Bankers may bring in the billions, but it is artists who have given London its recent buzz and driven regeneration from Hoxton to Peckham.
As wealthier businesses move into artists’ districts, London’s artists struggle to find affordable studios and are left to ponder moving to other vibrant, cheaper cities.
I spoke to three organisations faced with these problems – Artsadmin, Bow Arts and SPACE – to explore what they have learned about keeping artists in the capital.
SPACE dates back to 1968. It identified riverside warehouses as offering a solution – and landlords struck cheap deals for these then-unwanted spaces. Today, SPACE has 722 tenants, from Turner Prize winners Laure Prouvost and Tomma Abts to graduates, occupying more than 500 studio spaces totalling 256,000 sq ft in 18 buildings.
Bow Arts rented its first building in east London in 1994 from sympathetic developer Marc Schimmel, who also helped a young Damien Hirst. Bow Arts now manages 12 buildings, housing around 500 artists. The organisation invests £750,000 of its revenues from artists’ affordable rents in cultural and educational services, including placing artists in schools.
Judith Knight co-founded Artsadmin in 1979, both to produce her own work and to help other performers who were working without office facilities or management support. Since 1994, it has been based at Toynbee Studios, E1, and will be there until at least 2038, thanks to lottery funds and £6m it raised from a mix of sources. Now Artsadmin operates around 15 artist offices, plus a theatre and five rehearsal spaces. It also disburses bursaries every 18 months.
The Shoreditch effect
SPACE’s Anna Harding says it has become a victim of its own success, as businesses pay higher rents to move into the areas it has made attractive.
Marcel Baettig, trust director of Bow Arts, agrees: “The leases have been for set periods of time. At the end of it, the developer gets the opportunity to do something else with the site. And now the spaces are becoming rarer.” A City Hall Artists’ Workspace Study in 2014 suggested that the capital is set to lose 3,500 studios in the next five years.
Bow Arts has also opened up conversations with councils and developers about how to create ‘a proper community presence’ in new developments, and is working with housebuilder Berkeley on putting artists into its conversion of the former News International site in Wapping, E1.
A fabulous place to live
Baettig says artists face the same financial battle as most Londoners, with the double whammy of needing workspace as well as a home. But artists buying in places such as Margate, Kent are still commuting to London.
In New York, mayor Bill de Blasio is acting on rent controls and building live/workspaces for artists. San Francisco increased public spending on arts by 50% last year, to combat artists being pushed out of one of the most aggressive real estate markets in the world. “There is a lot of talk at the Greater London Authority about how to finance art,” Harding says. “They have to put their hands in their pockets.”
Baettig believes there is an interesting debate under way about preventing the spread of the Shoreditch effect. “Can we work with planning authorities to create zones that are rent controlled and retain artists?” he asks.
City Hall could be the artists’ champion. Baettig cites one unnamed borough mayor who turned down the chance for around 250 creative workspaces on the grounds that the area had ‘enough artists but needed jobs’, demonstrating a misunderstanding of what artists do.
The arts and artists, many observers believe, are what has made London special in recent decades. “If you lose them, you will get another generic city,” Baettig says.
This is an extract from London Essays. Click here to read the full collection.
