Be_Creative_Be_Well

Be Creative Be Well
Arts, wellbeing and local communities

An evaluation
Richard Ings, Nikki Crane

and Marsaili Cameron
Well London
The Well London Alliance Partnership has been awarded a Health Promotion and Community
Wellbeing award from the Royal Society for Public Health. This award recognises the
partnership’s achievements and innovative approach to promoting community health and
wellbeing in 20 of London’s most disadvantaged areas.
‘ If we are to reduce health inequities it is essential to take action on the social determinants
of health – the ‘causes of the causes’ of ill health. That means working in partnership at
local level to improve the social conditions in which we are born, live, grow, work and age.
The Well London Alliance Partnership does just that. Empowering individuals and
communities, and giving people a voice is integral to addressing health inequalities. I am
delighted the Partnership has achieved well-deserved recognition for its work.

’
Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director, UCL Institute of Health Equity
Be Creative Be Well
‘ I have no problem with what people call ‘instrumentalism’. So what if artists want to
change the world through their practice? What’s so terrible about that?

’
Karen Taylor, Programme Manager, Be Creative Be Well
Cover image: A local resident begins to dig out an Angel in Edmonton as part of the 100 Angels project
(see page 51)
Photos: Bethany Clarke (unless otherwise stated)
◥ 3 Contents
Contents
Foreword 6
The report at a glance 8

An executive summary
Introducing Be Creative Be Well 13

Good art and the social good
Overture 20
The object through which people understand the project
Case study: Hoe Street LSOA, Waltham Forest
1 Be Creative Be Well in context

Culture, health and the policy framework
1.1 Postcodes and poverty
23
23
Past visions and current failures of social housing
1.2 The human cost 26
The link between poverty and ill health
1.3 Recalibrating health promotion 27
How policy makers are responding to new thinking about well-being
1.4 The contribution of culture and the arts 30
A growing acceptance of the value of culture and creativity to health
1.5 Areas of low engagement and participation 33
Ambitions for deeper and wider engagement in the arts
◥ 4 Contents
2 Be Creative Be Well in practice

Artists and projects
2.1 Choosing the artists
36
36
The key attributes and the participatory process
2.2 Briefing the artists 39
The situation on the ground
2.3 Developing an artistic programme 40
A survey of artistic activity and achievement
A festival of light 42
Case study: Woodberry Down LSOA, Hackney
3 Be Creative Be Well in theory

Understanding the outcomes
An evidence-based framework for evaluation
44
1. Place/Take notice 48
Paying attention to where you live
100 Angels 51
Case study: Upper Edmonton LSOA, Enfield
2. Relationships/Connect 54
Developing friendships and networks
An artist with people 57
Case study: Woolwich Common LSOA, Greenwich
3. Cultural life/Keep learning 60
Discovering and developing creative energy
Not just jigs and bells 62
Case study: Canning Town North LSOA, Newham
4. Physical activity/Be active 66
Exercising healthy choices
More fruit than cake: 68
Case study: South Bellingham LSOA, Lewisham
5. Leadership/Give 71
Making a difference locally
A new secretary for the tenants and residents association 73
Case study: Nunhead LSOA, Southwark
Somewhere for kids to go 77
Case study: Larkhall LSOA, Lambeth
◥ 5 Contents
6. Community cohesion 80
Realising the potential
It brings everything together 80
Case study: Limehouse LSOA, Tower Hamlets
4 Plonked in the middle of the estate

Learning from practice
What does the experience of Be Creative Be Well mean for future arts interventions?
84
1. Preparing the ground 85

2. Defining the community 86
3. The well-balanced artist 88
4. Demystifying the artistic process 89
5. Working with local structures 90
6. Collaborative programming 91
7. Finding the right setting 92
8. Building levels of engagement 93
9. Using evaluation 94
10. Leaving a legacy 95
5 Recommendations to Arts Council England

The strategic implications
97
Coda 100
A good place to live
Case study: South Acton LSOA, Ealing
Appendix 106
Be Creative Be Well funded projects
About the authors 118
Acknowledgements and thanks 119

◥ 6 Foreword
Foreword
This is an important report that describes and evaluates the Be Creative Be Well project and
the key role it has played within the integrated, community-led Well London programme.
The influence of Be Creative Be Well has been significant: not only in the direct impact it has
had on working with communities over the three-and-a-half years of the project, but also in
the contribution it has made, as a key theme, to the success of the overall Well London
approach. The emerging evaluation of the Well London programme suggests that it has been
highly effective in increasing community engagement and in improving health and wellbeing,
in even the most deprived communities; this report highlights that the quality of the arts and
cultural activity has an important relationship with the quality of that engagement.
This contribution continues to be highly relevant, perhaps even more so, in the current
financial and economic climate and in the context of ongoing policy and organisational
changes in the arts, health and related policy areas. This context has changed significantly
since Well London and Be Creative Be Well were conceived. The rise in unemployment, the
growth of personal debt, reductions in income and the problem of homelessness risk seriously
undermining wellbeing, threaten community cohesion and are highly likely to lead to an
increased demand for health, social and other public services. In this context, initiatives like
this which increase local communities’ engagement and ability to improve their individual and
community’s wellbeing and develop resilience, are all the more important.
Looking to the future, local government will have new responsibilities for public health and
for commissioning for health improvement. We believe that this offers even greater
opportunities for more integrated, local, community-focused interventions bringing together
all aspects of wellbeing, from good health, community cohesion and resilience, to strong
social networks, culture, arts and local economies. The learning detailed here will be even
more important as a result.
In the words of the authors of this report: ‘Be Creative Be Well represents a significant step
forward in a growing dialogue between the arts and health professions, each having taken its
own path to a common goal of promoting wellbeing.’ As Well London moves into its second
◥ 7 Foreword
phase of development and Be Creative Be Well continues to be a key theme, we commend

this report to all professionals and organisations that are concerned with the health and
wellbeing of communities, including local government, NHS trusts, GPs, housing associations,
organisations in the voluntary and private sectors, and artists and arts organisations. All of us
have a commitment to reach out to and support communities – this work offers real
inspiration about how we might do that with energy, with creativity and with a sense of
shared purpose.
Moira Sinclair Gail Findlay

Arts Council England London Health Commission
Area Executive Director, London Coordinator (until October 2011)
◥ 8 The report at a glance
The report at a glance

An executive summary
What is it for?
Policy makers and academics are taking renewed interest in how people feel about themselves
and their neighbours. For example, there is ongoing work into how to measure wellbeing and
represent this in official statistics and debate continues on the factors that contribute to – and
jeopardise – community cohesion. In many areas, local communities themselves are making
clear their desire to be involved in opening up opportunities for a fuller life.
There is a growing body of evidence that creativity and the arts can make a significant
difference to people’s health and wellbeing – and also to how they feel about, and interact
with, their neighbours. This report tells the story of Be Creative Be Well, one of the most
ambitious grassroots arts and health programmes ever delivered in the UK. Written by
independent evaluators, the report aims to:
• explore the range and depth of benefits potentially associated with artists working in close
collaboration with local communities
• share new learning about factors that help – and hinder – successful collaboration of this
kind
• contribute to the growing dialogue between arts and health professionals
• offer recommendations on how to ensure that the commissioning process is most likely to
give rise to work that will result in a sustainable legacy
Who is it for?
The report will be of particular interest to:
• agencies at regional and local levels concerned with improving the health and wellbeing of
disadvantaged communities and reducing health inequalities, such as public health
departments, health and wellbeing boards, local authorities, mental health trusts and clinical
commissioning groups
• agencies at national level that have an interest in empowering local communities and
promoting community cohesion, such as Arts Council England, the Department of Health,
the Department for Communities and Local Government, Public Health England and the
National Mental Health Development Unit
• community arts practitioners and other artists who are interested in working with local
communities
• public health professionals and GP practices interested in developing innovative ways of
engaging and working with local people
Where did it come from?

In July 2007, the Big Lottery Fund announced that it was giving just under £9.5 million to
finance a new four-year health and mental wellbeing programme called Well London. The
successful application had come from the Well London Alliance, a group of agencies from
different sectors across the capital that shared a vision of ‘a world city of engaged local
people and groups with the skills and confidence to improve their own physical health and
mental wellbeing’.
The Well London programme included 14 projects. Some focused on support for community
engagement and capacity building while others were based around five themes: culture and
tradition, healthy eating, mental health and wellbeing, open spaces and physical activity. The
culture and tradition theme was delivered through Be Creative Be Well, an ambitious
programme developed by Arts Council England. However, creativity in the Well London
programme was not confined to Be Creative Be Well – creative approaches were embedded
throughout.
In 2010, Arts Council England commissioned an independent team to carry out an evaluation
of Be Creative Be Well. This report describes the team’s findings.
What is the key learning?

Be Creative Be Well was a wide-ranging innovative programme that, at its most effective, was
shaped by local conditions and local people. Even when projects involved comparatively few
residents, there were individual breakthroughs – people who were inspired to try new things,
change jobs, refresh their outlook on life and gain useful creative skills. In nearly all the
projects visited, there was a new sense of possibility evident in the neighbourhood – a hint of
what could be.
This report analyses the achievements of Be Creative Be Well by combining evidence-based

research into ‘ways to wellbeing’, developed by the new economics foundation, with
published evidence of typical outcomes from good participatory arts practice. This gave the
authors a robust framework for assessing how successful the programme was in encouraging
behavioural change into healthier lifestyle choices and what particular contribution creativity
and the arts had made to this process.
The experiences, challenges and achievements of the programme also reveal a great deal
about how to make an arts intervention successful and sustainable. The following emerged
as key learning points:
Defining the community

Do Don’t
Commissioners Aim to select a self-defining Commissioners Set up projects across split sites
community
Artists Where possible, build on existing community
resources
Selecting the artist

Do Don’t
Commissioners Ensure that artist teams have skills in Artists Set up an opposition between quality of artistic
community development as well as their specific product and deep engagement with the community –
practice the best projects seem to combine the two
Preparing the ground

Do Don’t
Commissioners Ensure that artist teams are briefed as Commissioners/artists Assume statistical
fully as possible on how decisions are made locally, or demographic information will provide a clear picture of
outside of the community, and who holds the power the communities involved
Commissioners/artists Make practical Commissioners/artists Raise unrealistic expectations
acknowledgement of the fact that it takes time to of the project among local people
develop relationships and trust, and to establish what
kind of activities local people would like to see and
support
Artists Pay careful attention to finding a venue that
local people will be happy to attend
Demystifying the artistic process

Do Don’t
Artists Begin by exploring participants’ thoughts and Artists Set out an agenda of ‘we are going to
feelings about their community and environment and make art’
focus on building on these
Artists Reflect on the questions: ‘What difference do I
hope to make?’ and ‘Why do I think what I’m planning
to do will make that difference?’
Working with local structures

Do Don’t
Commissioners/artists Make every effort to enlist the Artists Try to set up activities without the support of
active support of local organisations – the ‘familiar local organisations, programme sponsors or project
face on the estate’ is often an invaluable aid to partners
marketing the project
Commissioners/artists Think through the role that
project partners are expected to play and use that
analysis to identify the most appropriate partners
Artists Form mutually respectful and productive
relationships with representatives of the local authority
and other major agencies
Collaborative programming
Do Don’t
Commissioners/artists Make every effort to create Commissioners/artists Underestimate the challenges
good conditions for collaboration and joint working of bringing together very different discourses and
Commissioners/artists Aim to develop opportunities approaches
for active and equal partnership
Artists Be clear about your own contribution to the
collaborative work – including the nature of the energy
you bring – and be explicit about your aspirations for
joint working
Building levels of engagement

Do Don’t
Artists In recruiting to the project, find good reasons Artists Give in to the temptation of relying on
for people to step out of their comfort zone on a cold conventional promotional approaches like flyers,
night posters and newsletters – they are rarely effective for
Artists Prioritise face-to-face encounters with local community arts projects
people and use ‘ambassadors’ where you can
Using evaluation
Do Don’t
Commissioners Structure programmes in such a way Commissioners/artists Over-consult local people so
that projects are allowed to set their own tempo and that gaining feedback gets in the way of developing
find their own sense of direction and purpose the work
Artists Take opportunities to turn evaluation into a
creative learning activity that has the potential to
enhance your practice as well as the specific project
Leaving a legacy
Do Don’t
Commissioners Give priority to working with artists Commissioners/artists Leave thinking about legacy
to identify how initiatives can be embedded until the last few months of the project
systematically
Artists Throughout the project, build on opportunities
to pass on skills – including fundraising and advocacy
skills
◥ 13 Introducing Be Creative Be Well
Introducing Be Creative
Be Well
In January 2007, Arts Council England tendered to join Well London, an alliance of agencies
brought together by the London Health Commission to explore new ways of improving the
health and wellbeing of some of the poorest communities in the capital. By March 2011, a
total of nearly £1.3 million from the Well London programme budget had been spent on
implementing the Arts Council’s Be Creative Be Well programme, which it had also helped to
coordinate in several London boroughs.
Twenty of London’s most disadvantaged areas were chosen to participate in the Well London
programme. Here, the Be Creative Be Well leaders originated and developed a wide range of
arts and cultural activities – around 100 different creative projects – in consultation with local
residents and agencies. This programme aimed to engage communities and individuals in a
process of change to improve health and environments, to increase community cohesion
through intercultural and intergenerational projects, and to provide accessible, enjoyable,
whole community activities. A ‘one size fits all’ approach was not taken. No artform was left
untouched across the programme and local activities ranged from painting workshops to
dance classes, parades to musicals, personal poetry to communal sculpture – and some way
beyond.
Those leading the projects were equally various – individual artists from numerous professional
disciplines, Arts Council-funded arts organisations, groups that had formed within the
neighbourhood itself and even local enthusiasts with a strong creative streak. Each project
developed in its own way – and did its own thing – but all of them shared a vision of how
participatory arts could help people achieve greater wellbeing.
Be Creative Be Well represents a significant step forward in a growing dialogue between the
arts and health professions. Each has taken its own path here to a common goal of promoting
wellbeing. In health terms, when people are happy or fulfilled in themselves, keep fit and
active and are actively engaged with others, they are less likely to present symptoms of poor
mental health and, thus, may require fewer medical or institutional interventions. Although
the Well London programme was predicated on medical research into factors affecting mental
and physical health, no health professionals were involved in running the Be Creative Be Well
strand. However, they will undoubtedly be interested in what has emerged from it, particularly
at a policy level. There is a strong desire, in both medical and government circles, to
encourage behavioural change towards healthier lifestyle choices. The role of creativity in this
process was recognised and sometimes adopted by other Well London partners. The
outcomes from artistic interventions across the whole programme, particulary in Be Creative
Be Well, should therefore be of great interest to the health sector.
Well London and Be Creative Be Well are equally significant in terms of arts development. In
the long-running debates about the role of the arts in society, it is increasingly accepted (and
shown) that participation in creative activity can – on an individual and a communal basis
– develop personal and social skills as well as technical or aesthetic knowledge. Thus, in a
variety of social and institutional settings including schools, prisons and hospitals, artists are
helping people to develop a range of positive behaviours, improving their ability to learn, to
take responsibility, to act pro-socially, to take pleasure in creating things and so on. There is
now a considerable body of research showing the positive impact of creative interventions in
medical settings, much of which addresses improvements in patient wellbeing and their rate
of recovery from illness. This is echoed by evidence from participatory and community-based
arts, particularly from policy-driven interventions aimed at reducing social exclusion and
building community cohesion that were put in place under the last Labour government. The
political and economic context for the launch of Well London and Be Creative Be Well four
years ago has now changed considerably, of course, but the outcomes of the programme
should be of significant interest to the current coalition government that has identified
happiness and wellbeing as a major policy issue. In its emphasis on ‘localism’ and on engaging
participation, the programme may also contribute to realising some of the current
government’s hopes for the Big Society.
For Arts Council England, Be Creative Be Well is arguably central to its core mission of
achieving great art for everyone. The programme offered opportunities for arts participation
where little currently exists. It tested not only the impact of creativity on individuals but
whether, by encouraging individual creativity and personal confidence to emerge and flourish
in a social (ie collaborative, cooperative) context, engaging in arts activity might help to
strengthen neighbourly bonds and thus community cohesion. By giving local people a new or
renewed sense of creativity, purpose and confidence, the programme might also leave a
legacy, both in terms of wellbeing and of agency in a political sense, for individuals and the
community as a whole.
Meeting the challenge of evaluation

