OT : Times article regarding Coventry as the up coming City of Culture

[Heathen]

THE ARTS COLUMN

I feel blue about Coventry’s lacklustre plans for UK City of Culture
Richard Morrison
Friday February 28 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Still ten months to go, admittedly, but I am starting to worry about Coventry. Three years ago, in a decision that, it’s fair to say, came as a surprise, the place was anointed UK City of Culture for 2021. Before that, nobody had thought of going to Coventry for culture, unless their idea of culture was the mouldering half-life of 1950s town planning set in brutalist concrete. Then again, nobody thought of going to Hull for culture before 2017, when the city made a huge success of its year in the sun.

So I was prepared to give Coventry the benefit of the doubt. Then the 2021 organisers announced their first big idea. It is — wait for it — to paint 366 locations in the city bright blue. Readers with a keen interest in the history of medieval textiles will understand the colour choice at least. In the 14th century Coventry’s weavers were famed for their blue dye, made from woad.

Now the plan is to create a new colour called Moving Blue (because apparently “moving is a word often associated with Coventry”) and daub it all over the city. It’s ironic, in the circumstances, that Ikea has just announced the closure of its superstore in Coventry — which of course is already painted blue.

Yet apart from admiring lots of blue walls, what else can we expect from Coventry’s year of culture? This month Chenine Bhathena, the creative director for Coventry 2021, offered her thoughts so far. To say they amount to a tissue of piffle would be generous. “Our programme will be driven by outcomes,” she writes, clearly dipping into the Rebecca Long Bailey Book of Meaningless Clichés, before adding the scarcely less heart-sinking words: “We want to create movements, not moments.”

It’s vital, she goes on, that the year of culture inspires “real social action”. To which end she pledges to find “creative solutions to challenges around health, homelessness, isolation and criminal exploitation”. And of course there will be a “strong focus on the environment”. She will “seek to rewild the city”.

And so it goes on: sentence after sentence of virtue-signalling, box-ticking horlicks, yet not a word about what most people would regard as essential components of a year of culture: namely music, theatre, dance, comedy and exhibitions. “UK City of Culture,” Bhathena writes, “will only be a success if it shows how arts and culture can play a role in addressing the issues and inequalities we see in society.” Really? A year of culture should surely be about bringing entertaining shows to a place that might have missed out, not following some dour social-engineering manifesto.

Apart from anything else, Coventry deserves a cracking party. Time and again through the centuries it has been battered by setbacks. Hugely prosperous in medieval times, it was clobbered by Henry VIII because it had a powerful monastery and clobbered again by Charles II because it supported parliament in the Civil War.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries it rebuilt its fortunes by becoming a manufacturing powerhouse: first clocks, then bicycles, then cars. It was our Motown. Then, as in Detroit, the automobile industry crashed and by 1981 — when the Coventry band the Specials had a hit with a song aptly titled Ghost Town — unemployment in the city stood at 20 per cent.

In truth the malaise had set in long before. Coventry’s reputation as a soulless dump was so ingrained by the 1960s that when a superb higher-education campus was built on the city’s outskirts it was disingenuously titled the University of Warwick, despite Warwick being miles away.

It’s easy to blame the Luftwaffe for how postwar Coventry looks, but the fact is that British town planners, heavily influenced by the uncompromising modernism of Le Corbusier, had drawn up plans to demolish Coventry’s medieval streets long before the terrible air raids of 1940 and 1941 did the job for them. The new, concrete Coventry was supposed to be an idyllic blueprint for all cities in the late 20th century. Instead, it was vilified by its inhabitants. And despite endless schemes for regeneration, its image has never recovered.

Yet there’s something stoic, even noble, about how Coventry has staggered on for a thousand years. The greatest symbol of that — and Coventry’s most inspiring claim to worldwide fame — is Basil Spence’s mighty postwar cathedral, rising next to the bombed ruins of its medieval predecessor. Yet it’s typical of Bhathena’s manifesto for 2021 that she doesn’t even mention the cathedrals. Much too stodgy and historical, I guess.

It’s not too late for her and her colleagues to raise their game and devise a programme of fabulous events that make the world want to flock to Coventry and ignite real civic pride among its residents. It won’t be done, though, by painting everything blue and attempting to “rewild” the city.


An interesting comment

It’s also to be a City of Sport.  Ironic really that the city’s football team, the 137 year old Coventry City FC have been thrown out of the stadium built for it, by the owners the immigrant rugby club formerly known as London Wasps, who were sold the stadium on a 250 year lease by Coventry City Council, who also ignored the impact on the once mighty Coventry RFC.

