AS Durham County Council’s bid to be shortlisted for UK City of Culture 2025 goes in, David Whetstone looks at what’s at stake
Durham Cathedral is one of the UK’s most popular attractions, recording around 750,000 visitors annually in pre-Covid times – and presumably again in years to come.
Along with Durham Castle, it’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so about as famous as it’s possible to be internationally.
Yet not far away, in Peterlee, are children who have never seen the Angel of the North, just 20 miles up the road and harder to miss than not.
Both factors will come into play when the judges decide which place (and it no longer needs to be a city, hence County Durham’s bid) will be UK City of Culture 2025.
For the rules, laid out by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, say applicants must showcase the strengths of their cultural offer, acknowledge its limitations and demonstrate the ambition and potential to improve.
UK City of Culture, they add, is intended to be “a transformational moment in a place’s growth”.
County Durham’s bid to reach the shortlist (to be revealed in March) can list fabulous cultural assets, including the cathedral, Beamish, the Bowes Museum, Locomotion and more.
But it scores in other ways too. Across this broad and varied county are organisations and individuals whose work, often not showy or headline-making, improves life for many people.
Those Peterlee children were on a bus trip to Tyneside’s cultural hotspots (BALTIC and Seven Stories) organised by East Durham Creates (EDC), set up in 2014 as part of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places scheme targeting areas of low engagement with the arts.
“That was when I realised this project was really important,” recalls EDC project lead Jess Hunt at the base it shares with East Durham Trust – and from where, under lockdown, arts activity packs were distributed with food parcels.
EDC has done much with its commissioned artists, creating opportunities for young people, targeting loneliness and even working with residents to turn Horden bus shelters into mini venues for a day.
Now its life has been extended with extra funding and its remit expanded to cover the whole of County Durham.
Jess Hunt in the art cafe at East Durham Trust Picture: DAVID WHETSTONE
In Barnard Castle, which must have featured in more lockdown jokes than any other town, another grassroots arts outfit can now build on its successes.
Northern Heartlands was established in 2016 as part of the Great Place Scheme, set up by the Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund to embed culture in areas of socio-economic deprivation.
In this area of extreme differences, projects were set up with communities in rural Upper Teesdale and in former pit villages once condemned as category D.
A giant metal monster, The Man Engine, was paraded through Willington and a community opera, Song of Our Heartland, was created by people across the county working with professionals from Opera North.
Northern Heartlands also ran arts activities used for social prescribing, whereby people visiting their GP for non-medical reasons, such as loneliness, can be directed towards some form of social engagement.
“The opportunity to get to the heart of these different communities and listen to people, find out what the issues were and create something was an absolute gift,” says director Jill Cole.
“But three years was nothing. You’ve just decided what you’re doing and you’re writing your exit strategy.”
Jill Cole indicating Barnard Castle on a map of the Northern Heartlands patch
The decision was taken to keep the organisation going as a charity, working with communities where it is needed.
These and similar organisations, all run by passionate and committed teams, are part of the Culture Durham Partnership (CDP), principal supporter of the county council bid along with Durham University, and feature on its new website.
Chair Tony Harrington also runs Stanley-based The Forge, which works with artists to broaden the horizons of children and young people through creativity.
Pointing out that Eton College, famous producer of Prime Ministers, has several theatres, he says: “I don’t understand why kids in Durham who aren’t at schools like that shouldn’t have access to the same level of cultural opportunity.”
Durham County Council is backing culture, investing some of the £20m secured from the Government’s levelling up fund in Locomotion ahead of 2025, which is also the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
And when Chancellor Rishi Sunak visited the Shildon attraction in December, he reiterated the Government’s commitment to levelling up opportunities across the UK.
As the detailed bid goes in from the first county aiming to win UK City of Culture, there are plenty of good reasons why it should win and just as many for hoping it does.
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