This report is an independent evaluation of the Be Creative Be Well programme.
Commissioned by Arts Council England, it is intended to complement the overall
evaluation of Well London by the University of East London.
The delivery of the Well London programme was specifically designed to allow a rigorous
evaluation, generating evidence about the impact of the programme on health and wellbeing.
The research team at the University of East London, the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, and the University of Westminster used a community-randomised trial
approach; each neighbourhood where Well London has been delivered was paired with a
similar neighbourhood where nothing happened. The areas would then be compared in terms
of health and wellbeing at the end of the trial. The University of East London has used a
community survey to collect data to allow them to do this comparison. The evaluation has
also involved qualitative research to understand people’s experiences of Well London and how
it might have affected their health and wellbeing. The final report on the evaluation is due in
spring 2012.
The university also collected data on the programme structures and processes. Data from
self-reported participant questionnaires tells us that throughout the life of the Well London
project there were 14,772 participants. The data shows that 79 per cent of participants
increased their levels of healthy eating, 77 per cent increased their physical activity and 82 per
cent felt more or much more positive about life.
Of these, 3,862 participant engagements were with the Be Creative Be Well project. Some
people may have attended more than one session, so the overall number of people reached is
likely to be slightly fewer, but this reveals a high level of participation and suggests positive
indications in that people came back to additional events. Among the people taking part
specifically in Be Creative Be Well, 55 per cent reported an increase in healthy eating, 76 per
cent an increase in physical activity, 48 per cent feel much more positive and a further 37 per
cent feel more positive.
Our own evaluation brief has been rather different, requiring us to focus on the story of the
programme, the qualitative outcomes of artistic engagement and its impact on wellbeing. So,
rather than try to duplicate the work still being done by the University of East London research
team in measuring the impact on wellbeing in terms of the five Well London targets, we
explore the links between the process and outcomes of participatory arts work and creating
the conditions for wellbeing, as evidenced in particular by the new economics foundation.
The resulting report will, we very much hope, complement the university’s social research
approach. We should also point out that, due to budgetary constraints, we have had to focus
on a limited but, we believe, representative set of case studies running during the third and
final year of the programme, rather than attempt a comprehensive account of all the projects.
Our approach has been based on ‘realistic evaluation’, as defined by Ray Pawson and Nick
Tilley in Realistic Evaluation (Sage, 1997). These authors focus on ‘context-mechanism-
outcome’ pattern configurations, which helped us to draw out the lessons from Be Creative
Be Well and to analyse its achievements.
The context-mechanism-outcome configuration is defined by Pawson and Tilley as ‘a

proposition stating what it is about a programme which works for whom in what
circumstances’ (Realistic evaluation, Sage, 1997, p.217). In the case of Be Creative Be Well,
the programme itself posits the initial, ‘conjectured’ configuration or ‘theory of change’ –
namely, that a creative or arts-based intervention in a particular community will enable it, and
the individuals within it, to achieve higher levels of wellbeing, better mental health and wider
participation in the arts.
We started out in the belief that there is a potential link between evidence-based benefits for
people from participating in arts activity and actions that have been shown to promote health
and mental wellbeing. We argue here that the two themes we were tasked to explore –
improvements in health and wellbeing and greater engagement in the arts – are closely
intertwined: the better the creative engagement, the more likely it is to lead to healthy
outcomes.
We set out to test these assumptions through a close analysis of what actually happened, in
all its local detail, in a dozen projects run during the third and final year of the Be Creative Be
Well programme. In Pawson and Tilley’s terms, we wanted to ‘refine’ our initial configuration:
our task was ‘not to hypothesize or demonstrate the constant conjunction whereby
programme X produces outcome Y’. We share Pawson and Tilley’s view that social
interventions should be viewed ‘internally’ as they are ‘always embedded in a range of
attitudinal, individual, institutional, and societal processes’ (Realistic evaluation, Sage, 1997,
p.216). We therefore did not look for a facile ‘what will work everywhere’ formula but a more
nuanced analysis, out of which we have drawn recommendations that acknowledge the
opportunities and threats that such programmes as these will need to engage with in the real
world.
The report we have produced follows the context-mechanism-outcome pattern. We begin by

setting out the context or, rather, contexts for the Well London programme and its Be
Creative Be Well strand. On the one hand is the physical nature of the chosen area for activity,
which may entirely or partly consist of social housing. There is also a political context, not just
locally but also in terms of arts and health policy. This ‘meta-analysis’ is then mirrored at
ground level in individual case studies, where we try to outline the concrete conditions into
which the programme ‘mechanism’ was inserted. As realist evaluators we sought through this
study to better understand ‘for whom and in what circumstances’ a programme like this
might work.
After setting out the context, we address mechanisms. In Pawson and Tilley’s terms, we try to
show how the ‘causal mechanisms’ which generate social and behavioural problems are
removed or countered through the alternative causal mechanisms introduced in a social
programme. In other words, we set out to analyse how (and how far) the commissioned
artists and the artistic process itself worked to change patterns of behaviour relating to health
and wellbeing, as well as to engagement in creativity. We discuss this in general terms but try
to base as much of our analysis as possible on what we saw, heard and read about actual
projects from residents, artists and other stakeholders. The case studies act here as anecdotes,
which have been theorised as ‘access to the real’: that is, opening a window onto the reality
of the work. These illustrate our account of how artists addressed the causal mechanisms
generating health problems, from poor housing to a lack of exercise.
Finally, we examine a range of outcomes, as far as they are understood at this early stage, in
terms of what they can tell the reader and us about how our theory of change works, or fails
to work, across a range of contexts. In the process, we also pass on some transferable
recommendations on future practice and future commissioning, as we believe that a
fundamental purpose of evaluation is improvement through learning.

Our report is, on the one hand, an extended snapshot of the final year of Be Creative Be Well.
We visited projects as they were taking place, during the final year of this three-year
programme and talked to artists, local people and staff from other agencies in the community
about what had been happening and what it felt like to be engaged in artistic activity. None
of the team has ever lived in social housing or in poverty so this was a steep learning curve for
us. In writing this report, we are very aware of the thin line between empathy and patronage
and hope we have not crossed it.
The conversations we had and the reports that each project team sent in over the last year
have helped us to identify not just what has been achieved but, more broadly, what has been
learned in the course of meeting such a complex and challenging brief. This gives our report
its second important function: it is a diagnosis as well as a portrait.
We have set out to draw out the learning from Be Creative Be Well for the Arts Council, for
its partners in Well London and for those who we hope will continue to commission and
deliver this kind of work. We try to show what impact the programme has already had on
people’s wellbeing and creativity. We believe the most important learning is about what needs
to be in place to create the conditions for success and that requires some analysis of what
exactly the artist and the creative process bring to a community context and how that can
best be supported by policy makers and funders.
The story of Be Creative Be Well is, without doubt, one of considerable success. Even where
very few residents were involved from a particular area, there were individual breakthroughs
– people who were inspired to try new things, change jobs, refresh their outlook on life and
gain useful creative skills. Even where all that happened on site was a short-lived programme
of fun arts activities, there was a new sense of possibility evident in the neighbourhood – a
hint of what could be. In the majority of projects we ourselves visited, there was a lot more
than this and, in the best examples, the possibility that an enduring change for the better had
occurred.
If one word could sum up the nature and power of the artists’ role in the Be Creative Be Well
programme, it is ‘energy’. By introducing their energy into a community, artists can – given
the right conditions – set off a chain reaction, releasing people’s own creative energies and
making their full potential visible. Another important word here is ‘play’. Artists model
creativity as play and by involving people in play help to create a sense of wellbeing.
If we had to pick one finding from our visits and our research that might push this kind of
work on to another level of understanding and support, it would be that the greatest
communal impact seemed to be reflected in the most impressive artistic result and vice versa,
the skills of community development and artistry performing a perfect balancing act. This
tallies with the healing vision of a ‘new instrumentalism’, espoused by John Knell and
Matthew Taylor in their pamphlet, Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society (RSA, 2011,
p.18):
‘Artistic instrumentalism would embrace excellence in terms of raising artistic standards and
a better understanding of the value of the artistic experience for producer and consumer.
Public good instrumentalism would focus on the wide range of positive economic and
social outcomes flowing from the arts, and active participation in the arts. Sometimes these
logics will overlap. Sometimes they will not. Both are united by a common interest in the
quality of the experience for audience members or for those actively participating in the
’
art.
It is our belief that in the best of Be Creative Be Well, the two logics overlap: good art and the
social good.
Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs)

For social research purposes, all the Well London areas were selected from Lower Super
Output Areas (LSOAs). These are standard mapping areas based on postcodes and used by
the Office of National Statistics to gather neighbourhood data.
Each LSOA has 1,500 to 2,000 residents and four to eight LSOAs make up a council ward.
However, they are not intended to represent actual communities and their boundaries often
cut across the natural neighbourhoods of streets and estates.
The LSOAs selected to participate in Be Creative Be Well and the other Well London
programmes were chosen from among those in the lowest 11 per cent of the Index of
Multiple Deprivation. Thus, the LSOAs described in this report may be thought of as statistical
communities of some of the poorest people living in London.
◥ 20 Overture
Overture
The object through which people

understand the project
Where did the project take place? When did the project run?
Hoe Street LSOA, London Borough of Waltham Forest April 2010-March 2011
How much money was allocated? What was planned?
£31,000 A programme of arts events using and sharing the
Who received the funding? drawing shed and PrintBike (mobile arts studios) with
the drawing shed the intention of facilitating social and emotional
wellbeing and having fun.
‘ There were more than 30 people involved in the making of it throughout the day. The
children and adults started off with plastic gloves; there was a lot of physical work mixing
clay and mixing sand and pounding the straw into this clay and sand and subsoil. By the
end of the day, the gloves were off; the children were immersed in it. It was an
extraordinary process and there was a huge sense of community pride. And then to see it
fired up… it was a process that continued over several weeks. What came out of it has a

’
real physical presence. It’s a proper sculpture, isn’t it?
The drawing shed artists
This ‘sculpture’ is pulled on its trolley out of temporary storage: a clay oven, its small mouth
blackened from use. Preparations for lunch are already underway, a small portable marquee is
set up in case of rain (or worse – the cold is fierce), and various bowls filled with salad and
sawn-up baguettes are rested along two trestle tables. A portable gas burner is placed under
the soup one of the team has prepared earlier. Already, an hour or two ahead of lunch,
people are stopping by and chatting. A woman in her 80s interrupts her walk to come over
and inspect the oven. A younger woman reminisces how, back in Africa, her family would
cook meat in this fashion. Several small boys poke kindling into the oven’s mouth, intrigued
by fire.
Case study
◥ 21 Overture
This is taking place yards from a row of residents’ garages, where the drawing shed is
temporarily housed. Other than that space, everything to do with this project – not just the
oven – is a moveable feast. There is no formal venue, no community centre, no covered place
This is taking place yards from a row of residents’ garages, where drawing shed is temporarily
housed. Other than that space, everything to do with this project – not just the oven – is a
moveable feast. There is no formal venue, no community centre, no covered place for local
people to gather in on this side of the main road, so artists Sally Labern, overall Well London
co-ordinator here, and Bobby Lloyd, her co-lead on Be Creative Be Well, have decided that the
team’s programme of activities should go out and about. PrintBike, another key element in
this programme, is about to be launched: this customised Brompton will provide a peripatetic
design and publication service for leaflets and posters.
The Hoe Street LSOA is split by a main road, The Drive. People find little reason to cross the
road over to this estate, though a few do make their way to try the food today. Ascham
Homes, which manages the estate, is represented by the plethora of warning signs that have
been erected over the grassy areas: residents are firmly warned off feeding pigeons as well as
playing ball games. The artists have poked gentle fun at this slightly Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish
feature by working with residents on alternative placards with witty captions and images. It
should be noted, in fairness, that this housing company has been pleased enough with the
artists’ work – particularly the oven – to let them use a second garage.
Since its launch at last year’s Big Lunch, when over a hundred people turned up, the oven has
become a symbol of the whole Be Creative Be Well initiative here, as Sally remarks:
Case study
◥ 22 Overture
‘It’s not just about cooking. It’s about different cultures coming together and people really
sharing something. And it’s also about family and history and intergenerational stuff.
People don’t give it a label – no one is asking: is this art? Actually, of course it is art, just as
much as remaking those signs is art. There is no misunderstanding about what this is. It is
the object through which people understand the project.
’
The oven provides, most obviously, a link between the creative act and encouraging ‘healthy
eating’, one of the core Well London aims, but its significance goes some way beyond this.
Eileen, the elderly passer-by who lives on the estate, takes a recipe tag: she plans to add her
bread pudding to the community recipe book that the artists hope will be edited and
published by local people. The clay used to make the oven was donated by the ceramics
department at Waltham Forest College, located nearby on the other side of the estate, and
which young people here attend. It is hoped that this small gesture might lead to a more
substantial relationship with the college and the chance for local people to use its facilities.
The oven manages to combine the exotic with the everyday. It is, in the end, a gift from the
community to the community and, according to Bobby, it has served as the main catalyst for
gaining local people’s trust and respect for the project as a whole. It will remain here once the
project is finished, a tangible legacy, an object with a story to tell and remember.
More people are turning up for lunch. It is still cold but the oven warms the conversations and
provides something good and hot to eat.
Case study
◥ 23 Be Creative Be Well in context
1
Be Creative Be Well
in context
Culture, health and the policy framework
‘Council estates have the effect of making people feel worse about themselves, and, in
turn, physically worse than other members of society, because they know they are cut off
from the mass affluence… that the rest of the nation enjoys.

’
Lynsey Hanley in Estates: An Intimate History (Granta Books, 2007, pp.19-20)
1.1 Postcodes and poverty

Past visions and current failures of social housing
‘You’ve got South Kensington which is very, very rich with a couple of estates in it and then
you’ve got North Kensington with a massive number of estates in comparison and a high
level of poverty. It is much, much poorer.

’ Lisa Nash, artist
The largely unregulated slums of the industrial age may have given way to government-
funded social housing – a process that started a century ago with the razing of the notorious
‘blackest streets’ of the Old Nichol and the building of the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch.
High rises may have gone up and, over the last 20 years come down again, but those on the
lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder still find themselves set apart within the intimate
geographies of the capital.
There is an ironic contrast between the physical closeness of London’s rich and poor and the
social distance between them. A tall Victorian mansion with muted servants’ bell-pulls on the
gateposts speaks of a different life from that of an ageing 1960s tower block along the road,
with rusty trikes parked on its strip of threadbare lawn. The rich and poor still inhabit different
worlds. Their maps of the city and their mobility are very different, just as their quality of life,
their state of health and their diet markedly diverge.
In the case of housing estates, the divisions between the haves and have-nots are written
more clearly across the city’s map. Originally built by the local authority to accommodate
people unable to afford to buy their own homes, it is here that the different environs of rich
and poor become most recognisable, each estate set apart spatially and architecturally from
the ‘nicer’ residential areas. In her book, Estates: An Intimate History (Granta Books, 2007,
p.150), Lisa Hanley writes:
‘If a map were to be drawn showing how the traffic of people and cars flow through
London, its legion council estates would show up as large areas of blankness. The world
seems to stop on the edge of every estate. You park your car… on the edges and enter the
concrete labyrinth as though entering a foreign country.
’
Providing council housing was a revolutionary idea that we and our government were once
proud to support – ‘homes fit for heroes’ was the ideal after World War I – and, by and large,
people felt privileged to have the chance to live in them. Building tower block estates at a
later period was equally visionary, releasing people from dilapidated Victorian housing and
adding good views into the bargain. As Hanley points out, these were moments when the
government had the opportunity to ‘build social inequity out of the landscape’ (Estates: An
Intimate History, Granta Books, 2007, p.19). That did not happen of course – and, in fact,
little seems to have changed in this respect since George Orwell wrote up his social research
in the northern towns in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Orwell welcomed the removal of the 19th-century slums – those ‘labyrinths of little brick
houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered
yards’ – but saw the ‘Corporation estate’ as only marginally better. For all its advantages –
clean air, more conveniences, ‘a bit of garden to dig in’ – such estates had ‘an uncomfortable,
almost prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well aware of it’.
That sense of being cut off from the rest of society was, as Orwell saw, felt profoundly by
many of the first generation taken out of the familiar ‘homeliness’ of the slum to live in the
new social housing estates but strangely, given the enormous changes in our society since the
1930s, this feeling seems to have persisted right up to the present.
Running down the estate

The sense of uprootedness amongst former slum-dwellers may be shared by some of the
immigrant groups that have ended up on these estates in London in recent decades, but
feeling isolated here has generally more to do now with endemic poverty and how estates
and their residents are perceived by the rest of us.
In Orwell’s time, the estate offered poorer people a way out of squalor, albeit in a somewhat
‘ruthless and soulless’ way. The council house was not then a first step towards home
ownership but a destination: somewhere decent to settle down at last. This consensus
unravelled fairly quickly after World War II, when government policy – reflecting perhaps an
instinctive cultural preference among the English – favoured the ideal of buying one’s own
home over social tenancy. The council house became instead a staging post on the way to
owning one’s own property and, by implication, to achieving full citizenship.
The right-to-buy policy under the Thatcher government, encouraging council tenants to
purchase their own home, was a logical extension of the party’s long-held vision of a ‘property-
owning democracy’. It was also the thin end of the wedge that has been driven with increasing
force, under subsequent governments, between the more and the less affluent, between those
who can afford to buy and those who cannot. According to Hanley, the final stage in this
ideologically motivated break-up of mass council housing has been the increasing delegation
of provision from local authorities to independent housing associations since the late 1980s.
One could, of course, argue that there are health benefits from home ownership, which gives
people more control over their lives. In an attempt to give all residents, whether renting or
owning, that sense of autonomy, the New Labour government introduced a raft of supportive
measures, including the New Deal for Communities, and it adopted numerous policies aimed
ultimately at ending social exclusion and child poverty. This was not matched with any
increase in new social housing, however – rather the reverse – and any gains in social equity
have now been thrown into question by the global financial crisis.
Nevertheless, nearly three-quarters of the population (72 per cent) are now on the property
ladder, however tenuously, and 10 per cent rent privately. The remainder rent council property,
a third of those through housing associations. This might look like a good result but only if
one happens to be in the majority of the relatively affluent. Those left as council tenants are,
in effect and in fact, by definition the poorest in our society. The impact of post-war
deindustrialisation has had its greatest impact on those who used to work as skilled or
unskilled labourers and who lived, by and large, on council estates. Unemployment in this
setting means that one can never buy into the larger society – a fact made painfully visible in
the eruption of violence on estates around the country in the early 1990s.
Just as those who lived in slums were tarred by association – blamed for the conditions they
themselves had no means to escape or ameliorate – so now estate-dwellers are stigmatised by
the larger society. Too many of the estates that were built to give working people a decent
place to live have now become, as one artist involved in Be Creative Be Well observed, ‘social
dumping grounds’. They have become run-down; so, too, have the people living on them.
1.2 The human cost

The link between poverty and ill health
‘There is serious deprivation here – very real problems that people have to face on a daily
basis. They don’t know how they’re going to feed the kids next week. Unemployment is
high. And depression. All they think they want is to get out of South Acton. Although I
guess everyone is potentially just a few circumstances away from falling low like this, when
you’re in that actual situation yourself, it’s very hard to see how you’re going to climb out
of it, how you’re going to engage and become a part of the community again.
’
‘People get isolated. They feel it’s all happening somewhere else. They just feel down and
that affects their children, and masses of children have been born in areas like this. When
you feel significant to society, you contribute more, you step out more. When you don’t,
you just opt out, and you can get sicker and sicker.

’
Comments from a roundtable discussion with a local Be Creative Be Well team
Over the last 15 years, the connections between mental and physical distress have been
increasingly recognised. Policy makers, practitioners and others involved in health improvement
have, therefore, broadened the concept of health to include wellbeing, as well as physical
health. Although wellbeing is a very broad term that can be used to mean many different
things, definitions in the context of health and social policy share some key characteristics.
Wellbeing is more than happiness or the absence of illness. It is fundamentally about how
people experience their own lives, whether they feel able to achieve things and have a sense
of purpose. It’s also about a sense of belonging and being part of the social fabric, connected
to other people and supportive local networks.
People living in areas of high deprivation certainly face practical barriers to being physically
healthy. Studies have shown, for example, that estate dwellers have easy access to fast-food
outlets but generally live a long way from shops selling healthier food; healthier food also
tends to be more expensive. Sporting facilities are limited and the closure of many local youth
services has meant young people have fewer opportunities to keep fit. Some housing stock
on older estates is poorly insulated and riddled with damp and vermin. Unemployment also
has a physical impact. The lack of exchange with neighbours and the sense of being on one’s
own and feeling threatened by real or imagined dangers – for older people, this might simply
be the sight of young people roaming the estate – can make people ill.
The words of the Be Creative Be Well team quoted above suggest that the overwhelming
barrier to wellbeing and thus to full health is the feeling of entrapment in places and
situations like this. Participation in any aspect of mainstream society seems too often an
impossibility, yet this may be one way out.
‘If you have links outside [the estate] – friends who live in a different area or type of
housing, activities that regularly and repeatedly expose you to new experiences – then
you’ve one less wall to knock down. This is known in think-tank speech as ‘social capital’.

