Cherish city's artscape

I take the title of the introduction I wrote for this season's Hello Lincoln. I reproduce the article below, but I want first to set out just why our city's artscape is in need of being cherished.

It is about being a city which embraces excellence in all its forms and not just a city what was notable in the past.

In order to be a place of excellence, I believe a number of factors need to be present. Excellence in education, which we have in our universities and college; excellence in work and employment, which we have in Siemens, Lindum and James Dawson but also a host of very creative businesses; excellence in architecture and heritage, which we have in abundance. It also needs excellence in the provision of arts and culture. It is simply no good if people living here have to go elsewhere to ‘feed their souls’.

I have written elsewhere of Charlotte Bronte who only found her eyes opened to art in the then new National Gallery when she visited London. In Lincoln we are amazingly lucky because, unlike Charlotte Bronte, we don’t have to go to London to have the experience she had; we have it on our door step. The Usher Gallery is surely, in its own way, as beautiful a building as the National Gallery and its setting on the hill nestling below the cathedral surely knocks Trafalgar Square for six. It has in recent years welcomed exhibitions that would make cities many times our size green with envy. It speaks of a city that is significant.

We do of course need more that just that. Many of the people of this city live in some of the most deprived wards in the UK. It is vital that our provision of art and culture reaches as far as it can and is as accessible as it can be. At the Drill Hall, we are delighted to be working in partnership with the YMCA to bring the experience of theatre to young people living in their part of the city and also to be working with the Mansions of the Future project to make art accessible in the very centre of Lincoln.

The Usher has the potential to be a massive force for good. It has been neglected and does need investment to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. The building is one with its collection, and this is important. It was built for the purpose for which it is still used and is a necessary complement to the art on display. It can speak loud and clear to the Lincoln community and to our many visitors.

The reference to visitors is important. We will soon have two wonderful heritage sites and visitors, I am sure, will come in their thousands. However, once they have visited the cathedral and castle, what next? To my mind, it is vital to have strong cultural offering to encourage those vital repeat visits.  I would argue that high quality public performance is part of this, but also the opportunity to experience great visual art in the place built to show it.

Both the Drill Hall and the Usher have a further vital role to play. They need to be places where today’s and indeed tomorrow’s artists can work. In today’s world, art cannot be something that is just ‘consumed’; there is a hunger to participate. Both places are ideally suited to this.

What kind of a City is Lincoln?

It is a question I have asked before but in a different context; this time it is much more about whether we are a city that looks back, or one that looks now? Let me explain.

Millions of pounds have been spent at the castle, and indeed are being spent at the cathedral, to enable visitors and, of course, local residents to see what Lincoln was. All this is done in a very engaging and expert way, and that is wonderful. But is that all, and should it be all? What about the creative people of today? More to the point, what about you and me - now?

We all get on with our day to day lives, and much is far from easy. We need, from time to time, to be taken out of ourselves to experience something totally different. Here I declare my hand, I am chair of trustees at the Lincoln Arts Trust which cares for and runs Lincoln Drill Hall. So I would suggest that it is a pretty good thing to go to the Panto and have good laugh. I know, from talking to audience members, that the experience of a performance of Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera truly lifts the spirits. It may be music; it may be comedy or theatre; it depends what is your particular cup of tea.

It is more that just live performance; it is the other ways artists speak to us. The work going on at Mansions of the Future is reaching many more people than some existing venues and that is good, but those other places can too.

As I have written elsewhere, I have come to the world of arts and culture quite late in life. I still remember the thrill of seeing paintings in an art gallery and, rather than shuffling round bored and embarrassed, having someone open my eyes to what I am seeing. I am currently writing about Charlotte Bronte, the author Jane Eyre, and have found in her letters that the same was true for her; she had her eyes opened when she visited London and the then new National Gallery.

In Lincoln we are amazingly lucky because, unlike Charlotte Bronte, we don’t have to go to London to have the experience she had; we have it on our door step. The Usher Gallery is surely in its own way as beautiful a building as the National Gallery, and its setting on the hill nestling below the cathedral surely knocks Trafalgar Square for six. It has in recent years welcomed exhibitions that would make cities many times our size green with envy.

