Cultural infrastructure for Ealing’s 367,100 creatives
09 September 2024
The home of British cinema and a cradle of British rock, Ealing is a cultural production powerhouse for London and the world. Now is an important moment to renew this legacy and ensure it delivers for those who make Ealing home.
Last year the London Borough of Ealing published its cultural manifesto and a commitment to produce a cultural infrastructure plan for Ealing’s 367,100 creatives. To meet the manifesto’s ambitions for culture, Ealing must step up to plan infrastructure, from facilities and equipment to support creative careers to world-class performance venues to bring people together.
Leading a collaborative team with Tom Fleming Creative Consultancy and Sound Diplomacy, we’ve produced a cultural infrastructure plan that spans from evidence to action blueprints for what cultural spaces are needed for its communities over the short, medium and long term so that the ambitions in the cultural manifesto can be achieved.
Ealing’s audiences are diverse, ranging from low engaged and health poor seniors and youths looking to participate in low-barrier activities locally to highly active, diverse, social and ambitious regular and eclectic arts engagers. The evidence shows that these audiences are geographically distributed, a result of disparity in income, demographic, health outcomes and transport connectivity across the borough.
The cultural infrastructure plan takes both a thematic and place-based approach to translating evidence into recommendations for cultural infrastructure, ensuring all projects work to deliver against Ealing’s challenges, capitalise on opportunities and support a growing cultural sector and talent base across Ealing’s seven towns. Each of these - Acton, Ealing Town, Hanwell, Northolt, Greenford, Perivale and Southall - has a unique offer and opportunity to raise its cultural profile.
House of AEIOU in Southall includes garment production space, sells locally-made art and books and hosts weekly events for creatives.
We’ve recognised opportunities to 'stay local’ through embedding cultural production and consumption at hyper-local scales of 20-minute neighbourhoods. We’ve identified ways to grow provision in town centres and we’ve also focused on the rapid connections to the rest of the capital, especially Central London. This is enabled by transport links such as the Elizabeth Line, HS2 and potential West London Orbital. This proximity offers the opportunity for Ealing to become a cultural destination for Londoners. It supports a strong existing creative community to embed culture within large scale transformative regeneration schemes and thriving towns.
Priority projects emerged from local dialogue and evidence. These include projects to enhance and activate libraries for multi-functional cultural use, through to securing a long-term position as production powerhouse by safeguarding affordable creative space.
And given Ealing’s music heritage has significantly shaped its cultural landscape - from the legendary Ealing Club to the home of Marshall amplifiers - now is the time to develop a coordinated roadmap to guide future investment in the music ecosystem and its rehearsal, education and venue spaces.
Stay tuned and keep track of what’s happening with culture in Ealing.
(Image: Impact Theatre, Perivale)
