The post-Covid arts recovery must come from the grassroots

Coronavirus has caused devastation to the British arts, with venues still closed, others only partially open and job losses across the board. Greece has shown that it doesn’t have to be like that, writes Oliver Bennett

Opera star Anita Rachvelishvili ‘reopens’ Greece at the All of Greece, One Culture event at the Agora of Athens in July (AFP/Getty)

When the Arts Council was set up in 1946, its progenitor, the economist John Maynard Keynes, secured £235,000 to see the nation’s new arts body through its first year – about £10m in today’s money. A sense of national renewal was sorely needed. Understanding that the arts boost morale in stricken times, Keynes – who died in the council’s inaugural year – expressed the post-war vision in the council’s first annual report, inviting citizens to “look forward to a time when the theatre and concert hall and the gallery will be a living element in everyone’s upbringing and regular attendance at the theatre and at concerts a part of organised education”.

The particular cruelty of the coronavirus lockdown saw that we couldn’t (and still can’t) attend galleries, theatres and concert halls – even in the Second World War some museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum remained open to keep morale up and offer troops cultural sustenance.

In the Covid-19 washup, meanwhile, culture has hardly been the government’s top priority. Prior to Rishi Sunak’s £1.57bn bung in early July, described as “the biggest ever one-off investment in UK culture”, there had been an increasingly urgent drumbeat of closures and lost jobs, from Plymouth Playhouse and the Theatre Royal Newcastle to the Nuffield in Southampton. And although the bleeding has been slightly staunched, there’s still an ominous sense of delayed doom. Harrogate Theatre has announced it will not reopen again until spring 2021 – nor will Birmingham’s Hippodrome – and Ipswich’s New Wolsey Theatre, and Sheffield Theatres and the Crucible and Lyceum, will only run “pop-up” performances.