. To inform and help shape East Brighton is a ward in Brighton show how big gaps in income within a and Hove and is home to nearly fifteen country has a negative impact on the 6 THE thousand people. Our work focused on health and wellbeing of everyone, even the the lives of people living in three specific richest. This work also shows, however, areas of the ward, the Whitehawk Estate, that it has a disproportionately negative NEIGHBOURHOODS Manor Farm and Bristol Estate, which impact on the lives and life chances of the combined have a population of nearly poorest. eight thousand. We cannot hide from the fact that people Hangleton and Knoll is a residential living in the poorest neighbourhoods in suburb of Hove with a population of just Britain are more likely to struggle to feed over fifteen thousand people. The areas their families, live with chronic stress, are different in many ways but they do have fewer educational qualifications, have some important similarities. have higher rates of physical and mental health issues and live fewer healthy years They are predominantly working- • than their more affluent counterparts. class areas with a high percentage of Recent figures from the Child Poverty households renting from social landlords. Action Group show that 30% of children • Both are under-served and amongst are now living in poverty in Britain. Poverty the least advantaged places in England does not exist because of the failure of (IMD, 2019). individuals to make the right choices. • Despite being only short bus rides Poverty exists in our society because of away from the city centre and all its deliberate political and policy choices. attractions, both neighbourhoods feel quite cut off from the rest of the city. It is incumbent on us to emphasise that people living in adverse circumstances There is a lot of data to show exactly how rarely think of themselves as victims difficult life can be for people living in the because they are busy getting on with neighbourhoods but we have chosen not their lives – working, taking the kids to to include the specifics here. Residents school, paying bills, seeing friends and told us repeatedly that they are fed up family and supporting each other. Contrary with their lives being reduced to a series to popular opinion, most show extreme of numbers that feed existing negative resilience as they juggle demands that stereotypes that further blame, stigmatise others with greater resources would find and marginalize them. difficult. We do not wish to add to this burden, and so instead will point out that the UK has very high levels of income inequality compared to other developed countries. 3 Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More The work of Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) 3 Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane. Our work showed that many of our mum said to me ‘don’t take [name] participants faced adverse circumstances shoplifting, she doesn’t do that sort of 7 LIVING WITH when growing up. Some were young thing *laughs* and to be honest I was carers and cared for parents with chronic such a good girl and she was so not illnesses and siblings with severe *laughs* but the perception was you’re ‘A REPUTATION’ disabilities, others lived in homes with from where you’re from you’re going to parents struggling with addiction or be trouble. (Jane) mental illness whilst others experienced ” familial imprisonment. Circumstances As people moved into adulthood, this that often left them struggling to do much did not stop but followed them into their else apart from concentrate on surviving. work and professional lives as the area's reputation as ‘trouble’ negatively informs Zoe’s family struggled with parental other people’s, including employers and mental health, addiction and parental colleagues’ views, about who you are and imprisonment. She described what this what you can do. This, they said further felt like as a child. limited their opportunities. Mark, for example, applied for over fifty jobs before When you grow up in a place where he removed the name of his area from his “ lots is happening and very little of it is CV and got the offer of four interviews in good, there’s no space.