Drawing a Line Round the Arts

AIn 1987 the corporation of Draymouth drew a line around fourteen hectares of derelict bonded warehousing, named the enclosed streets the Quayfield Cultural Quarter, and offered ten years of reduced rates to any tenant who could plausibly claim to make something. The device spread quickly: by 2005 at least forty-two local authorities in the United Kingdom had designated a quarter of their own. The physical results are not in dispute. Warehouses were re-roofed, streets were pedestrianised, and by 2015 Quayfield held some three hundred and ten registered businesses where it had once held eleven. What has been argued over since the late 1990s is what the line itself did: whether designation assembled a cultural economy that would not otherwise have existed, or merely drew a boundary around one that was already forming, and then charged it rent.

BMarguerite Alsop, an urban economist at the Deverell Institute, holds that designation does real work, and that the proof lies in survival rather than in headcount. Between 2011 and 2020 her group traced every business registration in thirty-one designated quarters and in matched streets half a mile beyond their boundaries. Employment in creative trades inside the boundaries grew by 4.6 per cent a year against 1.1 per cent in the comparison streets, a gap worth noticing but not, she grants, large enough to settle anything on its own, since growth can be bought with a subsidy and disappears when the subsidy stops. The figure she treats as decisive is another: five years after registration, 54 per cent of the small firms inside a quarter were still trading, against 31 per cent in the comparison streets. A change in the rate at which fragile businesses survive their fifth year suggests that the arrangement of the place, and not merely its accounting, has altered.

CHer explanation is unglamorous and, she argues, testable. A quarter supplies shared equipment that no single small firm can afford: a kiln, a rehearsal room, a loading bay, a technician who can be summoned in an afternoon. If that is the mechanism, districts built around an organisation that already owned such things ought to outperform districts merely drawn on a map. Of the thirty-one, the twenty-two containing a conservatoire, a broadcasting studio or an art school accounted for the whole of the survival advantage; the remaining nine produced no survival advantage over their comparison streets at all, and in three coastal towns the designated streets did slightly worse. Alsop therefore calls the cultural quarter a scaffold rather than a seed: it holds up work that is already being attempted, and a scaffold around nothing stands in the wind.

DTobias Renwick, a social geographer at the University of Stirling, does not contest the survival figures; he asks who remains to enjoy them. From advertised rents and council valuation records for nineteen quarters he found that residential rents inside the designated boundaries rose on average 38 per cent faster over the decade after designation than rents elsewhere in the same city, and that of the artists named in the original funding bids, fewer than one in five could be traced to an address inside the quarter twelve years later. A district, on this reading, does not so much grow a cultural economy as harvest one. Renwick concedes two things. His series is built from asking prices, which move ahead of rents actually paid, so he probably dates the rise too early. And in two of the nineteen, both places where the council kept the freeholds and let workshops on long fixed-rent leases, rents inside the boundary rose more slowly than in the surrounding city, an outcome his account does not predict.

EThe dispute is sharpened by the poverty of the baseline. Almost nothing was counted in these districts before somebody decided to improve them: footfall counters, occupancy surveys and business censuses arrive with the regeneration budget, so the years that matter most are the years for which figures are thinnest. Alsop's comparison streets are an attempt to get round this, and she accepts that they are imperfect, since a street half a mile from a quarter may itself be affected by it. Renwick observes, awkwardly for his own case, that the tenants likeliest to vanish without trace are those on informal agreements, who appear in no rent series at all, so the displacement he can document is the displacement of people prosperous enough to leave a record. What exasperates both of them is a habit that has survived thirty years of criticism: councils reporting the success of a quarter in visitor numbers, a measure that responds to a new car park as readily as to a new studio.

FA truce of a kind is taking shape, in which the two accounts are assigned to different questions rather than ranked against one another. On whether designation helps small cultural firms last, Alsop's survival figures stand, and Renwick does not dispute them once her restriction concerning anchor institutions is granted. On who captures the value that follows, the evidence points to whoever holds the freehold, and Alsop treats this as a matter for tenure policy rather than a fault in her model. The question neither has answered is what designation means now that a good deal of creative work has stopped needing a building: no series yet covers enough quarters since 2020 to show whether shared premises still explain survival. What both refuse is the assumption that governed the first generation of schemes, that a district which has begun to look like a cultural quarter has therefore become one.