Sophie Leighton-Kelly

Publics and Partnerships: London’s Barbican Centre

The Barbican Centre in London is Europe’s largest civic-funded multi-arts venue. The majority of its funding comes from the City of London Corporation, the local authority for the capital’s global financial district, which has a residential population of under 10,000 and receives most of its political mandate from business votes.

Widely known as a venue for international work, specifically in its theatre programme, one of the Barbican’s recently implemented organisational objectives is to work at the heart of the city facing East: towards the Olympics and beyond. This East is primarily the Barbican’s neighbouring residential areas, the five boroughs which have been chosen as the site for the London 2012 Olympic Games, each of which are culturally diverse with areas of pronounced socio-economic deprivation.

This paper asks what the cultural value and impact of a civically funded, geographically removed arts centre producing performance events in the culturally diverse and regenerating urban areas of East London is. To date the Barbican has developed partnerships with local organisations to deliver performance outside its walls.

The paper argues that the Olympics and the global recession have been catalysts for a reconsideration of the relationship between the Barbican’s international and local work, and describes the efficacy of the partnership model in this development. It investigates the nature of these partnerships, and the assumed difference between the Centre’s usual public, and the public it hopes to reach through this work.