The high point of my involvement in community arts was between 1978 and 1984 in Hackney, when I worked first for Free Form Arts Trust and then, after a short sortie into Tower Hamlets, returned to rescue the Rio Cinema from closure, trying to define the meaning of community cinema.  I was also for a while chair of the Shelton Trust (the successor of The Association of Community Artists) and on the board of Cultural Partnerships.  So I had a pretty good grounding in that “grassroots approach, often useful in economically depressed areas”.  

Nowadays, I live in a wealthy area, in the commuter belt, and one might think that the same principles do not apply. But I’ve discovered that they can be used with a completely different group of people and can be equally empowering for the individual. They might not “trigger events at a national or international level”.  But then, did we ever?  The maximum impact, I would argue, was achieved not during those activist days, but later, when many of us individuals who had cut our teeth on community arts then moved on into other areas (politics, broadcasting, arts funding, education etc.) where we applied the principles that we had learned in our community arts days: democratisation, giving people a voice, and promoting change.

In 1991, while I worked for West Midlands Arts, I commissioned Doff Pollard to write a rural arts strategy. One section of this dealt with preconceptions about the arts in rural areas, which highlighted some erroneous ideas about rural arts, including:

• “nobody wants it”
• “everyone in rural areas is rich and can travel”
• “you can get it all in the city”
• “the shows won’t fit into the spaces and the facilities aren’t good enough”
• “it’ll cost more”
• “it’s not a local authority priority”
• “no-one will know about it or understand it”

20 years later, the same assumptions seemed to hold true, but we also found that it was possible to overcome some of them and run an organisation which was meaningful and effective for over a decade.  Of course, community artists had been working in rural areas throughout, but would there be a point or an opportunity in a wealthy village like Wadhurst in the 21^st century?

It started with the Parish Council. Parish Councils are pretty powerless organisations, with responsibility for things like dog litter bins.  However, because they have a “general power of competence” they can actually do anything else that an individual or group can legally do. There was a small window, back in 2011 when a strange coalition between all sorts  of greens, Tories and others took control of Wadhurst Parish Council, in leafy East Sussex, and someone suggested that there should be a “culture subcommittee”.  This was to become Wadhurst Culture, which soon became an independent charity – we claimed it was the smallest arts charity in England – and lasted till 2023.  

We had some expertise behind us, and we set about thinking what Wadhurst Culture would do. There were some routine things, like promoting professional theatre in the Commemoration Hall, which we did in partnership with Applause and Farnham Maltings. But what we really wanted to do was something more participatory, and so we unpacked some of our old ideas and off we went.  

Because yes, we were in a wealthy area, but that did not mean that everyone had a voice, or access to arts practice. The arts and crafts classes had disappeared from adult education provision, evening transport was poor to non-existent, and there was a large elderly population who had little access to anything. So one of my first community projects at the Rio, One Day in Hackney, was redesigned in 2012 as A Weekend in Wadhurst. Back in the 80s, we had given a film to everyone who wanted to participate, then taken the films in a large carrier bag down to Boots and got them converted into slides, which we then showed on the big screen.  

Things had become easier over the intervening 30 years, with the arrival of smart phones and digital cameras.  We simply asked people to take photos over the Jubilee weekend “whether you’re hanging out the flags or hanging around on street corners” and had an overwhelming – and very creative – response.  Local businesses funded the printing, a local framers framed a selection for free, and we had a well-attended exhibition and prize for the people’s favourite.  There was a real sense in the village that it was a collective project, and we began to collect a great list of volunteers who would invigilate events for us and participate in other ways.  

From then on we were on a roll for a while – we ran two projects where the shops in the high street displayed poems for special events – Words of Love in Wadhurst for Valentine’s Day 2012, and Foolish Words in Wadhurst for April Fool’s Day 2013.

A Weekend in Wadhurst/ Foolish words in Wadhurst.

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However, we were planning bigger things. We were put in touch with ArtMusic – Helen Ottaway and Alistair Goolden – who had a great track record in community-based site specific work.  May 2015 was significant for Wadhurst, because on the 9^th May 1915, 25 young men from the village were killed or mortally injured at the Battle of Aubers Ridge. IN THE FIELD, the resulting project, was probably one of the best participatory projects I’ve been part of. There was a sold-out concert in the church, followed by a month’s sound installation. The concert included three new compositions, two of which resulted from the workshops which had happened in the year leading up to the project, and a whole host of local participants – the primary school and the secondary school choirs, the brass band, bellringers, handbell ringers, and a choir brought together specially for the event.  A professional string quartet and a conductor were brought in to pull the whole thing together. Three of the songs were based on poems by children from the local primary school. The sound installation included extracts from the main new composition, plus found sound from the workshops. The installation was stewarded by 40 local people, from the list of supporters which we had been building up, plus some people who were drawn in by participating in the concert. 1,200 people visited it. It was funded by the Arts Council, several charitable trusts, the Parish Council and donations.  And it was accompanied by a second photographic project, A Weekend to Remember in Wadhurst, with photographs taken by villagers the previous Remembrance Sunday displayed in most of the High Street shops.  All this was built from the history, sounds and contributions of local people, with local people, and it felt like everyone in the village owned it.

In the field final rehearsal and the print workshop.

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It was a huge success, and gave us lots of confidence, but we promptly fell flat on our faces trying to set up another huge project, Through a Glass Darkly, with a couple of MA tutors from the University for the Creative Arts, and artist Andrew Cotting.  The Arts Council turned it down, and though we did manage to get some funding, there was no hope of achieving the £70,000 budget it needed, more than twice what we’d raised for In the Field.

By now we had some regular funding from the Parish Council and a lot of support from the District Council, and did manage another fairly large scale project, When the Oak Spoke, with artist Becky McRay, but despite lots of workshop activity (and participation in creating knitted oak leaves!), it did not quite have the same impact.

Oak spoke bookshop display with knitted leaves, oak spoke children’s leaves, oak spoke final installation.

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Then along came Covid. We had some funding in the bank, from the Parish Council and from profits on our touring theatre promotions, so we worked with artist Jeni Johnson, who was by then on the Committee, to create a series called We’ve got Creative Arts in a Bag offering various activities which people could do at home, which were very popular.  But we lost our income from the touring shows, and by now the makeup of the Parish Council had changed, and they cancelled our regular grant.

Art in the Bag Lockdown project, with Easter bag contents.

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We managed one final set of projects, three videos, The Blacksmith’s Tale, The Knitters Tale  and The Filmmakers Tale, designed to be part of a series demonstrating the creativity which exists in the village.  And we decided to change our name to Creative Wadhurst in order to better reflect what we do.

The Filmaker’s Tales, you can watch the other films via the links above.

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But nothing lasts forever.  People would join the committee, but then move on, either because they left the village, or had too much creative work of their own, or whatever.  Eventually the committee shrank to just three regulars, none of us artists, and we felt we should wind up.  We gave the village the chance to take it over, not wanting to wind up the charity if someone wanted to carry on, even if they wanted to take it in a different direction, but we didn’t succeed and in 2023 we wound up the company.

Lessons learned: 

— It isn’t only in urban areas that people are starved of the opportunity to be creative and to work with professional artists 

— It’s not impossible to raise tens of thousands of pounds for a participatory arts project in a village if you hit the right note

— Small interventions (like the poems in shop windows) can be very effective in raising morale and interest

— Don’t flog a dead horse – we could have retreated to only promoting projects in the hall, but that wasn’t really what interested us, it was a means to an end.

Lots of us had a good time, people developed unexpected skills, people gained confidence or a new platform. That will do for now.