The Sky Blues, currently play in Birmingham, apparently because they refused to indemnify Wasps against any possible financial loss incurred if the European Union rule that the sale by the Council was dodgy. 

You couldn’t make this up.

My response

You just have.

Wasps would welcome CCFC back with open arms if the SISU were not involved in the equation. Over 90% of the Sky Blues fans want them out as well!

You are not Les Reid in another guise, are you?

[Neils]

Sounds like a similar miserable barsteward

[Raggs]

If you have a subscription, could you check these out?

Cov seem to be talking about turning it into a legacy, rather than a party, I'd have thought Morrison would have liked this given he seemed to expect it of Hull: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/richard-morrison-hulls-reign-as-uk-city-of-culture-is-pointless-without-a-legacy-rwp6ztmlccl

I'd like to know if he was as positive about Hull beforehand as he was Cov too: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/richard-morrison-hull-has-big-plans-as-uk-city-of-culture-but-will-it-all-be-worth-it-s7h3vtb7p

[Heathen]

#1

 What would that old curmudgeon Philip Larkin have thought about the plans for the city where he spent most of his working life? Fewer than 500 days to go, and the excitement mounts. Some 14 streets and four public squares are being revamped; 1,000 trees have been planted.

Boosted by £18 million of public subsidy, a year-long programme of 1,500 events — including 25 separate festivals, 15 commissions and 12 artists’ residencies — is soon to be unveiled. And there is talk of building a 3,400-seat music and conference venue in the heart of the city. That would transform its ability to attract top touring acts.

Like the rest of the smug metropolitan arts world, I raised a supercilious eyebrow when Hull — not so long ago famed only as Britain’s “No 1 Crap Town” — was announced as the UK City of Culture 2017. The choice seemed incongruous. Hull was horribly bombed in the Second World War. The few Victorian streets that survive in the Old Town merely hint tragically at what was lost. Then the city had its economic heart ripped out by the collapse in the 1970s of its deep-sea trawling industry.

I’ve been there a few times — for the opening of its super-aquarium the Deep, and for shows at the Hull Truck Theatre — and have come to admire the resilience and self-deprecating wit of its residents while remaining unconvinced that the city has either the infrastructure or tradition to sustain a year of world-class cultural events.

Indeed, even the Hull Truck Theatre, which was such a brazenly northern theatrical powerhouse when John Godber was turning out locally based hits such as Bouncers and Up ’n’ Under, lost its way horribly when it moved into a glitzy new £14.5 million building six years ago. Since then it has had more than £1.4 million of “rescue” money from Arts Council England and Hull City Council. Its lack of a resilient and enthusiastic audience base doesn’t bode well for the big collaborations, with the RSC and others, planned for 2017.

In the past year, however, a new sense of purpose seems to have gripped Hull’s planners. True, I was initially alarmed to discover that my old friend Rosie Millard (she of the “best-supporting dress” when reporting on the Oscars for BBC News) had been appointed chairwoman of UK City of Culture 2017.

I don’t deny her love either of culture or Hull (where she was at university), but I do recall her mind-boggling article for a national newspaper in which she blithely told the world that she and her husband had run up £40,000 of credit-card debt. I hope she’s not in charge of reading the balance sheets.

However, since then she has made an excellent appointment, nabbing Martin Green — the impresario who commissioned the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies — as chief executive. He has cannily hijacked Larkin’s poem Days as 2017’s motto (as in “What are days for? . . . They are to be happy in”), and I am starting to believe that he will produce a year which, “Had we but world enough, and time,” as another Hull poet, Andrew Marvell, put it, will entice thousands to visit Humberside.

That, however, is not the real challenge. The point of the City of Culture projects is to take one run-down city every four years and permanently transform it, economically as well as culturally. This is called legacy. Will Hull get that? When I put the question to Darren Henley, the Arts Council England chief executive (and another University of Hull graduate), he was emphatic: “There will be a legacy, I promise, and it will make a real difference.”

Yet the example of Londonderry, which in 2013 was the first UK City of Culture, is not encouraging. The stunning, almost surreal transformation of the formerly grim British Army barracks at Ebrington — creating enormous spaces for everything from Radio 1’s Big Weekend to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Turner prize — proved to be a 365-day wonder, leaving the city without a large performing venue.

And earlier this year Northern Ireland’s culture minister, Carál Ni Chuilín, confirmed that there was no budget to pay for any more “legacy” projects and that the plan to set up a company to deliver such projects — which she announced with a flourish during 2013 — had been cancelled.

My friends in Londonderry tell me that there’s now a depressing sense that the circus has moved on, leaving the place much as it was. Hull must learn from that, and do better.

