Gloucester Cultural Strategy doesn't go far enough

The Citizen printed my article about culture yesterday, but did not put the article on their website, so below I have reprinted it for my blog readers. I've already had several enthusiastic responses from readers, including one very exciting piece of news which I will blog about in due course. Here's the article:

I read a tweet a couple of weeks ago which really struck a chord. It said:

“Why does Gloucester not explode with art and life? It could. There's space and opportunity. People need to raise their hopes for it.”

This sums up what I feel about the cultural offer in Gloucester. We live in a city rich with 2,000 years’ worth of history and heritage, and yet we don’t do nearly enough to celebrate that. As a Liberal Democrat city councillor I have argued in the chamber that we need to do more as a city to celebrate the great musicians, artists, writers and poets who have hailed from Gloucester.

On a personal level, I am very interested in the poet and musician Ivor Gurney, who as boy sang in the same stalls at the cathedral that I sing in every day as a Lay Clerk. Gurney’s reputation is going up, but I still feel we could do more, especially with the 100^th anniversary of the start of the First World War coming up – (Gurney fought in the trenches). We need a major exhibition on Gurney and his contemporaries. We have the locations – two recently refurbished museums – and we have the material – Gurney’s original manuscripts and notebooks are housed in the County Records Office in my ward of Kingsholm.

Recently the city council published its 6-monthly update of its 2007 Cultural Strategy. Whilst it’s good that we have a strategy, it does not go nearly far enough. The Tory administration have gone for the idea that ‘more is more’ – listing anything and everything that they can think of that might loosely be defined as culture, and trying to take credit for national events that would have happened anyway. The Cultural Strategy is well-meaning but timid, and could do a whole lot better – a bit like the Tory administration!

We ought to be capable of major cultural festivals, not just the Three Choirs Festival once every three years. There could be literary readings and signings at the Waterstone’s shop and elsewhere, but because Cheltenham has the literary festival we don’t try to encroach on their space.

And although the Guildhall is great for bands (I saw and really enjoyed Wild Beasts there recently) there is only the cathedral for classical music. I hope this will change with the refurbishment of Blackfriars.

We could have an art festival and exhibition, or an antiques festival down at the docks. The list is endless – all we lack is the will.

People might also say we lack the money – but we know from the amazing Crucible exhibition last year that if you stage an imaginative and bold exhibition, thousands of people will come to the city. Businesses will experience an increase in takings, as happened during the Crucible.

Art gets people talking, even if not everyone likes it. The St Kyneburgh’s tower at Southgate Street is going to be a conversation piece, and we ought to be encouraging more like it. It would have been far better to have an imaginative piece of public art at Gloucester Park, rather than the fake Victorian bandstand that the Tory administration wasted public money on. The Tories lack imagination, and a Liberal Democrat administration would do much more for culture in Gloucester.