’
Lynsey Hanley (Estates: An Intimate History, Granta Books, 2007, p.181)
The Be Creative Be Well programme can be seen, then, as an attempt to create social capital:
to break down that wall, offering people those new experiences and connections to a wider
social world that could give them a new sense of wellbeing.
1.3 Recalibrating health promotion

How policy makers are responding to new thinking
about wellbeing
How well people feel physically and mentally is determined by a range of factors that are
outside the control of health services, including income, housing, environment, education,
social networks and access to social facilities and services embracing cultural, leisure and arts
activities. These determinants of health have an impact on how people behave: whether they
smoke, for example, or abuse drugs, or whether they are likely to take regular exercise or
adopt a healthy diet. These lifestyle choices – and ‘choices’ is hardly the right word in this
context – play a crucial role in overall health and wellbeing.
According to the London Health Commission’s report Fair London, Healthy Londoners (March
2011), the difference in life expectancy between those living in the most and least deprived
neighbourhoods of London is 7.2 years for men and 4.6 years for women. In a worsening
economy with an increasing gap between rich and poor, that statistic seems unlikely to improve
without some radical remedy. There has been increasing concern about these inequalities in
health and wellbeing and their seemingly entrenched nature. The growing understanding of the
role of the determinants of health has transformed the policy debate about how best to reduce
inequalities. Rather than focusing exclusively on improving lifestyles and access to healthcare,
policy makers now understand that it is important to change the factors that make people ill or
stop them feeling well in the first place. There is a growing realisation that, in this situation, the
health of individuals and communities cannot be improved by health services alone.
Even the idea of providing health services for people is being rethought. Increasing importance
is attached to individual and community empowerment – giving people the confidence, skills
and power to shape and influence what public bodies do for or with them. People need to be
involved in making decisions about service provision and encouraged to participate in health-
promoting activities. This might not just enable people from disadvantaged or vulnerable
groups to gain better access to services that are better tailored to their circumstances and
needs. By putting people more in control of their own lives, it could also improve wellbeing.
As a consequence of these shifts in understanding, a much broader range of organisations

have now become involved in activities to improve health and wellbeing and to try to reduce
inequalities. In particular, local government has been given a range of new powers: the Local
Government Act (2000) granted local authorities the power to promote social, economic and
environmental wellbeing in their areas. The Local Government and Public Involvement in
Health Act (2007) requires public bodies, including health trusts and hospital foundations, to
work with their local communities in ways that give them a greater say over decisions.
The prescription for London

London has been at the forefront of these developments. In October 2000 the Mayor of
London set up the London Health Commission, a partnership of agencies from different
sectors across the capital committed to taking action on the determinants of health. One of
its first tasks was to advise the Mayor on how his statutory strategies for London, including
culture, could maximise potential health benefits. A few years later, in July 2007, the Big
Lottery Fund announced that it was giving just under £9.5 million to finance a new four-year
health and wellbeing programme called Well London.
The London Health Commission had set up the Well London Alliance the previous year,
bringing together the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, Groundwork,
London Sustainability Exchange, Central YMCA and the University of East London. Its vision
was of ‘a world city of engaged local people and groups with the skills and confidence to
improve their own physical health and mental wellbeing’. In particular, its aims were to
challenge the stigma of mental health issues, to encourage healthier eating choices and to
enable communities to provide opportunities for local people to become more active.
The Well London approach was to build and strengthen the foundations of good health and
wellbeing in communities by:
• significantly increasing community participation in health and wellbeing enhancing activities
• building individual and community confidence, cohesion, sense of control and self-esteem
• stimulating development of formal and informal community and social support networks
• integrating with and adding value to what is already going on locally
• building the capacity of local organisations to deliver activities and making strategic links
locally and regionally so the improvement in health and wellbeing is sustainable for the
longer term
Also intrinsic to the Well London programme right from the beginning was the desire to
demonstrate to those setting national policy around health and wellbeing the value of this
kind of joint agency intervention. Therefore, rigorous baseline assessment, monitoring and
evaluation were central to the Well London approach, in the hope that this would support the
mainstreaming of activities into core programmes throughout London – and contribute to the
growing evidence base on effective interventions to improve health and wellbeing.
Well London’s research and evaluation framework, based on social research methodologies,
was designed by University of East London. For its experimental method to work, it was
necessary to adopt a standardised approach not just to data collection but also to the target
communities themselves, which were to comprise some of the poorest sections of the
population. In order to measure the impact of the various interventions for better health and
wellbeing on those on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, all 20 areas included in
the Well London programme were selected from Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs), as
defined on page 19.
The local Primary Care Trust and the local authority had a role in the selection of LSOAs: two
were chosen in each borough and randomised, one being selected to take part in Well
London, the other not. In this way, statistical information before and after and between the
two LSOAs could be easily gathered and then analysed to make the case for an intervention
of this kind and scale.
The Well London programme included 14 projects, all of them ultimately aimed at encouraging
behavioural change into healthier lifestyle choices. The first set were ‘heart of the community’
projects that supported community engagement and capacity building by increasing access to
Well London projects and other health improvement opportunities, brokering changes in local
service provision and activities to meet community needs. The second set of projects was based
around the five themes of the Well London programme: culture and tradition, healthy eating,
mental health and wellbeing, open spaces and physical activity.
The ‘culture and tradition’ theme was delivered through Be Creative Be Well – an ambitious
programme developed by a new member of the Well London Alliance: Arts Council England.
1.4 The contribution of culture and the arts to health

A growing acceptance of the value of culture and
creativity for health
Although the Be Creative Be Well programme was seen as the cultural or creative strand of Well
London, it is important to note that the arts process was understood by other Well London
partners as a key delivery mechanism. Creative approaches were embedded throughout the
programme: UEL used graphic facilitation in its community engagement process; the YMCA ran
dance activities; and DIY Happiness and the other mental wellbeing programmes employed a
variety of arts-based approaches. This general acceptance of the value of creative activity reflects
an increasing official recognition of the role that culture and creativity can play in addressing
inequalities and other determinants of health and in improving health and wellbeing.
In order to understand the contribution and potential value of the arts more fully, the
Department of Health began a review of its role in relation to arts and health in September
2005. A small working group was set up and over 300 responses to a questionnaire were
received from senior NHS managers, NHS arts coordinators, artists, arts therapists, clinicians,
charities, individual patients and users, professional bodies, academics, architects,
constructors, designers and engineers. In addition, the working group carried out a number of
literature and research reviews, and interviews with key individuals.
The Department of Health concluded that the arts should be firmly recognised as being
integral to health, healthcare provision and healthcare environments, including supporting
staff. Arts and health initiatives deliver real and measurable benefits across a wide range of
priority areas for health. Given the wealth of good practice and the substantial evidence base,
it was important for the Department to take a lead in promoting, developing and supporting
arts and health initiatives.
Other independent research before and since this review has borne out the positive impact
that arts and cultural participation can have on health and wellbeing. This evidence base also
sheds light on how cultural participation impacts on health and wellbeing.
It is now widely acknowledged that cultural interventions can improve rates of healing and
recovery in the healthcare environment. Evaluations of the Enhancing the Healing
Environment programme, run by the King’s Fund, which is aimed at humanising the hospital
environment, showed clear benefits for staff, patients and visitors (Enhancing the Health
Environment, Kings Fund and Department of Health, 2009). Several other studies have also
provided strong evidence of the influence of the arts and humanities in achieving more
effective approaches to patient management and to the education and training of health
practitioners, improving doctor-patient relationships.
The need for increasing levels of social integration, which arts and cultural work can help to
build, was cited by Professor Sir Michael Marmot as chair of an independent review
commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health to propose the most effective evidence-
based strategies for reducing health inequalities in England (Sir Michael Marmot, Fair Society,
Healthy Lives: Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, The Marmot
Review, 2010). The Marmot Review found that social networks and social participation appear
to act as a protective factor against dementia over the age of 65 and are consistently and
positively associated with reduced morbidity and mortality. It also drew attention to the strong
evidence that social relationships can also reduce the risk of depression. People with stronger
networks are healthier and happier.
There were similar findings from a research project, carried out jointly by Anglia Ruskin
University and the University of Central Lancashire (Mental Health, Social Inclusion and Arts:
developing the evidence base, The Angila Ruskin/UCLan Research Team, 2007), into the
impact of arts participation on mental health. It found that there were significant
improvements in empowerment, mental health and social inclusion, even among people with
significant mental health difficulties. There was also a significant decrease in the proportion of
participants identified as frequent or regular service users.
The Arts Council’s leading role

A study carried out by Dr Joy Windsor for Arts Council England found that people who attend
artistic and cultural events are more likely than other people to report good health, even
allowing for important characteristics such as age, socioeconomic status and highest
educational qualifications (Dr Joy Windsor, Your health and the arts: a study of the association
between arts engagement and health, Arts Council England, 2005). Taking part in dance
activities is also associated with better health – one way of preventing obesity and
contributing to an improvement in the nation’s health. Although people with a long-standing
illness that limits their activities were less likely to attend cultural events, they were more likely
to engage in creative activities.
In 2004 the Arts Council published a review that included 385 references from medical
literature related to the effect of the arts and humanities in healthcare. It highlighted the
crucial importance of the arts and humanities in inducing positive physiological and
psychological changes in clinical outcomes, reducing drug consumption, shortening length of
stay in hospital and improving mental healthcare (Arts in health: a review of the medical
literature, Arts Council England, 2004). Further evidence of the way cultural participation can
improve health outcomes was provided in A prospectus for arts and health, published by Arts
Council England and Department of Health (2007).
Finally, in 2007 Arts Council England built on the Department of Health’s favourable review by
developing a formal arts and health strategy of its own. This defined two overarching aims:
• to integrate the arts into mainstream health strategy and policy making, in order to make
the case for a role for the arts in healthcare provision across the whole country and for a
wider remit for the arts in terms of healthy living and wellbeing; and
• to increase, and more effectively deploy, resources for arts and health initiatives, through
funding, quality assurance of artists’ work and advocacy
To work towards these aims, five priorities were identified: healthy communities; the built
environment; children and young people; workforce development; and advocacy and resource
development.
The development of this strategy had paralleled the development of the Well London Alliance,
whose aims were clearly sympathetic to those of the Arts Council. As a long-term funder of
arts and health providers and programmes, including future national portfolio organisations
like the London Arts in Health Forum and Arts and Health South West, the opportunity to
become a partner in such an enterprise was clearly serendipitous. It was not only a chance for
the Arts Council to strengthen the evidence base for arts and health work but to do so on a
scale that would be well beyond anything it could fund or run by itself. Being part of the
Alliance would also offer exciting possibilities for finding common ground with other agencies
working in the health sector, and for exchanging skills and sharing specialist knowledge.
1.5 Areas of low engagement and participation

Ambitions for deeper and wider engagement in the arts
‘The arts are popular with ambitious programmes really making a difference… Yet we know
how much work remains to be done because only a minority of the population has much
to do with the arts on a regular basis. A big challenge lies in addressing the disparities in
levels of engagement between different sections of the population, as currently those who
are most active tend to be from the most privileged parts of society.

’
Achieving great art for everyone (Arts Council England, 2010)
Arts Council England’s new strategic framework for the arts over the next 10 years sets out
five long-term goals. Goal 2 is that ‘more people experience and are inspired by the arts’. This
aim is much wider than building audiences for cultural product. There is a new emphasis here
on participation and arts engagement. The people who do benefit are, almost invariably, the
well educated who tend to be middle class, as John Knell and Matthew Taylor note in Arts
Funding, Austerity and the Big Society (RSA, 2011), a provocation paper published for the
joint Arts Council and RSA 2011 State of the Arts conference.
It is perhaps not a surprise, therefore, to learn that in mapping cultural engagement, whether
across the country or across a city like London, a correlation exists between where you live
and whether you participate in the arts. This might look like another form of postcode lottery,
as if these areas were poorly served by the arts sector, but the truth is that the lottery is a
bigger one about affluence and poverty. Research into the potential cultural offer within close
reach of the chosen LSOAs often produced impressive lists of artists and arts organisations,
including some national flagship companies. The fact is, however, that for largely economic
and social reasons, a relationship had rarely been forged between the communities on their
estates and the arts bodies around them. It remains to be seen whether current ideas around
localism and new structures of delivery might change this.
A key question that the Arts Council has been grappling with in various ways over the last
few years is around supply and demand. Its traditional role has been to fund and support
artists and arts organisations in the hope or expectation that there will be a demand for their
work. The increasing pressure since the mid-1980s to develop the demand side of the
equation has come from two politically opposed directions: those who want to see the arts
paying their own way to a much greater extent, thus making less use of public money; and
those who want public money to go further and reach a wider and more diverse audience.
One response to this pressure was the New Audiences programme which devised imaginative
and ingenious approaches to encouraging the reluctant or non-attender to take up the
cultural offer and visit theatres, galleries and so on. Some approaches were based on
tweaking the price offer or revamping the programme, others on trying to find ways to
reassure people that the experience would be an enjoyable one, mainly by raising awareness
and building confidence via education or participatory work.
In fact, the notion of educational outreach and participatory work has been a feature of our
cultural landscape for a long time – going back to the creation of the Entertainments National
Service Association (ENSA) at the beginning of World War II. This notion flowered in the late
1960s and took institutional form as community arts in the 1970s. Since then, there has been
ebb and flow between national arts policy and the claims of grassroots arts activism as the
increasingly sclerotic argument between excellence and access (the Arts Council’s twin
founding principles) shifted first this way then that, between art for art’s sake-posturing and
frank instrumentalism. The publication, after a wide-ranging consultation with the public, of
Achieving great art for everyone signals a truce at last and perhaps indicates a growing
consensus that the arts can be both ‘truth and beauty’ and a social good – and that the two
are impossible to untwine.
Beyond access vs excellence

Knell and Taylor suggest how this realisation might be a real turning point in how the arts are
viewed across society:
‘ The invitation here is not for the arts community to succumb to crude instrumentalism …
nor for it to reject accountability in favour of a bland assertion that art makes the world
better. Rather it is to develop coherent (and challenging) accounts of the role art does, can
and could play in helping us imagine and create more fulfilling lives in a better society. This
is hardly unfamiliar territory for the arts. If you review the cultural strategies of local
authorities, they have long placed an emphasis on how cultural participation can help build
the good society, using the language of strong and cohesive communities in which
individuals have a sense of connection with other residents and a pride in their
neighbourhoods.

’ Knell and Taylor (Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society, RSA, 2011, pp.27-28)
In evaluating the implications as well as the achievements of Be Creative Be Well, this is a

critical statement. There is, for us, a real sense that, in collaborating with agencies outside the
arts world to create a participatory programme of this scale aimed at achieving a social good,
the Arts Council may have, in national policy terms, taken its most significant step yet towards
achieving great art for everyone.
The strategy’s title itself is, in this context, interesting in its choice of the word ‘achieving’ over
a word it might once have chosen, ‘providing’. It allows for a more active response from
people than simply being consumers or suppliants. In identifying what achieving its second
goal – ‘that more people experience and are inspired by the arts’ – might look like, the Arts
Council states that one sign would be that ‘more people value the arts as being important to
the quality of their lives and are actively involved in shaping provision in their communities’
(Achieving great art for everyone, Arts Council England, 2010, p.31).
Perhaps the next leap after that will be to recognise that there is an even more reciprocal
relationship possible between those who provide art and those who receive it. To speak of ‘an
arts project on a council estate’ might conjure up uncomfortable images of middle-class
do-gooding among the poor or provoke patronising sneers about ‘cultural deserts’ but, as this
report will show, the people who live here have something of their own to contribute.
Sometimes, it may even be (whisper it) recognisably artistic.
‘ As long as we keep an elitist approach to the arts, we are doing the arts a disservice and
failing to value the energy that is here – energy that actually inspires a lot of the arts out
there anyway.