Trusts are the answer for Britain’s parks
Largely unnoticed while most of the country was on holiday, Peter Harper, chairman of the Dartmoor National Park Authority, raised the possibility of charging visitors to England’s ten national parks. This would counter what he calls the “creeping decay and degradation” caused by government cuts (33 per cent since 2010, with a further 25 to 40 per cent expected to be lopped off in the next three years).

I am not quite sure how he will do that; presumably he isn’t contemplating giant perimeter fences. Abroad, walkers often get charged — I paid about £5 when I rambled over the glorious clifftops of the Cinque Terre walk in the Italian Riviera — but those are for single paths that are easily guarded.

In any case, charges are nonsensical in social or health terms. We want everyone to be out keeping fit in the countryside, not just middle-class fogeys like me. Yes, Mr Harper is right to draw attention to what is now an acute funding crisis for the national parks, but the long-term answer is what I suggested six months ago: setting them free from government dependence and giving them trust status and a new focus on galvanising regional pride, volunteers and investment.

Trusts have worked brilliantly for stately homes, historic monuments and, more recently, canals and rivers. Parks — national and local, urban and rural — could be saved by going down the same route.

[Heathen]

#2

It’s two years since I was last in Hull, and the gritty, grey east-coast port has been transformed. Unfortunately, not yet for the better. The city centre is a building site, as it has been for months. “National shortage of orange barriers because Hull has 3,164 of them” was the admirably precise headline in the Hull Daily Mail, which declared that one street alone had 654, trammelling pedestrians into narrow walkways through armies of workmen laying fancy new pavements. The Ferens Art Gallery and the grandiose New Theatre are also closed for refurbishment, and handsome Queen Victoria Square, the civic heart of the city, is virtually a no-go area.

“I’m sure it will be worth it!” said the lady behind the counter at Greggs, with a sardonic inflection suggesting a healthy dose of Yorkshire scepticism. Well, now she can check for herself, because yesterday Hull unveiled the programme for its year as UK City of Culture — the catalyst for this multi-million tarting up of its main streets and arts venues. Or at least, it unveiled the first three months of it. Cannily, the director Martin Green (who produced the opening and closing events of the 2012 Olympics) has divided 2017 into four quarters, and is announcing the nitty-gritty of each quarter separately.

What has come out so far is certainly impressive, not least financially. Set a fundraising target of £18 million to finance next year’s fun and games, the organisers have raised £32 million, 40 per cent from non-public sources. That has allowed them to offer what seems to be a much bigger range of shows than Londonderry did in 2013.

The year will open with a seven-day hi-tech installation projected on to buildings across the city. Devised by the Hull-born documentary film-maker Sean McAllister, it will (according to Green) “tell the stories of the things that people know about Hull, like the fishing industry and the Blitz, but also of such things as the immigrants who made this city, the fantastic sport and our sensational clubbing history — I mean music, not seals”.

That first three-month season, called Made in Hull, will also include a collaboration between Hull Truck Theatre and the RSC, premiering a new play by Richard Bean, of One Man, Two Guvnors fame. Titled The Hypocrite, it’s set in Hull at the start of the Civil War. The Ferens will reopen with an exhibition showcasing its magnificent new acquisition — Christ between Saints Paul and Peter, by the 14th-century master Pietro Lorenzetti — in the startling but perhaps apt company of Francis Bacon’s “screaming popes” (or five of them, anyway).

Later in the year, the refurbished gallery will host the Turner prize. Meanwhile, the British Museum is lending some fantastic drawings by Dürer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Matisse and Degas for exhibition at the University of Hull’s library, which surely would have delighted its former chief librarian, Philip Larkin.

Hull’s little-known David Bowie connection (his band, the Spiders from Mars, came from the city) will be celebrated in a live performance of the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust . . . and the music offering also includes the intriguing prospect of Opera North turning the Humber bridge into a “giant music installation”. Other events pay homage to Hull’s famous sons, daughters and graduates, including William Wilberforce, J Arthur Rank, Anthony Minghella and Ethel Leginska, the first woman to become a regular orchestral conductor.

Those are the headline acts, but Green is also keen that we should notice the year-long learning programme that will “reach all 60,000 young people in the city”, and 60 community arts projects. “The year is as much about making Hull’s residents feel good about their city as about making the outside world take notice of Hull,” he says.

