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If there’s an art form that is especially British, its 2026 season gets under way right now.
It involves pretty much every creative discipline you can think of, and one or two you can’t; no-one knows exactly how many experienced it last year, but an informed - conservative - guess puts it at around 23m (over 200,000 make it to Glasto alone every time).
Festivals, of course.
This week a report from the Arts Council funded network Without Walls in a joint endeavour with OutdoorArtsUK, Creative Third Version and 101 Outdoor Arts, sets out a ten-year shared framework to, in the face of a frightening phalanx of challenges, strengthen the outdoor arts sector. It attempts to place festivals at the centre of cultural community strategising, policy development and place-making. “Outdoor arts has always been more than just great art” says the report. “It is a civic act”.
In fields, parks and streets around the British Isles, weather notwithstanding, there is music of all genres, dance ditto, visual art, comedy, cities of culture, theatre, opera, poetry, circus, horticulture, crafts, sometimes all of them at once. Despite notable casualties over the years, festivals from Glastonbury to Orkney to Notting Hill to Manchester to Dulwich are this week setting out the bunting, opening booking sites, finalising mammoth rubbish collection programmes, organising queues, setting up bars and dancing round the maypole for what the Labour government might call the people’s art, art without walls.
Nobody knows how many festivals there are, but it’s about 500 from one end of the year to the other. They range from the venerable like Edinburgh (founded 1946) and Brighton (1966) but more than half of them have started since 1990; and it’s a modern phenomenon with 28% of audience members under 35, more than twice than for the arts overall.
In 2015 the Southbank Centre decided to revive its 1951 purpose - to create a festival to mark Britain’s revival after the war as well as commemorate the Great Exhibition. Now it has five festivals celebrating poetry, music, jazz, literature and, with the world’s biggest festival of its kind, women. Some are organic, popping up for one season and disappearing for ever; some collapsed, like Bryn Terfel’s Faenol Festival, devised by him to revive his Caernarvonshire birthplace, which closed in 2011 for lack of ticket sales after ten mostly successful years.
Funding is a nagging ache becoming a chronic pain, for festivals at least as much as for any other beleaguered art form. Just as for Faenol 15 years ago, audiences are choosing prudence over fun in the shadow of the cost-of-living crunch, but also local authorities are backing off - and under new party configurations may back out altogether - while sponsors are thinking twice about making a commitment in these turbulent times to a project that relies so much on the weather.
Whoever is leading the government when these words reach your screen, DCMS is committed to widening audiences and making the arts more accessible. Announcing grants worth £130m last month, culture secretary Lisa Nandy said: “Arts and culture aren’t a luxury for a privileged few. They are for everyone, everywhere. They bring people together, open doors, and support our shared sense of belonging”. Open doors, spot the code. The campaigners see festivals sitting comfortably in the housing department’s policy paper Protecting What Matters, a strategy heavily endorsed by Keir Starmer to promote social cohesion in which the importance of community arts is underlined.
But that money, from Nandy's £1.5bn Arts Everywhere Fund launched in January, is not for “everywhere”: it’s for buildings such as the Lowry Centre in Salford and the Theatre Royal at Stratford East, for art within refurbished walls.
The report from Without Walls and its associate organisations wants to get us to look beyond bricks and mortar. It has been jointly commissioned by OutdoorArtsUK, a national organisation that promotes street performance and believes that outdoor arts are “a vital and unique part of our cultural ecology”; Third Version Creative which helps artists and producers through research, strategy and creative programmes;
Without Walls is itself a commissioning charity that works with festivals of all dimensions across the country. It started in 2007 working with five partners and now has 30, from the Norfolk and Norwich in May to Bournemouth’s Arts by the Sea in September. It commissions new work in collaboration with these partners and generates touring at home and abroad.
The report, A Strategy for Joy and Belonging, may sound like a Salvation Army soap box sermon but it presents a very non-sectarian strategy for development investment in creativity, innovation and sustainability; collating data that can make the case for the value and impact of festivals to potential funders; fostering internationalism and cultural exchange; and developing a joined-up advocacy that can use the data in lobbying governments at all levels - much like the Creative Industries Federation (CIF, now part of Creative UK) did a dozen years ago to prove in plain statistics that the creative sector was the fastest growing in the economy and put a figure on it. It’s worth £24bn a year.
In the steps of the CIF, the festivals’ advocates have decided to get political, even to urging a rapprochement with Europe. "Outdoor arts play a central role in delivering the government's priorities on social cohesion, pride in place and access to culture” says Sho Shibata, director of OutdoorArtsUK, which provides creative spaces for workshopping open air arts. “In Protecting What Matters, the Prime Minister highlighted the need to rebuild communal life through activity that brings people together and strengthens belonging, while the government's response to the Hodge Review of Arts Council England confirms that the arts should be "for everyone, everywhere" and that "access to exceptional culture should no longer be the preserve of the few".
This strategy, he says, shows outdoor arts at the forefront of delivering on “arts for everyone” ambitions, “animating public space, reaching communities beyond formal venues and embedding cultural experience into every corner of ordinary life”.
But as costs persistently and ever more sharply rise, artists are in urgent need of support if they are going to continue to fill that civic role. But it shouldn't be seen as just a grim challenge.
“The opportunity is immense” the report concludes. “Outdoor arts stand ready to strengthen communities, support regeneration and rebuild cultural confidence across the country by animating public spaces.
“With the right structures, greater investment and strong yet shared leadership, our sector can flourish: innovating across artforms, reaching more people and helping to shape healthier, more creative places.”
And there’s still £1.37bn in Nandy’s handy Arts Everywhere Fund…
To download A Strategy for Joy and Belonging, please use this link.