’ Rachel Pepper, Acton Community Forum and Be Creative Be Well team leader
◥ 36 Be Creative Be Well in practice
2
Be Creative Be Well
in practice
Artists and projects
Having looked at the context in the last section, we now turn to how the Arts Council set
about pursuing the broad aims and objectives of Well London and achieving the specific goals
of Be Creative Be Well.
The approach was simple. A lead artist or organisation was appointed to devise, develop and
run a programme of cultural and creative activities that would be shaped as far as possible by
each community’s evident needs and desires. No area received an investment greater than
£52,000 over the three-year life of the programme and many received much less; in all cases,
the main cost was paying artists what was felt to be a professional rate for their work. Apart
from requiring those leading the project teams to make quarterly reports back to the Arts
Council, in addition to fulfilling the evaluation requirements imposed on all partners by the
University of East London, there was no top-down directive on what should or should not
happen on the ground in order to meet the aims and objectives of the programme.
2.1 Choosing the artists

The key attributes and the participatory process
The opportunity to participate in Be Creative Be Well was widely advertised. Because of the
large number of projects and applicants, and given the modest staff resources at Arts Council
England – the core team consisted only of Karen Taylor, Programme Manager; Lucy Clark,
Programme Coordinator (who succeeded Jenny Malarkey in this role) and a part-time
administrator – artists and arts organisations were chosen on the strength of their paper
applications and were not personally interviewed before being appointed. The decision-
making panels often included arts team staff from local authorities, local residents, youth
ambassadors and Well London partners. (It should perhaps be noted here that, especially
given this mix, it was felt later that a paper-based approach might not necessarily be the best
way to decide who should run projects.)
Some of those applying would already have been known to the Arts Council, either from
having received funding for earlier work or being recognised as artists or organisations
engaged in participatory arts practice. Others were new to the team but presented persuasive
evidence of their arts and/or community development skills.
Not all successful applicants had a previous track record in arts and health work, though many
did and others had transferable experience, having run projects with individuals and groups in
a variety of community and institutional settings, from young offender institutions to schools.
They were chosen on the basis of their evident suitability for a programme that demanded a
range of skills.
This ideal skillset was composed of three key attributes: artistic ability, the ability to facilitate
participation and the ability to work effectively in and with a community. In the case of a
whole organisation, these abilities might be shared out: so, the person leading the
programme might not be a professional artist but there would be artists within the
organisation to run the workshops. Where a single artist was appointed, the demands on that
person were, therefore, comparatively more challenging, though not impossible.
The sector in which artists work is full of changing definitions and descriptions – community
arts, participatory arts, socially engaged arts, creative learning, outreach and so on. These are
a struggle to keep up with and can become challenging in changing political circumstances.
Although most, if not all, practitioners subscribe to the broad belief that arts engagement can
make a difference to people’s lives, the sector lacks a detailed ethical framework, and some
artists struggle to fulfil their own needs as creative producers alongside their deep
commitment to social progress. It is, in any case, a broad church.
Some practitioners, for example, will be happy to admit that they use their artistic skills simply
as a tool to achieve desirable personal and social outcomes – so, they might use a particular
theatre technique, like hot-seating, as a way of encouraging people to develop greater
empathy for others or to reconsider anti-social behaviour, such as pulling out a knife to settle
an argument. Others will set out to involve people in a creative process, believing that this in
itself will make them, in artist Hannah Hull’s words, ‘politically autonomous and socially
mobile’. All will have their own ideas on where the artistic outcome, if any, fits into all of this
(there is another tiring binary argument here, between the value of process and of product)
– let alone what can be said or claimed about its quality.
There is, however, a greater consensus about the outcomes of this kind of work. The most
recent addition to a large archive of research and evaluation documenting the process and
potential benefits of participatory arts work is Adult participatory arts – thinking it through
(509 Arts, Arts Council England, 2010), a study of several leading companies working in this
way. Its chart (below) summarises the trajectory of a typical project, from start to finish and
shows what participants can gain at each stage if things go well. It also, incidentally, shows
how the product (or, here, presentation) can, in fact, be an integral part of the process.
PARTICIPATION PRESENTATION
Immersion Scripting Presentation
Introduction Compilation Performance
Workshop Composition Display
Skills acquisition Devising Sharing
Creative learning Rehearsal Exhibition
Group activities Try-out Recording
Learning
Research
Exploration Progression Recognition
Familiarisation Confidence Validation
Adoption Motivation Achievement
Sign-up Learning Accreditation
Commitment Self awareness
ENABLING OWNING
‘Elements of process and product’, from Adult participatory arts (Arts Council England, 2009, p.20)
These findings will be very useful in terms of starting to analyse what artists and the arts
might have contributed to achieving Well London’s aims. The attitudinal and behavioural
changes that can come out of cultural participation are the kind of changes that are proven to
help people to make healthier lifestyle choices.
As we will see later, in evaluating Be Creative Be Well, there is, in fact, a close coincidence
between the personal changes and behaviours listed above with some of the evidence-based
ways to wellbeing identified by the new economics foundation. This is also true when we
consider the third area of skill, in community engagement and development.
Apart from screening applicants in this way, the Arts Council also decided that, as far as
possible, the artists should be local to the relevant LSOA. This was in part to guard against the
old problem of artists parachuting in and then vanishing for good once the project has been
completed. One hope was that a close and lasting relationship would be formed between the
artist and the community, which might continue beyond the life of the programme. Given
that fresh money would be needed for follow-up work, artists might be able to provide local
people with fundraising support or training or even help them write funding applications. The
Arts Council also hoped that artists would be encouraged, outside of this programme, to
apply for funding to continue projects.
This decision to stay local was also based on the assumption that such artists would either
have personal knowledge that would obviate the need for a long research and consultation
period, or were more likely to be committed to acting locally.
2.2 Briefing the artists

The situation on the ground
Prior to artists beginning their work, a wide-ranging survey of the selected LSOAs had been
carried out by the University of East London. This research and consultation exercise analysed
not just demographics and the like but it also attempted, through ‘appreciative enquiry’ and
other methodologies, to discover what people there felt about their current lives and the
neighbourhood, and where they wanted to see changes or improvements. Agencies and
resources relevant to these areas were also researched, including arts and cultural
organisations located in the borough. The appreciative enquiry workshop reports were used in
briefing artists applying to lead Be Creative Be Well projects.
Artists were also introduced to or made aware of their Well London partners and the team
coordinator as well as representatives of local interests, including members of tenants and
residents associations and staff from the housing associations that might own all or part of
the housing stock in the LSOA. In some cases, a committee had been set up to help advise,
establish or steer Well London; this was often called the local advisory group. In a few cases,
artists became Well London coordinators and these naturally had a wider overview of how the
Be Creative Be Well work might complement what the Well London partners were doing.
In most cases, once the programme was ready to begin, launch or taster events were also
held to enable artists to meet and greet local people and to learn more about what they
might want in terms of cultural activities.
2.3 Developing an artistic programme

A survey of artistic activity and achievement
The following chapter takes a more detailed look at particular projects and particular aspects
and outcomes of delivery through case studies, as part of an analytical framework based
around the new economics foundation’s ‘ways to wellbeing’ and their coincidence with a
range of health determinants. This section, therefore, simply celebrates the work, focusing on
artistic outcomes over the three years of the programme’s life.
Be Creative Be Well funded a diverse range of creative opportunities for residents from
October 2007 until the end of March 2011 and it is almost impossible to do justice to the
sheer volume of activities, products and partnerships these projects generated.
Initially, the Well London community engagement processes facilitated conversations directly
with local artists, organisations and residents, who were then commissioned to run activities.
In 2008, this included Clod Ensemble’s Memory Soup, an arts, cooking and reminiscence
project for elders at the Walter Sickert Centre in Canonbury, which printed several of the
participants’ favourite recipes; a contribution to the London Borough of Newham’s Park Team
for a jointly funded consultation on Star Park in Canning Town, which now has new play
equipment; a film and video skills development and food diary project run by City Gateway
for young women in Limehouse; and a Big Chair Dance for the Asian Centre in Noel Park by
Entelechy Arts, which culminated with performances at the Capital Age Festival at the South
Bank.
Many projects were also suggested by Well London partners, who often helped the Be
Creative Be Well team broker relationships. In 2009, projects included the jointly funded Final
Frontier Festival in partnership with West Ham and Plaistow New Deal for Communities at the
Hub in Canning Town, where several local arts and community and voluntary sector
organisations took part and ran workshops; the refurbishment of the Handcroft Road Tenants
and Residents Association by local residents and artists in partnership with Croydon Council
which included a variety of play equipment for the local youth club based there; and Waltham
Forest Arts Education Network to run a series of dance projects across The Hoe Street LSOA,
with hundreds of residents taking part, getting fitter and learning about nutrition.
In 2009, due to time and resources, the Be Creative Be Well team used a formal
commissioning process to set up projects in each of the 20 areas to run from January 2010
until the end of March 2011. Apart from those featured in this report, projects included
Creative Health Labs, which ran workshops, leading to a community parade and festival in the
192 Gallery in Haverstock; Green Shoes Dance company, which ran Dancing Heath to train
residents to run their own dance activities; Stories in the Street artist Richard Neville, who ran
several storytelling workshops in Westminster, Enfield and Lewisham; Age UK Croydon, which
ran several creative workshops for local elders including dance, song and craft; the Somali
Women Support and Development Group, which ran yoga and salsa workshops for women in
White City; and Bounce Theatre, which organised youth drama, dance and an elders drop in
centre.
A festival of light
Where did the project take place?
Woodberry Down LSOA, London Borough of Hackney
How much money was allocated?
£35,500
Who received the funding?
Immediate Theatre
When did the project run?
April 2010-March 2011
What was planned?
A programme aimed at developing a creative
community, through activities exploring the local
area’s heritage, enabling residents to celebrate
their relationships with different cultures and their
environment, leading to the Festival of Light event.
◥ 44 Be Creative Be Well in theory
3
Be Creative Be Well
in theory
Understanding the outcomes
An evidence-based framework for evaluation
As the preceding section has shown, Be Creative Be Well was a wide-ranging, ambitious
programme that, at its most effective, was shaped by local conditions and local people. Artists
brought to each project their own particular set of values, experiences and practices and what
emerged from their work with particular residents was unique. Each project produced its own
self-evaluation and left its own particular legacy. How then to set about analysing so many
variables, so much data, such wide and varying experiences and impacts? How to see the
bigger picture when it was painted in all these different colours? How to identify the most
significant outcomes?
We needed a framework that would assess both the programme’s success in encouraging
behavioural change into healthier lifestyle choices – Well London’s overall mission – and what
particular contribution creativity and the arts had made to this process. We found what we
needed, first, in the evidence-based ‘five ways to wellbeing’ developed by the new economics
foundation in 2008.
Commissioned by the government, the foundation reviewed the work of over 400 scientists
working on different aspects of health and wellbeing. Based on this research, the new
economics foundation produced a concept of everyday wellbeing in its report Five Ways to
Wellbeing: The Evidence (new economics foundation, 2008, pp.1-2), comprised of two main
elements: feeling good and functioning well:
‘Feelings of happiness, contentment, enjoyment, curiosity and engagement are

characteristic of someone who has a positive experience of their life. Equally important for
wellbeing is our functioning in the world. Experiencing positive relationships, having some
’
control over one’s life.
It then identified ‘five simple actions which can improve wellbeing in everyday life’:
Connect = to build supportive and lasting social relationships that go beyond career-related
and material goals.
Be active = to engage in physical activity and, by extension, to achieve mastery of a physical

process.
Take notice = to practise awareness of sensations, thoughts and feelings and to reflect on
matters that go beyond mediatised and commercialised flows.
Keep learning = to try something new, to rediscover an old interest, to take on a new
responsibility or to gain a new skill.
Give = to behave cooperatively, to help one another and to seek reciprocity and engage in
mutual exchange.
Wellbeing
good feelings day-to-day and overall
happiness, satisfaction
Be
active
Take
Connect
notice
Good
functioning
Keep
Give
learning
Mental capital
resilience, self-esteem, cognitive
capacity, emotional intelligence
‘Five Ways to Wellbeing: The Evidence’ (new economics foundation, 2008, p.13)
As this chart shows, these actions produce feelings of wellbeing that might also build more
lasting ‘mental capital’. The fact that each action can engender its own positive feedback
means that wellbeing promoting factors can be reinforced. As one researcher puts it: ‘Positive
emotions can lead to positive cognitions, which in turn contribute to further positive emotions.’
This model is based on behavioural changes at the individual level and, the authors point out,
it does not explain ‘the role of enablers (infrastructure and motivators) at the societal level,
which have the capacity to encourage and sustain individual behaviour change’ (Five Ways to
Wellbeing: The Evidence, new economics foundation, 2008, p.14). We argue that the artists
in Be Creative Be Well act as enablers and that the creative process they facilitate provides a
structure that triggers and supports positive behavioural change.
At the outset of this evaluation, before we had made any visits, we recognised that these five
actions correspond closely to behaviours than can emerge in well-designed participatory arts
projects. People can form close relationships by engaging in a common creative task
(connect). Physical activity is intrinsic to artforms like dance but applies equally to the making
of material things (be active). Creating art encourages people to reflect on their world and
their experiences in it (take notice). People develop skills and find out new things through arts
projects (keep learning). Art is a powerful means of communication as well as self-expression,
and participation in the arts can build both self-esteem and empathy (give).
When we did make our visits to see what was happening, we found abundant evidence of
these behaviours in action and reported back to us. How, though, to organise this evidence,
without simply listing examples or wildly generalising? We considered then what we had
learned from residents and from our own observations about aspects of their lives that affect
their health and sense of wellbeing. These ‘determinants of health’ (as discussed earlier in this
report) include the physical environment they live in, the relationships they have with their
neighbours, their access to a cultural life, their fitness and their role and agency in the
community. Their health and wellbeing – indeed anyone’s health and wellbeing – depends on
the quality of these constituent elements of everyday life.
We realised then that the ‘socially engaged’ artists delivering Be Creative Be Well had, in fact,
addressed these ‘determinants of health’ simply through their practice, if not always as a
matter of declared intent. Unlike formal arts education or training, the participatory arts
process engages with the person in their own context and by extension, as with community
arts, with the everyday social formation around them. So, by examining how artists addressed
each of these factors – place, relationships and so on – we could then exemplify how they
encouraged the attitudinal and behavioural change embodied in the New Economic
Foundation’s ‘five actions towards wellbeing’ through a participative creative process.
The five chapters that follow provide an analysis based on the foregoing framework and offer
case studies that we hope illustrate how this actually played out on the ground in each case. The
final, standalone case study is included as an example of how creative projects can take people
on a personal journey and bring them together in what policymakers term ‘community cohesion’.
3.1 Place/Take notice

Paying attention to where you live
Taking notice means being aware of the world around you and your personal relationship to
it. This state of mindfulness has been ‘shown to predict positive mental states, self-regulated
behaviour and heightened self knowledge’ according to the research reviewed by the new
economics foundation. The idea of paying attention is exemplified by the foundation on its
Five Ways to Well-being postcards as ‘being curious’ and ‘savouring the moment, whether
you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends’.
We apply this idea here to how people notice – or often fail to notice – the place they live in
and what part artists played in helping residents to observe, re-view and transform their
physical environment.
‘At the top you have Manor House, which is where the Woodberry Down Reds, one of the
most prolific gangs in the borough, are based. That is where they sell the crack and heroin.
You go down to the left of the Robin Redman Centre [the main venue for the project] and
round by the off-licence and the bookies is where the old Jamaican guys sell their weed.
You cross over and go down the slip road between the really derelict blocks and that is
where the working girls hang out of an evening – and sometimes during the day. That’s
the patch.

’ Lead artist
There are instances like this where the notional line demarcating and encapsulating an area of
low income is made flesh, as it were, in the visible social world. Elsewhere, the LSOA might
lack such coherence. A typical example would be Canning Town LSOA in Newham, where a
vast underpass to the motorway cuts through the area and, according to the artists working
there, breaks up any sense of community. What little open space it has is riven by the noise
from endless streams of traffic.
This LSOA is also one of several where the local authorities have approved regeneration
schemes – another is Woodberry Down, where a new academy has opened with a new
community centre and a refurbished and expanded youth club. Such programmes vary in
intention and quality. In some cases, there is a sense of papering over the cracks – in another
estate we saw, this was literally the case: gently scrape the turf laid over the bleak new park
and you are quickly through to the rubble of recently demolished tower blocks. Local people
might be forgiven for questioning the value of such ‘progress’.
Although, across the LSOAs, the age and fabric of the buildings will vary considerably, there
remains more than a vestige of the council estate and its unmistakeable sameness: rows of
identical houses, grids of tower block windows. This is, for those who live elsewhere, an
abject landscape – the very architecture is a signifier of deprivation. Because that is the
outside perception, residents are often conscious of a stigma attached to living here. Yet this
does not necessarily mean they share that bleak vision. Some residents we met did bemoan to
some extent what had happened to their estate over the years, citing an increase in anti-social
behaviour or the physical dilapidation of the buildings, but more were keen to speak of the
virtues of where they lived – perhaps, in some cases, defensively, aware of the reputation that
such places can have in the world outside, particularly among policymakers. Indeed, these
descriptions were often the first barrier to engagement.
Ultimately, how the environment is viewed by those who live in it is shaped by their own
economic and social circumstances and by their sense of agency and purpose. There will be
young unemployed people who have grown up here and whose parents may never have been
in work, who may think of the estate as their entire world. It thus becomes – objectively –
their ‘prison’ in Orwell’s terms but, in their own terms, a safe space – their territory, their
ends, which they will defend against all comers. They are the creators or inheritors of the
no-go areas and safe routes that map all young people’s lives in the city.
This difficult, often ugly or unfinished place has, nevertheless, the potential to be transformed.
By looking around with a fresh eye, as if you had just landed here, and by thinking about the
place and what makes it – despite everything – home, can lead ultimately to a new
apprehension and appreciation of what it might become. That is what some of the artists
working for Be Creative Be Well have aimed at making possible.
In North Kensington, for example, with lead artist Lisa Nash’s encouragement, a young
Muslim woman screened a 360-degree film taken from the top of her tower block, setting
the new perspective on her estate to rapid beats. Someone in the same workshop
approached the same place from ground level, taking colour photographs of, in the words of
the resident artist, ‘a row of garages which are the most disgusting and uninviting spaces and
making something quite beautiful out of them’.
In Barking and Dagenham, Studio 3 Arts worked with participants, who included sedentary
elderly residents and people with mental health issues, to enhance their environment and
ease their sense of isolation. Simply cleaning up the green spaces was not enough in a place
that one described as having ‘no centre or focus in the community, nowhere safe to meet’.
Artist Martin Swan was also keen to create public art where people live – ‘not just on
roundabouts’:
‘This is about making an aesthetic difference to areas that people see every day, places that
’
are close to people’s hearts: their gardens and balconies...
For many people, the decorations they ended up making for window boxes and trellises and
other meaningful spaces made a real visual difference – one spoke of ‘the metal sparkling in
the snow, making the place look so lovely now...’ another of ‘the mosaic that had ‘brightened
up my garden so much that this is where I spend all my summer now’.
This project was all about creating art to adorn living spaces, including pots for their gardens.
The artists and local people in the Larkhall LSOA in Lambeth and the Cossall Estate in
Southwark also had the same idea of using ceramics to brighten the environment – in the first
case, by decorating the window boxes, thus individualising the rows of flats; in the second
case, creating ceramic ‘beauty spots’ in 10 different sites to bring all the fragments of the
estate together. In these ways, artists and residents turned the public space of the LSOA into a
site of transformative creative activity.
100 Angels
Upper Edmonton LSOA, London Borough of Enfield April-December 2010
£28,006 Inter-linked creative ventures involving public art, film,
Who received the funding? creative learning, public engagement and individual
Tiger Monkey enrichment, the objective being to support wellbeing
through a unifying theme
‘As I walk past and look at the angels, I feel something within me saying that we are being
watched over and protected. I feel safe and happy.

’ A local resident and participant
When arts company Tiger Monkey came to the Upper Edmonton LSOA, it found little
evidence of a coherent community there: the LSOA was defined more by data than any
meaningful relationship to self-defining communities of interest, race, culture or even
geography. The implications of this were graphically demonstrated when, despite the
company producing leaflets and posters, running open sessions, promoting word of mouth –
‘anything and everything that you can imagine to let people know what we were doing and
Case study
give them a taste of what was going on’ – only a handful of people turned up to the first
session the artists held at the local Boundary Hall one long Saturday.
Tiger Monkey then adapted its approach and found, at a primary school, the local support it
had been looking for. It put aside its original plan of running a particular activity straight away
and carried out instead a wide-ranging creative brainstorming session with local people. At
these sessions of dance, storytelling, craft, music and so on, ideas were floated and discussed.
It was at one of these that the notion of angels emerged.
In the consultation undertaken prior to the project, researchers from the University of East
London discovered that local people wanted improvements to the built environment, a
greater sense of safety and security in walking around the area, and community building. The
100 Angels project, as it became known, arguably achieved all three, transforming the
physical fabric of the LSOA and giving the disparate individuals and families living here a sense
of collective pride and confidence.
Putting it all into place

After the first (research) phase of the project, collective work on this theme began in earnest.
The artists helped local people to create metal plaques, a large sculpture for outdoor display
and flower arrangements of angels throughout the LSOA. All this work was launched as an
arts trail, with around 70 people helping Tiger Monkey artists Joe Robinson and Emma Ghafur
to complete a two-tonne concrete angel by planting 200 angel-hair grass plants to decorate
its wings. They all celebrated at Boundary Hall with – what else? – angel cake, as part of a
community feast funded by partners London Sustainability Exchange.
The artists point to the fact all this happened in an area actually called The Angel Edmonton:
the inspiration for the ‘angel’ theme. They were also aware that some participants saw the
concept in a more spiritual light – either way it has, they say, been the key to the programme’s
success:
‘When the angel first arrived, we were conscious it might be mistaken and seen as a largely
Christian symbol, but we’ve endeavoured all the way through to talk about the original
concept of the area’s name and the angel as a being that watches over us – a metaphor
for our community. Because what seemed to be needed here was something or someone
that could look over everyone rather than just one particular group of people.