Nevertheless, they are aiming to attract a million extra visitors during 2017, even though they have nothing like enough hotels to cope. “That doesn’t matter,” Green declares optimistically. “The biggest hotel chain in the world has no hotels, and it’s called Airbnb. This is the future. We said to the residents of Hull: ‘Look, you can earn up to seven grand out of Airbnb during the year of culture without having to tell the taxman, so help us and make some money.’ ”

There’s a feeling in Hull that the fabled “northern powerhouse” project is far too Manchester-centred, and that a lot more investment needs to be directed eastwards. If a city can haul itself up by its own frayed bootstraps, however, Hull seems determined to do it. Digital start-ups are booming, and Siemens has just opened a £310 million factory employing 1,000 people to make wind turbines. Hull’s more visionary leaders now talk of throwing a barrage across the Humber to generate green energy and a recreational lagoon, and building a swish new quay to attract luxury cruise liners. Unlike Londonderry, which has not really enjoyed much of a permanent legacy from being UK City of Culture, Hull’s leaders are determined that their year in the sun will herald a real renaissance.

I think the lady in Greggs may be a touch sceptical about that too — but let’s wait and see.

[Raggs]

Cheers Heathen. Looks like he was pretty negative at first, and still struggling to be positive in the 2nd.

[Brandnewtorugby]

I tend to agree in general with his criticism of the nonsense statements made by people that, to be blunt, bullshit their way through a career. The irony is that he then decends into bullshit himself, based on thin research about something he clearly knows nothing about. The world seems full of them.

Here's hoping the City of Culture is a success and gets support from the arts community rather than heckling from the sidelines.

[Skippy]

The article has all the hallmarks of a London-based journalist who's had a day out in a provisional city and can't wait to get back to his London mate and start ripping the piss out of it.

If he'd bothered to do a bit of research -- no more than a couple of clicks away on google -- he'd have found that the city has made some significant progress and that there's plenty more in the pipeline.

Only a few years ago, buses chugged though Godiva Square stinking the place out; and area that is now pedestrianised. Significant improvements are underway to the shopping precinct, with a number of the ugliest elements being removed, including the upper walkway and the legendary (in other words eyesore) green escalators. A number of the most hideous brutalist tower blocks are being pulled down, including one designed by the same architect responsible for the monstrous Birmingham City Library. The red sandstone Council House built in 1913 has been restored to its original glory on the outside -- a few years ago some muppet had decided to build a first-floor walkway from the front to a council building opposite that looked like an oversized artillery bunker.  The good news is that the bunker has also gone as has the rest of the surrounding Civic Centre complex.  And, here's the real story, the site is being redeveloped by the University of Coventry because it is proving highly successful and undergoing a major expansion, and successful universities can prove to be major drivers of regeneration.

Of course a Times journalist is unlikely to spend too much time on a university like Coventry. Not only does it undermine his own narrative and the chance to make fun of the name chosen for Warwick University, it's a 'new' university and it's just not the done to thing to talk about those. The Times' own university league tables have had a bit of a habit of choosing criteria that favour traditional universities -- it's managed to keep Coventry down in 44th place. By contrast the Guardian places in 15th in its latest rankings.  The Economist magazine singled the university out last summer in an article about the changing university landscape:

"Each institution’s future depends on securing enough students. This reflects a change in government policy. Admissions used to be managed, with limits set on the number of students each university could take. But beginning in 2012 restrictions began to be lifted, before disappearing entirely in 2015, since when universities have been free to take as many as they want. The result, says Sir Steve Smith, vice-chancellor at Exeter, is “the market, red in tooth and claw”.

There is lots of variation, but in general elite institutions have been the biggest growers. Some have ballooned. Bristol’s intake has shot up by 62%, Exeter’s by 61% and Newcastle’s by 43%. Universities lower down the pecking order have fared less well. London Metropolitan’s intake is down by 42%, Kingston’s by 33% and Southampton Solent’s by 28%.

Universities not attracting enough students have to adapt. Since the new system was introduced, almost all have charged the maximum allowed—now £9,250 a year. Since students are entitled to government loans, which they don’t have to repay until they earn more than £25,725 a year, they are relatively unfussed by upfront costs. But price competition has begun to emerge in the form of hefty scholarships. A more common way to appeal to students is to lower the grades for entry. At its most devious, this takes the form of offers which do not require the applicant to achieve any grades at all, provided they make the university their first choice. Recruiting students will at least get easier as the number of 18-year-olds rises in 2021.

Improving a university’s appeal through more reputable means is hard, but not impossible. Coventry has shot up the rankings, and has a 50% bigger intake than a decade ago. In 2010 a “shocking” low score in its student-satisfaction survey prompted a rethink, says Ian Dunn, the university’s provost. Now feedback is requested midway through a course and students are informed of changes made as a result within five days. The university has set up a college which offers degrees from £6,350. It has also cut back joint courses, like accounting and finance, which students enjoyed less."

All in all, there seems to be rather a large gap between the impression given by the Times article and the reality of what is taking place in Coventry.