More than this, Lincoln as city is radically different to the one I first worked in only twenty years ago. Its biggest population group by far is 18 to 25. These are young people at an incredibly important time in their lives. They already have world class universities and colleges; for their nourishment, they need access to great performance and truly engaging art. The same is true of you and me, and tragically we are at risk of losing both, for ever.

The Drill Hall is at risk of closure, which is why we are running our Buy a Brick campaign. The Usher Gallery too is as risk of ceasing to be an art gallery at all and the County Council are consulting all of us for our opinion.

With both, the question is the same: do we want to live in a city where we have on our doorstep excellent live performance and a gallery that can welcome world class art? Both need to be accessible and I know that more work is needed to achieve this. 

But, what do you think?

My article in the Lincolnshire Echo of 14 March 2019

Let's talk

The late Jo Cox gave this country a great deal, but not least when she said, "we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divided us."

The Queen perhaps continued the theme when she said to the Sandringham WI, '“As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture.”

In The Guardian of Saturday 16 February, Ian Jack quoted both in his piece about a visit to Brexit voting Boston in Lincolnshire with a couple of people from Remain voting Lambeth in London.

In the same paper Jonathan Freeland lauded the action of school children in demonstrating against those of their elders who ignore global warming. He offered his argument with some delicious humour:

"Such is the upside-down, topsy-turvy state of our world, that the children are now the adults and the adults are the children. In Westminster, our supposed leaders – men and women of mature vintage – keep stamping their feet and demanding what no one can give them.

They insist they should be allowed to gobble up all the birthday cake and still have cake left to eat, threatening to storm out of the European Union and slam the door behind them. As Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, rightly puts it: “Threatening to leave is the behaviour of a three-year-old who says that they are going to hold their breath if they do not get the toy that they want.”

In Washington, meanwhile, Donald Trump, aged 72 and three-quarters, has screamed and screamed and screamed until he is sick, pounding his little fist on the table as he demands money for the big wall of bricks he wants to build, and today declaring a national emergency to get his way. The House speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, assessed the situation accurately last month, when Trump was shutting down the government: “It’s a temper tantrum by the president. I’m the mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.”

Marina Hyde then despaired at how our adult leaders are spending the days as the clock ticks down to Brexit:

" If we crash out of the EU without a deal, I hope someone publishes a coffee-table book detailing each of the irrelevant arguments we had on each day as the Brexit doomsday clock ticked down. T-minus 42 days: was Churchill a shit or not? T-minus 41 days: where do you stand on the Boer war?

There is something truly grotesque about all this playing out as children around the country and the world strike from school to protest against climate emergency. In Westminster, a generation who will never be forgiven don’t even have the thing they won’t be forgiven for on their radar. It is left, shamefully, to actual kids to point it out. With absolute ironical inevitability, then, May made the time to criticise the nation’s young for their actions. Apparently, the climate strike “wastes lesson time”. Just to be clear, Prime Minister, on Thursday a party colleague requested an emergency parliamentary debate on Winston Churchill, who literally DIED IN 1965. Can you grown-ups give the kids another lecture on time-wasting, please?"

I strikes me that we, 'ordinary' people, need to talk to each other. Our politicians are failing us in a big way. They must not be allowed to succeed. So, whether you favoured Brexit or wanted to Remain, let's start talking before it's too late.

What's more, I will offer a venue for that conversation. Who's up for it?

Lincoln Book Festival 2019

Our friends at the Bailgate Independent suggested that I might come up with a Book of the Month recommendation. Bliss or what?

Here is my first from the February edition:

They then asked about plans for this year's festival:

Thank you Bailgate!

I hope you agree there is much to look forward to.

Be a Brick and Buy a Brick

It is true, I am not sleeping for worry about the future of the Drill Hall.

We have such an amazing team who are working tirelessly to keep this vital venue open at the heart of our city. So I was delighted to read in my Lincolnshire Echo (see below) an article written from an interview I gave on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. My delight was at the accuracy of the reporting and that fact that I had obviously said what I really wanted to say! (not always the case on a live interview).

So, what were these things I really wanted to say?