’ Emma Ghafur
Case study
The project has also brought together the various strands of Tiger Monkey’s arts programme
– and attracted a wide variety of partners to the whole enterprise. Enfield Homes, which runs
the Snells Park Estate, gave permission for the public artworks to be erected; it gave them use
of the Boundary Hall and helped with publicity to all the local homes. Groundworks Trust, a
Well London partner, was involved in the planting and gardening side of the project. Fore
Street Library hosted a residency and have put a set of angels permanently on display. Aptly
enough, the Angel Community Centre has assisted with publicity and signposting, as well as
hosting the set of angels that start the trail. The artists worked with the Florence Hayes
Adventure Playground, running regular workshops and training staff to continue the Arts
Award programme that had been set up; two Tiger Monkey apprentices gained their Gold
Arts Awards while volunteering on the 100 Angels programme. It has all come together.
The question of legacy also seems more secure than usual, with the Angel arts trail still there
to be seen by anyone who walks the half mile from Angel Community Centre to Snells Park.
At its launch, one local commented: ‘The angels are fantastic – a reminder of how great our
area is.’
Case study
3.2 Relationships/Connect
Developing friendships and networks
Connecting means being aware of the people around you and building a personal relationship
with them. According to the research reviewed by the new economics foundation, the most
significant difference between people with good mental health and those without is social
participation. The idea of connecting is exemplified by the foundation as investing in
relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.
We apply this idea here to how artists helped residents to initiate, renew and develop social
exchange and build mutually supportive relationships. Residents may sometimes feel isolated but
artists can provide activities that bring people together in collective and constructive activities.
‘I was brought up in south London where we knew all the neighbours. I moved away from
home but my mum still knows everybody in the street, including the new people coming in.
When I was living in a tower block and working on the Aylesbury Estate, I was probably the
only one who knew all the people on my landing. I was born in Guyana in South America and
in my village, if I came home from school and I didn’t say good afternoon to Miss Mary or
whomever before I got home, somehow my grandmother would know and I would get
beaten. “You walked past Miss Mary and you never said morning, good afternoon, nothing.”
So, for me in my formative years it was natural: that’s the way it should be. You’ve got to smile
and be friendly to people. I don’t think we should be so scared to get to know each other.
’
Drama worker Tony Gouveia’s memories encapsulate the vision of community as a web of
social exchange and mutual obligation. The image it conjures up has a nostalgic blur to it,
even though it is still a vital part of Tony’s practice as an artist at Immediate Theatre. It is
probably in all of us – this need for communion, for being part of a larger whole. It exists as a
rebuke to the way most of us now lead our lives, pushed for time, always promising to meet
up but never quite managing it. For those living on the LSOA, however, the situation can be
much more serious and the experience of living here a far greater contrast to that glowing
vision of community.
The initial consultation with local people revealed a worryingly predictable set of concerns and
problems about living on estates, much of it focused on community safety. In most cases,
fears about – and for – young people were paramount. Even the common complaints about
life here, such as the need to improve the street lighting, could be linked to the spectre of
youthful gangs, lurking in the shadows.
Fear is one acid, eating away at the possibility of trust and respect across the generations or
across different cultures. Another is isolation. It seems unlikely that putting so many people
onto estates or piling them into tower blocks would result in a lack of community, but that
has been the reality. Everyone lives close in space but many live apart socially, immured within
the nuclear family and disconnected from those in the same street or block, often not aware
even of their neighbour’s name. Perhaps the group most affected by isolation are women,
some of them raising a family by themselves, others out of work or in low-paid employment.
It was notable how large a proportion of participation in Be Creative Be Well was female, with
women more likely to be based on the estate during the day and free to attend workshops.
As a community-based participatory arts programme, Be Creative Be Well is all about

relationships: group work, cooperation and collaboration. Exchange and peer mentoring are
intrinsic to practice. The reason for taking part is not driven by the idea of monetary gain and,
although participation might encourage some to explore new career directions, the process is
fundamentally about creating art in the company of, and with the help of, others.
Perhaps the most obvious model of how such participation builds supportive relationships can
be found in the drama group: the community that forms around any mutual creative enterprise
like this is bound together by something very like love. Recent research into ‘mirror’ neurons
suggests that we have an inbuilt propensity for sympathy and understanding which proximity,
above all, brings out in us. Our moral awareness relies on the ‘affective nearness’ of others.
One of the Larkhall LSOA projects, making textiles and aimed at managing stress, serves as an
example of how artists brought people together who hadn’t met before though they might live
in the same area and who, after a few weekly workshops, were sharing personal experiences
quite intimately. It was, according to the artists running the project, ‘quite a therapeutic space’.
Breaking the ice

When residents were asked what difference Be Creative Be Well was making, many of them
would cite the fact they now knew by name people they had passed in the street for years,
discovering neighbours they could now talk to, having shared the experience of making art
together.
‘People who’ve been living next to each other for years have spoken for the first
time – I even saw someone kissing their neighbour outside my door!

’ Local resident
The way in which some artists, like Tony Gouveia in Brownswood LSOA in Hackney,
approached engaging the community modelled how relationships can be formed, crossing
generations – reaching older people through their children and bringing everyone together in
communal activity, in the case of Immediate Theatre, a street parade.
‘We have always started by working with the young people – this is about informal
education and with informal education, you need to get the parents involved as co-
educators. That way you get to know all the family.
‘You might get quite a small group to begin with but it will have a ripple effect because,
next time they come, they bring friends. A couple of weeks later, they bring another lot
– and their mums and dads. This is also why Immediate Theatre has peer facilitators –
young people who talk to other young people, young people supporting each other. If they
say ‘come on’ or your family says ‘come on’ or your neighbour says, ‘come on’, you feel
’
you can join in.
He has also begun to form bonds with young gang members – young men usually, teenaged
or in their early 20s who are probably the hardest demographic to reach and whose
involvement overall in Be Creative Be Well was much lower than other groups:
‘I still haven’t got the boys from the gangs through the door but they don’t give me any
trouble. On day one they came to the door, they looked in, they came in and they saw
what was going on. We were having a laugh and invited them to join in – a couple of
them did for one session and then they left.
‘One of them is a boy – he’s 13 – who comes in every now and again. He’s quite a brave
little soul, a soldier and he’ll come by for a couple of weeks at a time. Then I’ll see him in
the streets with all the familiar faces. They’ll go, “Hi Ton, hi Rasta” and be really friendly. At
least I know some of their names now, so I can say hi back.
’
An artist with people

Woolwich Common LSOA, London Borough of April-October 2010
Greenwich What was planned?
How much money was allocated? Connecting Barnfield: using performing and creative
£20,119 arts to generate greater awareness of community
Who received the funding? development and to create ambassadors to champion
New Global Image people’s participation
Barnfield Estate has no tower blocks – most of the buildings are four or five storeys high. They
surround a featureless expanse of thin, tired-looking grass brightened by the swooping
contours and bright colours of a new children’s play area. The flats have balconies, most of
them used for drying laundry or for overflow storage. None of them seem to be used for
sitting out, talking and watching the world go by. Many of the flats also have satellite dishes,
strengthening the impression that life here is experienced indoors.
The estate has a long-standing reputation for violence and crime and there are high levels of
turnover and transfer requests. There is little in the form of community organisation, apart
from a project for under-fives. Only with the advent of Well London at the end of 2009 was a
residents’ group – The Friends of Barnfield – finally established. Unsurprisingly, the need for
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social cohesion and a community identity was of the key issues to emerge from initial
consultations with local people.
The Be Creative Be Well project was managed here by New Global Image, led by Iristide
Essien, known as Iris. In partnership with the African Community Development Foundation,
New Global Image ran art and photography workshops and outdoor performing arts events.
The programme focused on young people, in the hope that they might act as ambassadors.
Championing the call for Barnfield community action under the banner of ‘Connect: My Side
of the Story’, Iris hoped to convert the introspective inaction of life here to a new narrative of
practical citizenship and community participation – and to spark the necessary creative
thinking and imagination of residents not just through engaging them in arts activity but in
supporting them to manage the programme itself.
As a result, volunteers on the project benefited from training in community development and
youth work practice, innovative and creative thinking about citizenship and community
engagement, people management and sustainable development – training that, it was also
hoped, would enhance their chances of employability. Having participated in other Well
London activities, some volunteers were already committed to increasing ‘constructive
neighbourliness’ on the estate as a way of sustaining activities once the project had finished.
One such volunteer was involved in both the creative programme and the afterschool link that
was set up at the suggestion of residents:
‘I was sitting at home, thinking my English isn’t good enough, my maths isn’t good enough
– all that kind of stuff. But since I joined this programme, I’ve found a new confidence in
myself. I’ve just finished my health trainer’s course, which was very good. Here at the
afterschool club, we’ve grown from one or two children to 10 and I hope we’ll have even
more by next year. The arts activities – dancing, drawing, modelling, drumming – have
made a huge difference. It’s not just through maths and English that people communicate
who they are.
’
In fact, maths and English were on the menu at the afterschool club, along with healthy
eating (fresh fruit), skipping and football. After some internal debate, New Global Image had
decided that this club was a legitimate addition to its programme, given its importance to
local parents, many of whom have English as a second language. Here, their children were
encouraged to develop different kinds of relationships with adults, based on shared interests,
enjoyment and curiosity rather than on power and authority. The youth ambassador who had
first promoted the idea of the club commented:
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‘Eventually, they wouldn’t want to leave at the end of the club. That showed me I didn’t
have to do anything really out of the way, just be there to support them when I was
needed – and to laugh with them when they were laughing!
’
A healthy pragmatism
The integration of these educational and creative elements was typical of Iris’s pragmatic
approach to delivering Be Creative Be Well. It also illustrated his emphasis on the community
development aspects of the programme, rather than on achieving overtly artistic aims. The
arts were seen primarily as instrumental: as a means of achieving wider social goals. Individual
artists might or might not bring to sessions a passionate engagement with their artform but
the main point was to provide a varied programme of activities – including photography,
African drumming, fashion design and rap poetry – that would give novice participants a
breadth of creative experiences rather than seek to draw from them any greater depth of
involvement.
Iris’s diffidence about his own artistic skills may have been a factor here. ‘I’m not an artist!’ he
would say, laughing and slightly defensive. The right answer to that came back from one of
the participants: ‘You’re an artist with people, Iris.’
His core belief is that, fundamentally, play is as important as work is – an artistic position as
well as a social one. It may well be that his overriding desire is to get people involved in
anything positive that gives them pleasure and creates shared laughter, because that is the
way to promote their health and the health of the communities they live in. Initially less
confident himself about how ‘doing art’ might fit into this process, Iris can now combine his
community development expertise with a new understanding of how to get people going
creatively. One young participant illustrates that shift:
‘When we started, we were learning about how a picture looked – it was boring. I didn’t
feel like coming back again. Then we started actually doing things and since then I’ve done
a rap about Barnfield and made a video with my cousins. I’ve had a lot of fun.
’
Fluid engagement with the energies and interests of local people is, in the end, as essential to
a successful artistic programme as it is to achieving its social goals.
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3.3 Cultural life/Keep learning

Discovering and developing creative energy
Learning, in this context, can mean rediscovering an old interest as well as trying something
new – examples offered by the new economics foundation range from signing up for a course
to ‘setting a challenge you will enjoy achieving’. While learning plays an important role in
children’s social and cognitive development, research reviewed by the foundation suggests
that ‘the opportunity to engage in work or educational activities helps to lift older people out
of depression’, enhancing their self-esteem, encouraging social interaction and a more active
life (Five Ways to Wellbeing: The Evidence, new economics foundation, 2008, p.9).
We apply this idea, here, to the issue of cultural engagement and creative activity. While it is
clear that many residents lack access to mainstream arts provision, it is also evident that there
is often rich and sometimes untapped cultural potential within the community. Artists can
facilitate the learning of new skills and help those with creative abilities to take these further;
they can also facilitate the expression of local cultural practices.
Those living outside these LSOAs or the housing estates that make up many of them might
assume that these are cultural deserts, cut off as they are from mainstream arts activity and
consumption. That attitude does, of course, have real effects on how people in these areas
view themselves and may either discourage them from developing skills they have, or
persuade them that ‘real’ art and culture lies somewhere beyond their neighbourhood. That
negativity is similar to that which pervades schooling in these poorer areas, where young
people learn not to aspire. There is also the fact that culture, like health, is some way down
some residents’ agendas, which will be focused on meeting more basic needs.
However, human communities always create culture, even if it is not recognised as such by
those who have the power to set the definitions. These places have their own mix of cultural
habits and preferences and one of the many challenges for the artists leading Be Creative Be
Well was to identify these and then to find a balance between offering more and better of
the same and introducing the less familiar and more demanding.
This is central to the participatory arts process, from learning how to hold a paintbrush to
leading a workshop on poetry. In Be Creative Be Well, it is noteworthy how often artists living
in or near the LSOA were discovered and drawn into the programme but, even more
encouraging, there were frequent instances of local people rediscovering or sharing old
creative skills and in some cases being spurred on to return to study or training, having
regained their confidence.
Certain areas of London might be considered home to particular populations – Portuguese

and Brazilian people in and around Stockwell in Lambeth, Turkish and Kurdish along the
Green Lanes corridor in the north east of the city – but the general picture is one of ethnic
mixture rather than segregation. Whether current government policy – the cuts to housing
benefit in particular – will change this jigsaw of difference, driving the poorer communities
out of the centre, is not clear, but this is the city in which Well London and Be Creative Be
Well has operated. This swirl of cultures, eddying and mixing across the LSOAs, provided
artists with a rich palette of possibilities.
Tony Gouveia of Immediate Theatre truly mingled the cultures in Brownswood LSOA:
‘This year we have had street dance, Bollywood dance, capoeira, African dance and
drumming, Turkish dance and drumming but then, intermixed with that, we have had Latin
American voice and rhythm and general theatre games as part of a whole stream of
activities. Then we have had Bigga Blocco, which is a band that evolved out of Brazil’s
AfroReggae group working with our youth theatre members.
’
Although most of the artists he brought in to work with residents were local, he sought out
others to bring something different to the table, including a Bollywood dance group imported
from Greenwich Dance Agency. However, this should not obscure his commitment to the
values of home cultures, as opposed to what he calls ‘Coca-Cola culture’, the commercialised
sector that exoticises such traditions when it does not ignore them.
As residents in such projects learned or rediscovered these skills, so too did artists learn more
of the cultures represented in the LSOA. In the case of Canning Town LSOA, there was a
reminder that such places have contributed to so-called mainstream culture and that there is a
two-way process going on – an exchange of skills and energies.
Not just jigs and bells

Canning Town North LSOA, London Borough of June-December 2010
Newham What was planned?
How much money was allocated? All Folked Up: a programme of participatory dance
£25,645 workshops and visual, literary and historical events
Who received the funding? celebrating Canning Town’s historical contribution to
East London Dance the birth of modern English folk-dance movement
‘I feel that when I dance I am celebrating my body, my fitness, my energy, my spirit, my

being! The music takes over completely…

’ Dancer from the adults and older people group
Dance has a long history in Canning Town. A hundred years ago, Maud Karpeles and Elsie J.
Oxenham came to work here at women’s settlements. Karpeles taught folk dance to local
children at the Mansfield House Settlement and went on to found the English Folk Dance and
Song Society with Cecil Sharp in 1911. Her pupils received national media coverage for their
performances and the wider folk dance movement achieved widespread credibility after D.C.
Daking taught the dances to soldiers behind the lines during World War I. After the war
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ended, Daking came to teach at the Plaistow YMCA, and her experiences there were
immortalised in fiction in Elsie Oxenham’s Abbey books.
Twenty-five years ago, Dr Ju Gosling, a disabled artist, also came to live here. Knowing
Canning Town’s celebrated role in the development of the folk dance movement, she set out
to reconnect the local community with its rich history. The shape of the Be Creative Be Well
programme here was in large part down to her efforts: devising the original concept, doing
the research, briefing the artists, producing an exhibition. Crucially, she introduced East
London Dance, the lead artists, to the key folk dance protagonists, as well as working with
project partners the English Folk Dance and Song Society on a national conference about
traditional folk dance.
The other main mover was Kiki Gale, project lead and artistic director of East London Dance,
an organisation committed to dance in the community and descended, via the dance
animateur movement of the 1970s onwards, from dancers like Maud Karpeles. She saw the
possibility that celebrating the contribution made by Canning Town to the folk dance
movement might not only help to revive the tradition here but, given the cultural diversity of
today’s residents, could produce interesting new forms and expressions.
In fact, the population here was already something of a melting pot back at the turn of the
last century, with people from Germany, India, Malaysia and Japan, and from a wide range of
Eastern European, African and West Indian countries. This time, however, there would
hopefully be more sharing and exchange of the dance traditions of these and more recently
settled cultures. Before this could happen, the organisers had to address the notorious
divisions that still linger on in the folk scene – whether in song, dance or storytelling circles
– between purists and innovators, preservationists and modernisers.
For East London Dance, this posed some challenges, one of which was deciding which styles
of dance to teach and how – could they fuse styles, for example? Another was how far they
could strike a balance in the exhibition between dances produced locally and professional
work. Ultimately, East London Dance braved the traditionalists and mixed different styles and
approaches, not least so that it could broaden the appeal of the dance programme to local
people. As one dancer put it, folk dance is ‘not just about jigs and bells’.
The support of the English Folk Dance and Song Society was essential in helping to make this
‘fusion’ approach acceptable. Folk dance does not have a large teaching community but the
society advised on whom to work with for maximum impact. The selected artists were
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experienced and highly skilled technically but equally important was their flexibility and
willingness to adapt their art to whatever was required to engage different groups. They were
joined by other artists trained in contemporary dance, making for some high-calibre artistic
collaboration, as Kiki Gale remarks:
‘ Our sessions were often organic. The dancers were completely open to teaching and
learning from each other, and speaking up when they thought something didn’t feel right
as a performer.
’
This approach also resulted in local people engaging with a remarkable variety of dance and
musical styles – including clog dancing, Jamaican dance hall, sword dances, bagpipe tunes,
maypole dancing – and dancing everything from the Sunshine and the Star to the Dip-and-
dive and the Thunderclap.
A fitter legacy
Given this hectic level of activity, it is no surprise to learn that participants report feeling fitter
in terms of stamina, strength and flexibility and feeling altogether healthier for taking part.
For many, dance will now be how they keep themselves fit in the future. Wellbeing is about
more than this, of course, and the close relationships that developed between artists and
participants were important in building trust and reducing inhibitions about performing. The
intergenerational element in the programme helped local people to make new friends and to
suggest what being part of a community might mean. New skills have been learned and
participants have developed their own creative voice – as one remarked: ‘We are artists too.’
What this confident assertion of creativity might mean was vividly illustrated at the last session
of the programme, when members of each group were invited to teach a short sequence to
the other group. One shy 12-year-old from the under-16s group, who had earlier struggled to
remember the material, found herself teaching a complicated sequence to a group that
included 70-year-olds. Then, to the surprise of everyone who knew her, another, even shyer
participant – an adult new to the UK who spoke little English – chose to deliver a sequence to
the under-16s.
At the culmination of this session, another local participant performed two duets. This woman
had trained professionally but, as her passion for folk dance grew, the contemporary dance
world had turned aside. She lost confidence, aspiration and passion and quit dance
completely. This project not only reinvigorated her love of folk dance but also gave her the
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space and time to regain her confidence as a performer. She is now spearheading the adult
dancers group’s plans to form a regular club.
The legacy of the Canning Town project extends beyond its impact on this community. Some
of the professional artists were so inspired by their collaborations that they have begun to
work together on other projects for East London Dance, which will now be able to continue
bringing folk dance to communities in East London. Meanwhile, the membership of Canning
Town’s local history group has doubled and the English Folk Dance and Song Society will now
be publishing the autobiography of Maud Karpeles, who used to teach in Canning Town and
who would be very pleased to know that her work here is still continuing to bear fruit.
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3.4 Physical activity/Be active

