This past few months the Peterborough Culture Forum has looked to the future, and did some looking after ourselves. If you would like to join, everyone is welcome, and we meet every other Monday, on Zoom, from 4-5pm - get in touch HERE.

Below are links to our session with Pat Carrington, some info on Peterborough Presents’ well-being workshops, and notes from an initial discussion about what the forums says they need from a Peterborough Culture Strategy.

Blog post image of a man standing in a ring of fire.

On 18th June the trustees of the Vivacity Culture & Leisure Trust announced that, due to the impact of the pandemic on its business model that it would be terminating its contract with Peterborough City Council. The physical assets, the libraries, sports centres and pools, the city museum and art gallery, the Key Theatre and Flag Fen, and the 500 staff who run the services in them, will be transferred back into council control over the following 90 days.

As this represents the majority of the city’s cultural assets it felt important to dedicate some of the discussion of the Culture Forum on 22nd June to this change in the local landscape. The detailed notes from these discussions have been passed onto ACE, Vivacity and PCC. This blog attempts to summarise the main points of the discussion, with my own reflections thrown in for good measure.

Lockdown :

What are the challenges that Peterborough artists are facing?

What are the challenges that the city is facing that artists could respond to?

Jumped Up asked if artists and local organisations would like to get together online and see if it was worth having a conversation about how lockdown is affected us, our organisations and our city. A rich and thoughtful conversation happened, and it was agreed to do this again. Read the blog to get the link to sign up.

Over the past few weeks the beaming photos of excited, begowned graduates standing with proud and bemused parents has interspersed holiday snaps and First Day At School photos.  I can remember the excitement, and the big hair and shocking pink trouser suit, of my own graduation.  I can also remember that feeling of “What next?” being an unnerving mix of excitement and downward bewilderment.

 Teachers, medics and lawyers have rigid career paths laid out ahead of them.  There are graduate programmes for accountants and civil servants.  Other opportunities may lie in entry-level jobs with friends and family.  Arts graduates rarely have a clear path to follow – their futures is open and flexible, a blank canvas of making your own career choices from Day One to the end of time – a pretty terrifying prospect for most people, especially when you are just starting out.

I am an Unlimited Ally.  I didn’t have to get a qualification or pass a test or be invited by an expert.  I just had to decide that access to the arts for people who are disabled was important and I was going to do something about it.

Unlimited is an arts commissioning programme that enables new work by disabled artists to reach UK and international audiences. A few years ago I was at an event chaired by Unlimited’s Senior ProducerJo Verrent, she told us to stop asking for tips on making the arts more inclusive and bemoaned that the number of funded organisations with weak-accessible websites.  The info was out there, “just get on and do something” were her instructions. Music to my ears.

So we eagerly booked Ugly Chief, a show, about a daughter, Vic Melody, planning her father's funeral, (her dad is Mike Melody.) They don't always see eye-to-eye. He can be difficult. They have had their fights. But she loves him.  She's his daughter.  He's her Dad.  And thankfully the funeral's not needed because Mike wasn't dying of a terminal disease, he'd been misdiagnosed.  So Vic decides to make a show about this. And about the relationship between parents and adult children, about fathers and daughters.