"Lincoln Drill Hall being a place for the people of Lincoln has continued for the last 130 years."

Peter Hennessy writes: Putting up prices is not an option according to Mr Hamlyn Williams. "Our purpose is to bring art and culture to the people of Lincoln, that's why we're here. We have to have tickets that are affordable - we want more and more people to come."

My predecessor as chair of trustees, Phil Cosker, puts it brilliantly in the animated video on the website. I have also written on Why it matters, on The Proms, on CompassionateLincoln Big Soup (next one 23 February), on Lincoln in WW1 and on some wonderful memories from years gone by.

That's why we are asking people to Be a Brick and Buy a Brick.

My Christmas present from my lovely children - at the Barbican

Not for the first time am I in the Barbican awaiting a production by the RSC. Last year it was all about revenge with Titus Andronicus; this year it is darker still with The Scottish Play.

My lovely children get together to buy me theatre tokens and I choose something that will get me thinking.

The programme made a good deal about the play being about time; indeed there was a digital clock on stage. For me the casting of three young girls as the witches was far more powerful. Shakespeare was writing amid the Jacobean witch hunts. Men were portraying witches as evil hags in league with the devil; in truth they tended to be intelligent women (always hated by men) with skills of healing. Tracy Borman's wonderful debut novel, The King's Witch, shows this vividly. So the casting of children made it clear that evil was not external to Macbeth and his wife, but within them, as indeed it is within all of us. No excuses.

Lincoln Drill Hall - why it matters

On the anniversary of some women first exercising their right to vote, I was privileged to see two pieces of drama Made in Lincoln

The first, The World at their Feet, I had seen before at Lincoln Drill Hall in November. This evening we saw the final scene without props or theatre lighting. Maggie and I were moved to tears, as we had been first time round. It was the combination of a story that mattered, great writing, great direction and great acting. This was a performance by a community theatre company, The Lincoln Mystery Players of a piece written and directed in Lincoln. It was so powerful. I have no doubt at all that the writer Stephen Gillard, director Sam Miles and a number of the players are heading for fulfilling careers.

The second, The Forgotten Suffragette, I am ashamed to say I didn't hear first time round when it was broadcast on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. It was acted by Phoebe Wall-Palmer and Rachel Baynton, ably supported by theatre students and the incomparable Simon Hollingsworth. This fine piece of writing was also Made in Lincoln by Proto-type Theater working with the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. If World at her Feet moved my emotions, the Forgotten Suffragette set my mind racing.

It matters that those setting out on a career have a place to perform and hone their art. It made me think more deeply about my role as chair of the Lincoln Arts Trust, whose activity is the promotion of arts and culture principally through the care and running of Lincoln Drill Hall. It made me ask, 'what really matters?' Is it popular professional performance that plays to full houses, or do I need to dig a little deeper?

This last year I have witnessed full houses, not least the wonderful talk given to an audience ranging in age from eight to eighty by Michael Morpurgo as part of the Lincoln Book Festival and, of course, the BBCProms and the Soldier's Tale. I have also been swept away by Les Miserables performed by Jamie Marcus Productions with no cast member over the age of nineteen. I have seen new work, where we paid what we thought. I can't wait to see the Panto, also by Jamie and Julie Marcus and produced with such high performance values with actors who know their craft.

  

Yet, when I do dig deeper, I find that the Panto reaches far more people than anything else and, through it, young people have their first taste of theatre which can result in a lifelong love. Our CEO Chris Kirkwood has written further on this.

Many young people find their own skills in our Fishtank Theatre Group, now also being run at the YMCA on Tritton Road. Some take part on the New Youth Theatre who take over the Hall for a week of performances each year. We have our monthly disco run by and enjoyed by people with disabilities. Saturday lunchtime is where people come to meet and eat whilst listening to talented musicians. Three times a year, Saturday is also when Compassionate Lincoln hold their Big Soup in support of community initiatives. There is the community performances, as well as World at her Feet, pieces by Common Ground Theatre , performances by the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra and the acclaimed Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival with their monthly concerts at the Hall.

In truth there is so much that matters.

Michael Morpurgo with Charlie Partridge - photography by Phil Crow