Exercising healthy choices
Being active means most obviously physical activity – from walking and running to dance and
gardening. According to the research reviewed by the new economics foundation, there is
evidence to indicate that physical activity ‘protects against cognitive decline in later life and
against the onset of depressive symptoms and anxiety’. Engagement in physical activity
provides ‘increases in perceived self-efficacy, a sense of mastery and a perceived ability to
cope’ (Five Ways to Well-being: The Evidence, new economics foundation, 2008, p.7).
We apply this idea here to how artists got residents on their feet, moving and performing in
creative ways. Residents often lack access to adequate sporting facilities and opportunities for
exercise – artists can model new ways of developing physical health and fitness, including
healthy eating.
Whether a lack of exercise causes depression or depression prevents people taking exercise,
there is a clear link between levels of fitness and mental health. People living in deprived
circumstances are less likely to have access to good sports facilities and more likely to buy
processed foods that are less healthy and more fattening. There is an obesity epidemic and
increasing concern at the inactivity and loss of muscular fitness and stamina among the
young, due to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
Many artists incorporated activities that would encourage healthy eating and physical exercise
– two of the five core aims of Well London. Examples include mothers and children sitting
down to make things together at home for the first time, the manual effort of making
ceramics and working with charcoal and paints.
There was a varied range of dance projects, including Dance at Bellingham for adults and
young people in the same building at the same time, combining a physical workout with
good warm-up exercise programmes as well as creative expression. Dance at Canning Town
brought together English folk dance and Jamaican dance hall for young and old. Even elderly
people were not exempted – encouraged to use their hands to work on planting new gardens
and decorating pots to enhance the exterior of people’s houses and gardens.
Although ‘being active’ is usually taken to refer to physical activity and exercise, it can, we
believe, be extended at least to the haptic aspects of making art and probably further.
Creating something artistic is as much an act of the body and the senses as an intellectual act
– often much more so. Dance is obviously physical exercise but so is getting out of the flat to
participate in a painting workshop.
East London Dance worked with one group of parents/carers and toddlers only for a short
period of time but the material that was taught was designed specifically with health and
wellbeing in mind. The dancers concentrated on helping them to understand the role of
gravity, development of cooperation, and the use of props in dance, which develops spatial
awareness and stimulates sensory awareness. The babies that were often a part of the taster
sessions were also engaged – they positively responded to the atmosphere in the studio by
smiling, laughing and moving to the music.
Residents also learned a fair bit about healthy eating. Asked what she had learned about this,
one young participant immediately offered: ‘Not good to have too many sweets. Take time to
digest your food.’ One ‘youth champion’ on the programme was astonished to find that the
young people he had been working with had developed a genuine liking for fresh fruit: ‘I’ve
never seen young people so excited by eating fruit. They’d literally argue over who got
different bits of banana, apple, tropical juice.’
More fruit than cake

South Bellingham LSOA, London Borough of Lewisham May-December 2010
£5,650 Bellingham Moves: a dance programme for children
Who received the funding? and adults to promote the positive use of public spaces
Trinity Laban and to boost participants’ health and emotional
wellbeing
At 10 weeks, this dance-based project was relatively short so it was vital to get people
involved – and moving – as quickly as possible. This proved challenging. The initial response
was extremely slow with just three or four people turning up to the first few classes.
Somewhat demoralised, the artists tried hard to boost numbers by running taster workshops
targeted at residents on the Meadows Estate. They also ran workshops in the local primary
schools, which worked very well, and plugged into the local health forum and other local
neighbourhood committees to seek advice and help with promotion. In the end, however,
most participants came from the surrounding streets outside the estate, many through the
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schools taster workshops. Another recruitment initiative that proved more immediately
successful was the idea of bookending the project with two community dance parties.
Let them eat… fruit

Joanna Gamper and her team of dance artists had written into their project plan that they
would throw a party to launch the classes that would be fun but healthy. Just offering cake
would not be a great way to start promoting healthy living, so they came up with the idea of
providing ‘healthy’ cakes with big, colourful, hopefully enticing fruit platters to accompany
them. Healthy cakes were duly commissioned from a specialist baker. When the day of the
opening party came, the team was convinced that the cake would be devoured and the fruit
would end up as decoration. But quite the reverse happened.
Joanna had the impression that a lot of the younger people had never seen many of the fruits
on offer before and they had certainly not tasted them: ‘They didn’t know how to peel an
orange, so we showed them how.’ Following this success, Amy, one of the dance artists,
suggested that Laban should theme the classes, which were held at the end of the week, as
Fruity Fridays. Each class would have a break and free fruit would be shared among the
group.
The launch party attracted around 40 participants and helped to raise awareness of the
project with local residents.
Joining the dance

The dance programme itself began with directed sessions but gradually wove in more
opportunity for creative input as participants gained in confidence. Interacting with a large
parachute, using hula-hoops and playing a huge variety of games helped to build confidence
and trust. Laban built their approach for young people on an already established model, their
Nu Groovz dance programme, designed for those reluctant to engage in physical activity and
with a tendency towards obesity. The model featured two classes running in parallel – one for
adults and one for children – allowing parents to participate in a dance activity without
requiring childcare.
Whether it was because or in spite of the increasing numbers of people from outside turning
up to class, there was a late surge of interest from estate dwellers. The 10 weeks had
apparently been enough to build awareness and, by the end of the project, participation had
tripled. That was reflected in the high turnout at the joyful closing party at Christmas, when
80 people attended, mostly from the estate.
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The results of taking part in the dance programme were encouraging for artists and
participants alike. Both the youth and the adult group had grown in confidence and fitness
levels and had ventured beyond aerobics for fitness into doing much more creative dance –
proof for Joanna of being truly creative and well: ‘Creativity is the key – when you’ve cracked
this, you know you are working at a deeper level and have a chance of sustaining it.’ The
interaction in classes between young people from the surrounding neighbourhood and those
on the estate was encouraging in building positive relationships and understanding. Children
who had been scared or wary of each other were now dancing together as friends.
There were setbacks – notably, the failed attempt to set up a boys-only class for some of the
very disruptive boys on the estate, who were creating a nuisance in the young people’s
classes. It had worked for a while but, without additional funding to support and help to
control them and give them individual attention, it was difficult to sustain. Overall, however,
the news is good for the legacy of this intervention.
Dance is still happening on the Meadows Estate. The classes for adults and children over
summer 2011 were set to culminate at the Bellingham Festival, when everyone would have
the chance to perform. Laban is now seeking alternative funding in order to sustain these
classes – the company is firmly committed to continuing its work here.
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3.5 Leadership/Give
Making a difference locally
Giving means joining in or contributing to your community – seeing how you might make a
difference. Based on its review of research, the new economics foundation states: ‘Feelings of
happiness and life satisfaction have been strongly associated with active participation in social
and community life. For older people, volunteering is associated with more positive affect and
more meaning in life, while offering support to others has been shown to be associated with
reduced mortality rates.’ (Five Ways to Wellbeing: The Evidence, new economics foundation,
2008, p.10)
We apply this idea here to the role residents might play in their communities but often fail to
through lack of confidence, self-esteem and initiative. We examined how artists can build a
sense of purpose and agency through the creative process and help to create partnerships and
mechanisms for residents to play a greater part in the planning and running of their
communities.
The machinery of power is not always as visible as it is on the Waltham Forest estate, where
huge signs forbidding ball games, dog walking and so on dot every stretch of grass. It is all
rather reminiscent of another observation from George Orwell over 70 years ago:
‘Take, for instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house.
You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them – in some estates
there is even a regulation that every garden must have the same kind of hedge.

’
The Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell, 1937)
These LSOAs are communities where power – visible or invisible – largely lies in other people’s
hands. There are tenants and resident associations and similar bodies, but they are not always
representative of the communities they serve and, in any case, have limited authority and
power.
One of the aspirations driving Well London was to encourage and equip local people to
develop leadership skills and to take up new roles and responsibilities in their communities. In
the case of Be Creative Be Well, there were two ways in which it was hoped artists might
contribute to this: by passing on artistic and facilitation skills to individuals so that they might
carry on some of the activities initiated by the programme; and – more indirectly – by raising
individuals’ sense of worth and independent agency to the point that they might play a more
active role in local organisation and community affairs or go on to further study and
employment – all actions that have clear implications for personal wellbeing.
There were good examples of these outcomes during Be Creative Be Well. There were also
many examples of volunteering: local people contributing resources, skills, knowledge or
simply a pair of hands to the creative work. The creation, for example, of the clay oven in
Waltham Forest was a collective giving of labour and skill towards a shared resource. In
Canning Town, younger people learning new dance skills helped to lead classes for the adults
and elderly people, some as old as 90. Similarly, on the Cossall Estate, younger people
empowered by their new skills were able to help pass on their visual arts skills to other groups
just starting out.
The two accounts that follow show first how individual leadership can emerge not from the
desire to wield power but, somewhat unfashionably, from a wish to serve others and,
secondly, how a community can find ways to provide its own resources.
A new secretary for the tenants

and residents association
Where did the project take place? What was planned?
Nunhead LSOA, London Borough of Southwark A project with four elements delivered through
How much money was allocated? resident participation, including a filmed documentary
£29,015 with soundtrack, workshops towards an exhibition and
Who received the funding? 10 linked pieces of artwork across the estate
Arts Express
April-December 2010
This sprawling estate seems to have little sense of community, perhaps because it has no
obvious centre. As on numerous similar estates today, many residents are fearful of interacting
with people beyond their immediate territory. Although there has been some recent
investment, it hasn’t dispelled a pervasive fear among many older residents about the
youngsters who hang out here. The Be Creative Be Well programme run here by Arts Express
set out to address the generational divide.
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The organisation soon discovered that this general malaise extended to the tenants and
residents association, which seemed to have given up trying to represent the huge cultural
mix of people now living here. The perception of the association among many residents, fairly
or unfairly, was that it had not only lost touch with local demographics but was also failing to
provide leadership for the troubled community. It was significant in this respect that the Be
Creative Be Well team decided to base itself not at the association hall, but in the empty shop
next door.
Arts Express designed its programme around the principle that people who are connected
with their community, who have a strong sense of being part of a wider entity and who
contribute to their environment, experience mental wellbeing. It drew in 140 people of all
ages, from toddlers to 80-year-olds, to work collaboratively on a range of arts, including
printmaking, stencil cutting, Photoshop, screen printing, ceramics and filmmaking. It
encouraged older people with professional-level expertise to support younger, less
experienced participants. At the end of the project, all this work was exhibited in the same
space – an impressive mixture of high-calibre photography and painting produced by the
wider community. However, perhaps the greatest achievement of the project was to help
revive and rejuvenate the tenants and residents association through the influence of a local
artist and mother, Sam Hills.
Back in 2006, Sam volunteered for Arts Express and was very soon offered paid work, which
she resumed after taking time out to have a child. As Arts Express wanted to engage local
artists to work on the Be Creative Be Well programme, Sam was well placed to take up a
position as she lives on the estate and already had a good track record with the organisation.
She was invited to be one of the arts workshop leaders. The experience has had a great
impact on her:
‘It’s been a huge confidence boost, being asked to take responsibility, meeting other like-
minded people and realising that there’s no point in playing it too safe – you need to take
’
risks.
Sam learned her jewellery-making skills back at art college 20 years ago and had, until
recently, her own studio. However, this project has made her rethink. In particular, it has been
her visits to local schools on behalf of Be Creative Be Well that have had the greatest impact
on her:
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‘I found out so many positive things about the schools here. Like other parents on the
estate, I was convinced that they were failing and were altogether bad news for our kids’
education. When I actually went in there, I began to see how dedicated the staff are and
how they are trying to help struggling parents.
’
Setting an example
Sam now feels very strongly that parents should do more to engage with these schools and
not just send their children off to ‘better’ schools. She has set an example by sending her own
son to a school she previously would not have contemplated and she has continued to work
with the school to help improve its chances. She is also now considering whether she herself
might make a good teacher and, as a first step, is studying for a Children and Young People’s
Diploma. Her jewellery-making has also taken something of a backseat – having been offered
free space at her son’s school in exchange for half a day of volunteering, she is now working
with the deputy head to create a sensory garden, full of fruit and vegetables and plants to
enhance the environment. This takes up much of the time she would have been spending on
her craftwork:
‘I want to be part of creating something special for these children. I am passionate about
working with early years children and their families, helping the ones that are really
struggling. What I’ve learned is that creativity is so much more than sitting in a studio
making jewellery when you could be working with the community.
’
Sam is not the only participant to have found a new sense of direction and purpose. Among
several others, her own husband, Steve, has begun photography again after a long fallow
period. A stroke at the age of 18 had left Steve with disabilities and an acute lack of
confidence. Although he graduated in 2004 from Camberwell School of Art, he couldn’t find
work. As a talented photographer based on the estate, he was invited to lead the
photography workshops for Arts Express and proved himself to be an excellent teacher and
communicator. He mounted a very high-quality photographic exhibition as part of the final
celebratory event and has gone on to have another show. With a new sense of confidence in
what he can achieve, he is hoping to pursue other photography projects and, like Sam, he is
keen to support his community on the Cossall Estate.
Meanwhile, Sam is now Secretary of the tenants and residents association where her
remarkable artistic and social abilities are being put to good use. Clearly, being part of the Be
Creative Be Well project was a huge catalyst for her. Communities like the one she is serving
Case study
need someone with a clear vision for what can be achieved and a bold approach to achieving
this vision: leadership, in other words. Residents are beginning to sense a change:
‘I don’t feel that hostility anymore. I feel safer now with younger people: this is what the
association should have been doing
’
Case study
Somewhere for kids to go

Larkhall LSOA, London Borough of Lambeth The Big Tea: enabling local people to design and
How much money was allocated? deliver a large scale community project and building
£34,500 relationships through consultation and inclusive
Who received the funding? engagement, including workshops in mosaics, crafts,
Trust Arts Project dance, photography and graphic design, baking and
When did the project run? food art
November 2009-December 2010
The Larkhall Estate was built between 1926 and 1931. It has the feel and look of a traditional
tenement block, with a large rectangular courtyard at its centre. A narrow slip road provides
the only exit and entrance to this enclosed and safe-seeming space. There are rows of
balconies with their flags of drying laundry and flower-filled window-boxes, which, if you look
closer, bear brightly coloured mosaics. These are, in fact, one visible outcome of the Be
Creative Be Well programme: a permanent marker that art has been here and made a modest
change to the way things were.
Up to the age of 11 or so, children gravitate to the centre of the estate to play. They look
after each other and some of the older residents, too, as Belinda Sosinowicz, the project
Case study
manager here, has noticed: ‘They all know the oldest member of this community. She’s 92
and they make sure she can walk properly and doesn’t fall over.’
Beyond 11 – and beyond this courtyard – the streets beckon. There is no real place for
independence-seeking adolescents to hang out, unless you count an adventure playground
open only during the day. Inevitably, issues around territory emerge along with the protective/
aggressive appeal of joining a gang. That can lead to incidents like a fatal stabbing in the local
park a couple of years ago.
Young people of this age need a place to go, a place of their own – and that also goes for
everyone on the estate. When people wanted to get together in the past, to run an event,
have a party or organise activities, they would use the local health centre. Owned by the
community, the old building had parquet flooring and galleried ceilings and could be hired at
reasonable rates. That has all gone. The new centre, built on the site of the old, is certainly
attractive, with a large glass frontage suggesting accessibility, but room hire here is now 10
times as high as before, putting it out of reach of most local residents.
The lack of a community space was also a major problem for Belinda and her team of artists.
It forced them to go to places where things were already going on. They would link up with
the children’s centre, for example, where they recruited participants from among the mothers
doing activities there. Or they would go to the local residential home in order to work with
older people. Belinda explains what these partnerships did not provide:
‘These were people who were already being offered activities. Part of my remit was to
reach those who were isolated and try to get them out of their houses and doing
something.
’
Finding the right place
The solution came with the discovery and revival of a ‘youth flat’ in the midst of the estate
blocks. This small suite of ground-floor rooms had lost council funding some time before but
was now quickly refurbished as a new venue for the community. A resident who used to go
there as a youth is now running it; she is, according to Belinda, a natural leader. She hopes to
add another evening to the regular weekly events, which are attended by up to 20 young
people aged 11 to 18 who might otherwise be wandering the street.
This unexpected development solved the recruitment problem, as Belinda explains:
Case study
‘The youth flat was perfect for us. Because it’s here, it’s open to about 500 residents and all
we have to do is put a big poster on the wall outside to draw people in.
’
During the holidays, a timetable of regular activities was posted up. The project ran weekly
workshops for about 5 months engaging children as young as 3 up to 16. These varied from
textiles, jewellery-making, baking to film and photography. It also ran a strength-building
exercise and piloted a youth Mental Wellbeing Impact Assessment here – in collaboration with
mental health service provider, the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM).
Additional funding was awarded to run Summer University workshops as part of Lambeth’s
holiday education programme. This resulted in more environmental improvements and
enabled young people to build stronger connections with each other. For Belinda, the only
downside – apart from the uncertainty of any such venture prospering in a worsening
financial climate – is that the discovery came too late in the project to realise its full potential
as a centre for sustained, confidence- and skill-building work among young people here:
‘We became an NQA awards site and it would have been great to run a programme where
they could really develop their skills and gain AQA certificates – which, for some of them,
would have made up for not getting qualifications at school. They would have had
portfolios of work: from people with severe autism making shoelaces to others perhaps
creating and maintaining a website and even building their own computer. That would
have been an amazing achievement.
’
However, although the project has now finished, Belinda – who worked in the area prior to Be
Creative Be Well – remains hopeful that her dream of working on a youth offending project
here in the flat will be realised at some point in the future.
In the meantime, local people are trying to keep the venue alive and open. Hiring it out for
functions brings in some modest income and a couple of youth workers have volunteered to
continue activities and develop the space. Friday nights have now become a regular venue for
a youth club, led by a local youth worker. There is fighting talk, too, of putting in for more
funding. Whatever its future, the point has been made and the venue’s potential is clear.
‘It was one of these serendipitous things. Finding and relaunching the youth flat meant that
children and young people had somewhere to go again.

’ Belinda Sosinowicz
Case study
3.6 Community cohesion

Realising the potential
It brings everything together

Limehouse LSOA, London Borough of Tower Hamlets Zoetrope Project: a moveable sculpture created by the
How much money was allocated? communities it passes through, providing a focus for
£34,000 performance and neighbourhood cohesion and
Who received the funding? encouraging onlookers and participants to look to
Splash Arts wider horizons
November 2009-September 2010
‘ Arts Council England brought together artists and youth workers for a meeting about Be
Creative Be Well and we all had to promote or put forward ideas for an arts project. The
one that seemed to bring everybody together was the idea of a sculpture. Gateway Youth,
one of the other organisations, said, “Why don’t we have a moveable sculpture that goes
from place to place throughout the LSOA?” Then somebody came up with the idea of a
zoetrope. It’s perfect. It brings everything together. It’s art, science, drama; it’s theatre and
media. So, it was a very good kind of focalising device. Because the other thing is: how do
you work with five different arts organisations?

’ David Bratby
David Bratby runs Splash Arts and coordinated the Be Creative Be Well programme in Poplar.
As he explains it, the zoetrope was the spinning centre of all the artistic activity that took place
here. It was also a device that linked people and places across the whole area, culminating in a
procession to a festival in Bartlett Park where the project came to its formal close.
The zoetrope was a 19th-century precursor of cinema, an instrument consisting of a cylinder

with a series of pictures on the inner surface that, when viewed through slits with the cylinder
rotating, gives an impression of continuous motion. They can be made in all sizes. David and his
colleagues commissioned Bill Wright, a sculptor and fabricator based in Ireland, to create one big
enough – three metres across – for several people to stand under its fabric roof. It came as a kit:
a set of aluminium rods and panels that could, with some effort, be connected together to form
what looked like a skeleton gazebo, ready for painted canvas panels to be inserted at intervals
Case study
Photo: courtesy of Splash Arts
between the 12 slots. Static, it could act as a studio or a theatre or gallery. Spinning, it would
bring 12 still photographs of a local young dancer to life. It was, in effect, a portable arts centre.
Each of the five organisations involved in the project (Stitches in Time, the Space Theatre,
Belle Dancers, Gateway Media and Splash Arts) used the zoetrope as a medium and an
inspiration for their own arts practice. Space, a company that runs drama workshops, did
theatre sessions around the estate, inspired by the Victorian era that produced such optical
wonders. They explored the zoetrope’s connections with silent film, vaudevillian performance
and animation and, by focusing on physical performance techniques, reinforced the Well
London aim of being more active. Children learned about the characters and stock gestures of
melodrama, devised plot lines themselves, found costumes and performed at the festival.
Stitches in Time ran costume-making workshops, where residents produced two different types
of costumes to tie in with the silent film theme, with hats and special armbands, some
featuring sewn cityscape skylines. These were for wearing on the street procession to Bartlett
Park. Bodices and pointed hats were designed and made for the dance groups that had also
come together at Hind Grove, the community centre at the heart of the LSOA. During Saturday
dance classes parents would make or decorate the costumes with stitching, while their children
practised their routines for the two dances that they would be performing on the festival day.
Case study
A work in progress
‘We could take this travelling or portable sculpture from place to place, creating a new
panel in each place, be it a housing estate, youth club, community centre or art club.
Linked to the sculpture we incorporated dance, drama, art, dressmaking and a video
documentary. As we went we created art clubs and enhanced other existing ones.

’
David Bratby
Dropping into the project midflow was a slightly bewildering experience though it soon
became clear that everything going on here would cohere around the zoetrope.
First, there was a group of older women, all members of the Art Knit and Chat club. They
were engaged, under David’s guidance, in creating Victorian cameos in preparation for
designing their own panels for the zoetrope. They began by hanging up a large white sheet
of paper and getting another participant to sit behind it with a light shining behind them.
They then drew the shadow projected at the front of the paper. It was a quirky process and
fun, allowing plenty of time for the weekly gossip.
Outside, David has – with a little help – succeeded in erecting the zoetrope, an art class
formed itself out of passing children and their parents. The estate here is dotted with odd but
potentially usable corners and even concrete platforms. The one outside the centre has paths
leading to it from several directions and it became an impromptu meeting point once the
zoetrope frame was up and two canvas panels laid on trestle tables ready for painting.
The overall design of these panels was based on the paintings of Ferdinand Legér, not copying
his work but using it as an influence. The growing group of children, some of whom had
begun the paintings in a previous session, were now tasked with adding colours to create
depth and perspective. Another artist is adding her own touches ‘just to bring out the
composition’:
‘I believe that there should be a very strong structure behind anything we are doing
creatively. Arts work is not some kind of wishy-washy thing but very formative. They might
not know the structure at the time but they will see it at the end. Actually, I’m very
impressed with their achievement. They are telling me which panel looks complete and
which panel may need to be retouched. Next week we’ll go through all the panels and to
see which part they thinks needs more work.
’
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This process began at a local school with two participants who were so interested they stayed
for four hours:
‘They just really loved it. I could not accommodate everybody who turned up for the last
two sessions. Today we will work here for a couple of hours. It’s different from an
afterschool club, where there is a set room you have to book and go to. Here they’re at
home in their neighbourhood, among the places and people they know.
’
Various parents linger and lean over to give their children advice or encouragement, some
unable to resist joining in, picking up a brush and painting. It is a vivid example of how adults
can be drawn in to arts activity through their children: a picture of cross-generational creativity
at a physical crossroads on the estate.
The turning world

Around 400 people attended the Bartlett Park festival, bringing the Be Creative Be Well
project out into the open. They included locals, residents from an elderly people’s home,
children’s groups from around the borough and even one from Stratford. At the centre of the
celebration was the colourful revolving zoetrope. As it span, it projected the convincing
illusion of a child dancing inside. Among the surrounding crescent of marquees and gazebos
was a small theatre and an art tent, places where people could take part in a landscape
painting competition or make their own paper zoetropes.
Will Bock, the designer of the zoetrope at the centre of the project, sums up what the whole
enterprise achieved:
‘I think the real success of this project lay in its ability to draw on diverse local resources
such as youth clubs, dance groups, elderly artists and so on – and bring them all together
for a final event, celebrating the work they’ve been creating together. Seeing the zoetrope
spin during the final event, with children all running trying to make it spin faster, was a
huge joy for me.
‘I think projects such as this are essential in bringing the local community together with a
common creative goal. It is important that communities such as the ones in Poplar have
access to high-quality creative and social projects such as this, as it allows them a chance to
play and, however briefly, to get a different perspective on their everyday life.
’
Case study
◥ 84 Plonked in the middle of an estate Learning from practice
4
Plonked in the middle
of an estate
Learning from practice
What does the experience of Be Creative Be Well mean
for future arts interventions?
The most successful projects were those where the artist brought both artistic and emotional
intelligence to the task, combining the catalytic charge of their artistic energy with a sensitive
and creative approach to engaging people on their own terms. In theory, this combination of
energy and engagement should work every time but in practice local conditions shape,
support and thwart what actually happens on the ground.
How artists dealt effectively and creatively with the considerable challenges of such a wide-
ranging and ambitious programme has been illustrated in the previous chapters. However,
things did not always go so smoothly, even in the case study projects, and a lot may be
learned by artists and, perhaps even more importantly, by those who commission them and
who set the terms and conditions of their work.
The comments quoted in this section were made by artists involved in the programme and are
used here as well articulated examples of general observations made to us, rather than as
purely personal views. For this reason and to maintain confidentiality, these comments are not
attributed to named individuals.
There is, in the end, no formula for success but that is no reason not to take whatever
measures we can to guard against failure. The question we ask here is: What do the
experiences, challenges and achievements of the Be Creative Be Well programme tell us about
making an arts intervention in this kind of community as successful and sustainable as
possible?
4.1 Preparing the ground
‘I do think there is something to be said for just having cups of tea with people and giving it
time. To plonk an artist in the middle of an estate and expect things to happen
straightaway is unrealistic. If funding is there for three years, wouldn’t it be a better plan to
spend the first year just getting to know local people, gaining their trust and
understanding? Then you would really know what kind of activities they would like to see
and support.
’
Some artists found the initial weeks and months very challenging – particularly if unrealistic
expectations had been raised in the way that the Well London programme had been
introduced to communities. Large sums of money were sometimes mentioned, creating the
mistaken impression that projects would have big budgets. In fact, the largest individual project
budget in Be Creative Be Well was £37,000, although some organisations received additional
funding if they delivered more than one project over three years.
One of the challenges faced by artists working on this programme was how to manage
expectations. When residents were invited to express concerns they had about their
neighbourhoods and what kind of improvements they hoped for in their lives, a wide range
of issues emerged – from inadequate housing to poor street lighting, and from anti-social
behaviour among young people to dog fouling. However committed, creative and
sympathetic artists might be, there were problems here that they could not realistically
be expected to solve – although that did not stop them sometimes trying. One ran an
imaginative and very popular project that addressed the problem of dangerous dogs,
for example.
Once they actually started work, artists – especially those appointed for limited periods –
encountered difficulties around engaging sufficient numbers of local people. One reported
that, instead of focusing on teaching, her team had been ‘pulled in all directions, attending
local meetings and social gatherings to try to increase numbers’. Having spent considerable
time ‘beating doors down to try to engage people when the project had already started’,
numbers picked up ‘just as it was time to wind down’. In other cases, artists found they had
to change tack when their original programme proved unpopular or inappropriate.
Some participants had such profound and challenging problems that their ability to take part
in the more demanding activities was often very limited. The gentle discussion and cups of tea
needed to involve them could have a significant impact on the timetable, slowing
development down ‘to almost a trickle at times’, as one artist put it, describing how his team
had to abandon plans to make large sculptures and concentrate on more domestic arts and
crafts activity – something that was, it should be noted, warmly welcomed by the participants.
There is a great pressure on such artists to deliver activities, partly because money and time
are always tight and those hosting and funding such projects often want to see quick results.
That can lead, as it did on occasion during this programme, to requiring the artist applying to
do the work to present detailed ideas of what kind of programme they plan to deliver before
they have developed a working relationship with local people. There is always a reluctance to
send artists in with an open brief, yet in a programme like this, aimed at engaging people
who have little or no previous involvement in arts-based workshops, it is important to give
artists time to develop a relationship of trust with the people with whom they hope to work.
Allowing more time would let artists maximise take-up of the opportunities they are offering
but would also help to shape what form those opportunities might take in the first place.
Forming relationships with local people also depended, initially at least, on how well the
preparatory work had been carried out. The research had been fairly thorough but it was in
no way a passport to understanding local conditions and politics. Sometimes this research had
been effective in identifying key people to link up with and so on; in other cases, expectations
had been raised that Be Creative Be Well could not fulfil, potentially souring relations. There
was also a suspicion among some residents that this was another short-term intervention,
which made building trust – the foundation of a good relationship – problematic.
4.2 Defining the community
‘Making a boundary of 1,500-2,000 targeted homes does not define a community. Many of
the participants lived just outside the boundary and it seems a shame to be so restrictive.
Communities are organic and define themselves; programmes such as this should reflect
this. At times, the Well London programme seemed to take for granted that ‘community’ is
’
always a well-defined thing. That’s not our experience at all.
Clearly, the LSOA, with its population defined in this case by a postcode analysis of poverty,
might be a useful locus for expressing change and progress in terms of statistics. However, as
these LSOAs are linked only by shared socioeconomic disadvantage, they presented the Be
Creative Be Well managers and artists with a set of significant practical problems. Postcodes
do not coincide with or represent organic or coherent communities; although several
participating LSOAs were contiguous with estates, others were on split sites, with, for
example, a large main road dividing one part of the population from another. Physically,
socially and culturally, many LSOAs were, therefore, heterogeneous.
It was not clear how to ensure that activities were promoted and delivered to the right
people, ie from the target postcode(s), and not to all local people – perhaps even including
those who lived on the same estate as legitimate participants. In reality, many projects ended
up topping up with people across the boundary in order to make up numbers, with the tacit
acceptance of funders. If they had not, the programme might simply not have been viable.
Artists did take a pragmatic approach to this in order to get activities going and simply
recorded postcodes whenever they could, reporting back to the Arts Council numbers of
participants from both within and outside the LSOA.
In most cases, artists found a way to engage with local people through a combination of
running open activities while targeting particular groups. Sometimes targeting was on the
basis of reaching those who seemed most in need, such as older people isolated at home; at
other times, it was more strategic, when – for example – artists worked initially with children
or young people partly as a way into reaching out to a reluctant adult community.
As many artists and residents told us, it would have been easier simply to set up projects
based within the architectural entity of an estate. There would have been no diminution of
the problem of trying to reach a community that often had little but poverty in common, but
at least the people would share the same physical space. Where the LSOA did coincide
entirely with an estate or part of one, it made the job considerably easier. There was more
likelihood of a venue on site, of a residents’ committee with an interest in what might be on
offer, of shared needs among local people. At best, as in the South Acton LSOA in Ealing,
there might already be an active community development resource that could provide a
structure and support for a creative project coming out of the blue like this.
4.3 The well-balanced artist
‘I had no idea that it would be so difficult to recruit onto a course like this. I was expecting
there to be a waiting list of people wanting to participate and that it would be really busy. I
am experienced in project management and I have a ready-made system in place, but I’m
realising that working within the community presents a whole set of different issues from
working in a school, which is my usual setting. It has been quite a steep learning curve.
’
Where an artist lacked sufficient experience or knowledge of community development, this
would most likely result in a low uptake amongst residents alongside some often very high-
quality artistic product from individuals self-motivated enough to engage with the
programme. Very occasionally, there were instances when artists failed to turn up at agreed
times or wore inappropriate clothing and local people considered this a mark of disrespect. In
contrast, where a project was led by someone whose primary skill lay in working with the
community through the creative process, rather than focused on high quality artistic practice,
the outcome would be a well-subscribed programme of arts activities but no ‘high point’ of
artistic interest or inspiration.
We discovered a fascinating characteristic of projects where the artist already had or was able
to develop a good balance between the two essential skillsets, which is highlighted in many
of the case studies we have included in this report. Each of these projects brought the
relationship that the artist(s) had created with local people into an artistic product, whether
that was a performance, as in Canning Town’s folk dance fusion or South Acton’s community
play, or a more permanent work, as in Waltham Forest’s clay oven or Edmonton’s trail of
angels. That product, admirable in itself, might also stand as a metaphor for the programme,
embodying both the physical realities of making art collectively and the human relationships
that make this possible. It is perhaps analogous to the personal epiphany experienced by
individuals discovering themselves in an act of creativity.
Incidentally, what this also shows is how a product can be an intrinsic part of the artistic
process, bringing a sense of completion and resolution that often leaves a lasting impact on
participants. The debate that some participating artists have had on this issue will no doubt
continue but, although it is a fact that setting a date for performance or booking a hall for an
exhibition can put an external pressure on what is seen by many as an organic process, this
can be balanced by pride in showing one’s work to the public in as professional a manner as
possible.
4.4 Demystifying the artistic process
‘What I think is off-putting to everyone is actually talking about ‘the arts’. A lot of people
struggle to have any interest. These are people who are in the most deprived communities
in London, so their whole interest in life is about getting work, money, safety and security,
looking after their children, those sorts of things. Worrying about their own health and art
and all those things is so far down the scale of things.
’
The starting point for successful projects was rarely a declaration about ‘we are going to make
art’. In most cases, artists began by exploring participants’ thoughts and feelings about their
own community and environment. That way, there was no intimidating ‘blank canvas’ to fill
and no sense that special aptitude was needed to participate.
In one project, in the North Barns LSOA in North Kensington, participants had been given
cameras and encouraged just to wander the estate and collect footage and photographs of
what they saw. Several found themselves able to focus on their environment in a way they
hadn’t before – one, who had never been interested in art or done any filmmaking,
discovered she had a flair for producing striking images. She went on to prepare an
installation for exhibition. Instead of being fazed by the technology or held back by her lack
of knowledge, the subject matter and the facilitation of the lead artist, Lisa Nash, had led her
into making art, almost without realising it.
There is a subtle but crucial difference between this journey – of needing to explore
something, adopting a suitable artistic medium and learning technique on the way – and
taking a technical arts course.
‘I had one woman come in, knowing I was a photographer, who said she wanted to learn
how to do photography for makeovers. I was completely honest and said that wasn’t my
thing. I’m not a technician. I just happen to use video cameras and still cameras to make
work.
’
There was no hard and fast approach to this issue. The woman went out without putting her
camera on auto, as she normally would, and began playing with shutter speed and apertures.
She ended up producing some striking images.
Sometimes, the activities were advertised and marketed not as art or as explorations of
subject matter but as practical opportunities to learn useful personal and social skills. For
example, one theatre artist, recognising that a lot of young people want to know what they
are going to get out of an activity, marketed his workshops as, in effect, employment training.
‘They want to know the bottom line. When you say it will be fun – well, “fun” is subjective
and they may well think, “that ain’t fun.” My strategy is not to say “come to drama” but
more on the lines of: “If you want to get ahead in life, you need to be able to
communicate – so come along and develop skills in self-confidence, speaking in public and
working as a team”. These are all things we know you can get out of drama and theatre
but my approach is to hide the drama at the bottom and sell the work-ready skills.
’
4.5 Working with local structures
‘To be honest, the tenants association is a club for members only. There’s about six or seven
of them that sit on it. They don’t seem to do anything very much, apart from meet and
take control. They seem more concerned with their particular tower block estate – it’s very
territorial. They did help us with our barbeque but no one from their patch came to it.
’
As illustrated here, there were cases where the local organisations, such as the tenants and
residents association, that might be expected to support artists with projects like this, proved
to be their biggest hindrance. Where they did help, they had a great effect, brokering free use
of space, advising on the shape of the programme and maximising the benefit of ‘the familiar
face on the estate’ in marketing and helping to spread the word about Be Creative Be Well.
At times, the programme suffered from a naivety about community politics. There were
examples of artists trying to set up activities without support either from the local residents
association or the Well London team. In some cases, the local individuals or groups identified
as project partners by Well London were not best placed to help artists engage with local
people or to support their activities; artists had to seek out more appropriate collaborators.
There was also a common problem in getting the active support of the local authority or other
major agencies, including mental health area teams, given the modest scale and population of
the LSOA. Many potential partners have a much wider territorial brief than a single LSOA and
wider responsibilities to fulfil.
‘What part does the council play in the estate? Well, there is a key figure who could have
been really amazing, the residents liaison officer. He’s very much on board with what we’re
doing, which is great, but I think he’s really stretched. But he has said that we can use his
name to get things done.
’
Forming mutually respectful and productive relationships with local managers and
representatives is vital to generating support and structure for activities and to achieving
successful outcomes. There were some very good examples of projects working with local
organisers who held positions of trust within the community – these individuals were key in
unlocking relationships.
4.6 Collaborative programming
‘The YMCA has supported our dance programme – we created a couple of dance drama
productions, which have been funded through that strand of money. I have heard of other
strands, like Groundwork, but I haven’t got round to it. I’m no good at gardening or
decorating, or any of that stuff. I’m on the theatre squad.
’
It seems clear now that more should have been done to create good conditions for
collaboration and joint working. Each agency has its own agenda and often its own language
in which it expresses its vision and practice. As in any projected partnership, the challenges of
bringing such different discourses and approaches together should not be underestimated.
The slightly belated entry of Arts Council England into the Well London Alliance may not have
helped here, but the main lesson for those commissioning must be that a joint approach to
research and consultation is essential prior to beginning the actual programme of activities.
This would help the agencies themselves, identifying at this preparatory stage those areas,
interests and approaches they share, as well as the communities, which would then be more
likely to understand what each agency would be bringing and sharing on the journey. Ideally,
this initial stage would be followed with commissioners monitoring progress and encouraging
each partner to continue their joint working on the ground, while ensuring there would be
sufficient resources to support initiatives outside each agency’s core delivery of activity.
On the other side of the coin, artists and arts organisations may be experienced at
collaboration within the arts sector and may be good at delivering creative programmes
commissioned by agencies in other sectors, such as hospitals and prisons. However, working
with such agencies as equal and active partners is perhaps not as familiar.
Artists also stand to learn from collaborating with agencies equally committed to community-
based work, not least by working alongside staff with a high level of community development
expertise – and sometimes a sharper awareness of how their work might contribute to Well
London’s overall aims. Not every artist working in Be Creative Be Well seemed fully aware of
the value of the scientific evidence underpinning Well London – and was thus less likely to
make a credible connection, in terms of influence and advocacy, between their intervention
and what it might produce in terms of better health.
4.7 Finding the right setting
‘This space is the community rooms and they’ve been done up. The idea was to open the
shutters, because most of the time they are down and it becomes an invisible space. The
idea is to make it a more welcoming place that residents feel they own. At the moment it’s
only used for evening classes in Arabic and ward meetings and that’s it – and now my art
workshops.
’
In this LSOA, several people from the local estate could not identify where these ‘community
rooms’ were. They were clearly underused and oddly located spaces and it was here that the
artist was expected to run activities. Although she discovered early on that the local nursery
could provide a ready-made audience of mothers – and a crèche, which the LSOA lacked –
the artist was told she could not relocate outside the patch. It may have been the intention to
use the Be Creative Be Well project as a way of popularising a venue that did clearly have
potential, but the short-term outcome was to make the process of engaging with local people
that much harder.
This may not have been a common experience but it does point up the vexed question of
where activities like this are best located. Although many housing estates do have venues,
there was not always an obvious place in which artists could base themselves or run their
activities – and, even when there was, it was not necessarily a place towards which local
people would naturally gravitate. Spaces are culturally coded – some people use them while
others avoid them or don’t know they exist – and they only exist where there is an actual or
presumed need, matched by the resources to support them. There is also often a real issue
around the high cost of hiring community spaces.
In some cases – as in the Hoe Street LSOA in Waltham Forest – there was not even a space to
be had, with all the implications for communal wellbeing of not having a decent place to
meet up with neighbours and to participate in activities together. In a number of cases,
recommended venues had to be abandoned for practical reasons. In the Bellingham LSOA, for
example, locals said people would not cross the road to use it. In another case, the venue was
accessible but the staff were unfriendly and did little to help people feel at home. Sometimes,
administrative crossed wires meant that venues were not always secure – in one case, a shop
being used on the estate to run the Be Creative Be Well activities was threatened with closure
by the local authority on the eve of a final exhibition of local people’s work.
Again, the question of finding an appropriate venue that local people would actually attend is
a question best addressed during the research period leading up to a programme like this,
and not left until artists are in the middle of trying to run activities.
4.8 Building levels of engagement
‘Posters and flyers don’t work, but what else can I do? I put one flyer in the newsletter at
the school and the local nursery as well, but people don’t read the newsletters. If a poster
is up for more than a day, it gets ignored – people walk past it. I think word of mouth is
the best way.
’
An early test of the ability of Be Creative Be Well managers and artists to form relationships
with local people lay in how they chose to approach recruitment. By many accounts, this was
one of the biggest challenges projects faced – and an embarrassment at times as, rightly or
not, success in such projects is often judged on numbers.
Most artists we spoke to had an opinion on what worked in terms of engaging and recruiting
local people. All seemed aware of the risks of parachuting in and the fact that places like this
had often seen well-meant interventions come and go. They realised, too, that however many
might turn up to a launch event, persuading them to continue to attend classes or workshops
– and to maintain their attendance – was a different matter – and a longer process. Anyone
might need a good reason to step outside of their comfort zone, particularly on a cold night
with something watchable on the television.
The main conclusion was that a direct face-to-face encounter was by far the most effective
means of drawing people into the programme, but even then this could be a slow and
dispiriting process. Recruitment worked best when coordinators infiltrated existing activities
– attending meetings already running, visiting events and community gatherings and so on
– and identified people who had local influence to act as channels of communication.
Engagement was strong where local agencies were able to help artists reach residents and
where artists were able and prepared to spend a lot of time in direct contact with local
people. Some artists were not as comfortable as others about going up to people in the street
and striking up a conversation, preferring instead to rely on more conventional – and indirect
– marketing approaches. The problem, as even these artists admitted, was that leafleting and
putting up posters was almost always completely ineffective in attracting significant
attendance and participation. As elsewhere, the key was in building personal relationships
and earning local people’s interest.
4.9 Using evaluation
‘In the midst of everything else, over the last two weeks I have done 17 hours of meetings
– and I’m really not a meetings guy, I can tell you! And having to go through the
evaluation forms with people when they are getting bored and you just want to start the
workshop…
’
The commissioners need to structure programmes like this in such a way that projects are able
to find their own pace, given the concrete conditions and the resources available, while
maintaining an overall sense of moving forward and making progress. Setting deadlines and
targets, linked to a rigorous evaluation process, is unavoidable in a culture of accountability
and regulation but it should not be allowed to unduly disrupt the organic and always unique
culture of individual projects. Only if projects are allowed to set their own tempo and find
their own sense of direction and purpose will there be a chance that what they have begun
will continue once the programme has closed.
The framework for Well London was based around the notion of experimental evaluation,
comparing LSOAs that had input from those who had no intervention. It was vital for this
social research approach to make regular surveys of people’s responses to the programme,
largely through questionnaires but also through coded interviews run under the aegis of the
University of East London. Be Creative Be Well projects also had to produce quarterly reports
for Arts Council England, which requires its clients to produce rigorous self-evaluations.
Selected projects were also subject to evaluation by the Big Lottery and, of course, our own
evaluation demanded time and attention from the dozen projects we visited.
Consulting local people on a regular basis about their feelings and experiences could be
counterproductive at times and even hold back the work. However, others expressed surprise
at the light touch of the organisers, having only had to fill in forms; in one or two cases ours
was the first evaluation visit they had had from anyone.
While future commissioners may need to reflect on what kind of evaluation is essential for
their purposes and how it can be implemented without making those studied feel like lab
rats, many artists too could play a more active and imaginative role in shaping how evaluation
is carried out. There were, in fact, a few outstanding examples of artists who turned
evaluation into a creative exercise and who produced a considerable amount of well-
presented data. In one case the artist, Belinda Sosinowicz, piloted a mental wellbeing impact
assessment in an attempt to measure impact more scientifically. This was a rare case of an
artist attempting something more ambitious than simply counting numbers of attendees and
workshops and reporting positive comments. It was also a rare example of an artist taking the
scientific aspects of this programme very seriously – in future, when artists are recruited onto
a programme like this, a key question should be how they intend to explore and deliver health
outcomes as well as artistic results. The new economics foundation’s ‘five actions to
wellbeing’ could form the basis of the answer.
4.10 Leaving a legacy
‘I would love this to be an art studio, with a couple of artists in residence. It would be
brilliant. If it was open and used every day, it would be more visible and more people
would be able to participate in the different things that were going on. I really like the idea
of an artist actually being embedded in the community so that they become a natural part
’
of the place.
One of the most difficult challenges for artists in Be Creative Be Well was to walk away at the
end. Having had to invest a considerable amount of time and energy in developing the
necessary trust and respect among local people in order to engage them – and, on occasion,
to produce some worthwhile art – artists were then expected to sever the connection once
the project was over or the budget exhausted. In some instances, artists tried with varying
degrees of success to maintain these personal relationships, even on a voluntary basis. In
other cases, artists worried whether what they had built in the community would be able to
weather the worsening financial situation – or were simply concerned about who would take
on the activities and maintain the resources acquired during the project.
Although a comparatively long-term programme, three years is not four or five or 10, and
commissioning agencies need to see how such initiatives can be embedded systemically so
that their achievements can be built on and not relegated to a fond memory. Equally, artists
need to be aware that their role on such projects is time-limited and so they need to be
finding effective ways of passing on skills – not just artistic but fundraising and advocacy skills
among others. The decision of the Arts Council to employ locally based artists was a risk that,
by and large, paid off handsomely: the potential of artists based in their local communities is
one that should be explored by all the stakeholders.
The final point to be made here is that projects worked well when artists were properly
embedded in the community, not just present but linked into effective local structures and
partnerships. This kind of work cannot be delivered effectively – and would almost certainly
not have an afterlife – without those relationships of mutual respect and trust binding artists
and community together.
◥ 97 Recommendations to Arts Council England
5
Recommendations
to Arts Council England
The strategic implications
Be Creative Be Well should, we believe, be seen as a crucial contribution to Arts Council

England’s core mission of ‘achieving great art for everyone’, enabling more people to
experience and be inspired by the arts.
In our final commentary on what has been achieved and learned from this remarkable three-
year programme, we suggest ways in which Arts Council England might develop its strategy
and practice towards engaging areas and communities that have traditionally been excluded
from mainstream arts provision.
• Respond more effectively and consistently to local cultures, needs and aspirations
In many ways, the Be Creative Be Well programme embodies the deeper values of the Big
Society promoted by the current coalition government, a vital element of which is a new
emphasis on localism. At its best, Be Creative Be Well has demonstrated how cultural and
creative provision can be shaped by local people and local conditions rather than imposed
from above. How and why people engage with arts activity and the kind of partnerships
essential to making projects a success is just part of the important learning from this
programme and will inform how investment can most effectively be made in the future.
One of the aspirations driving Well London was to encourage and equip local people to
develop leadership skills and to take up new roles and responsibilities in their communities.
Such leaders and ambassadors of the future did emerge out of the Be Creative Be Well
◥ 98 Recommendations to Arts Council England
programme. This vital legacy should be sustained so that their considerable expertise can be
invested in future projects.
Through a process of consultation and collaboration, local people have been drawn into
owning and celebrating the art they have made alongside professionals. In that same process,
artists have developed and strengthened their social role as creative catalysts and leaders,
better able to function outside the structures of traditional artistic institutions and settings.
This has lessons for Arts Council regularly funded organisations and future national portfolio
organisations in planning and delivering arts programmes in and around their own local
communities. They have considerable untapped potential to help a hundred local flowers to
bloom.
• Support and promote cultural and creative interventions that seek social good
through artistic excellence, or achieve artistic excellence through social
engagement
As we commented in our introduction, the greatest communal impact of Be Creative Be
Well seems to have been reflected in the most impressive artistic results and vice versa: ‘the
skills of community development and artistry performing a perfect balancing act’. We
believe that, by publicly adopting the credo that good art and the social good can go hand
in hand, the Arts Council can influence practice across the sector, highlighting those
exemplary funded organisations that are already dismantling the barriers between ‘core’ and
‘outreach’, between ‘artistic’ and ‘education’ programming, and between ‘pure’ and
‘applied’ arts.
The Arts Council could encourage this shift by finding ways to enable practitioners with a
highly developed combination of community development and artistic skills, like those
featured in this report, to act as mentors for emerging and established artists and arts
organisations keen to expand their practice beyond the arts institution.
• Continue to challenge traditional definitions of what culture is and what the arts
consist of
Although the Be Creative Be Well programme focused on those areas with least
engagement with the arts that the public pays for, artists found that these communities
were far from so-called cultural deserts and that the people who live in these communities
have much of their own to contribute. Equally, the experience of artists working alongside
professionals from other sectors confirmed for many the value and benefit of
acknowledging and contributing to creative practice in popular activities such as gardening
◥ 99 Recommendadtions to Arts Council England
and cooking. The arts are still intimidating to many people and so much can be gained in
integrating the arts in more familiar, everyday activities.
• Build directly on the achievement and learning from Be Creative Be Well through
further sectoral alliances and new commissions
We hope that our evaluation will encourage the Arts Council and its peers in the health and
other public sectors to continue the work begun with Be Creative Be Well and that this
report will help to identify what is transferable from the Well London partnership in future
commissioning.
We also urge the Arts Council to invest proportionately more in terms of staff resources in
any future programmes of this kind. If a relatively small investment – a core team of two
officers – can produce the results of Be Creative Be Well, then a larger complement could be
even more effective in maximising and sustaining the financial and artistic investment made
in the programme itself.
◥ 100 Coda
Coda
A good place to live

South Acton LSOA, London Borough of Ealing A series of taster sessions and short courses for and by
How much money was allocated? residents of all ages, building on the previous year’s
£22,000 successful activity, existing local activity and new
Who received the funding? activity, including visual arts, crafts, carnival sculpture
Acton Community Forum and costume
April-December 2010
Emerging from South Acton station, it is immediately clear that regeneration is underway.
A colourful new block is already up and expansive blue hoardings shield another site under
redevelopment. Past these, across the main road, is that familiar feature of the post-modern
estate: a plain, low-rise block whose ground-floor level houses a row of identikit shops and
businesses, some shuttered, some trading. You might not immediately notice that one of
these is where the regeneration team can be found. Round a windy corner are the offices
where Acton Community Forum is based. Here, Forum project manager Rachel Pepper has
assembled some of the people who have been involved in the delivery of Be Creative Be Well,
including Luke Battle, a local resident and community hairdresser, and forum volunteers
Amanda Cadogan and Sheila Gumbi. The quotes here are from our conversation.
All the high hopes, short cuts and bad dreams of the social housing boom, through the
1950s, 1960s and 1970s, are writ here in the estate’s concrete and brick: system-built,
medium- and high-rise tower blocks and slab blocks. The parts built early on have ample
pedestrian space but are isolated by a lack of interconnecting roads. The parts built later are
characterised by ‘complex deck access circulation patterns’, which are difficult to negotiate as
a pedestrian. As on many other estates, this means that residents are stuck here, effectively
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Photo: courtesy of Acton Community Forum
cut adrift from the livelier town centre and prey to all the anti-social threats that most
urbanists now agree were, like social segregation, unwittingly built into the fabric of these
once-utopian projects. The estate has had its share of bad press.
‘When I used to go to the college just down the road, I heard so many stories about what
was going on in South Acton – “South Acton’s got its own police helicopter,” people
would say. The estate has been labelled over the years as some sort of ghetto by people
’
that don’t live or work here.
The estate has certainly had a reputation as a dangerous place, partly because of a serious
drug-dealing problem, now under control, but the people round this table resist the
community being labelled in this way. One comments on how young people here are often
treated like potential criminals when all they are doing is hanging out – something that would
be perfectly acceptable out in the countryside. Popular assumptions and fears about gangs
don’t take into account the need for many young people to feel secure.
‘We need to change the language. It’s a pretty big world out there and it scares us as adults
sometimes so I can understand why young people club together: “gangs” can simply mean
safe groups.
’
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Outside perceptions of the estate do have real consequences. Until recent community policing
efforts, there was a certain attitude towards the estate evident when police were called in
– an example was a somewhat heavy-handed response to a complaint about noise, which
resulted in officers intervening in an eight-year-old’s birthday party. That incident, however,
also illustrated a problem closer to home – a failure of neighbourliness.
The emergence of the Acton Community Forum

On the eve of the millennium, the council formally launched a major investment programme
on the estate. Having listened to what the community was saying about life here, it
recognised that simple refurbishment of the existing stock was not an adequate response. The
demolitions have begun, starting with the toppling of Barrie House, a 21-storey tower block
at the heart of the estate. Six other blocks have fallen and around 400 new homes, both
social rented and shared ownership, have already been built. Crucially for running the Be
Creative Be Well programme, the old Oaktree Community Centre, across from the Acton
Community Forum offices, was also replaced in August 2007 by a generously proportioned
new building. With approximately twice the floor space, the Oaktree is now offering residents
a full programme of activities, from keep fit and dance to sewing and darts. The fact that it is
flourishing is down mainly to the work of the forum.
The forum owes its existence to the belated recognition – through the single regeneration
programme – that this estate had become a focus of serious deprivation. It quickly became
independent in 2002, with a board of 18 people from across the borough. It acts as a bridge
between residents and community sector organisations, local voluntary groups and the
statutory sector. It is in a good position to advise the local authority about what is happening
at a grassroots level. It has, Rachel says, the trust of both sides because ‘we do what we say
we’re going to do’. She continues:
‘We need a more positive voice for the people that have been spoken of negatively. When
people come with ideas, we try to support them. If we all work, together, people can get
up and get out of these situations – a lot of us have gotten back into work just through
volunteering and networking. If you stay home and try to fight it by yourself it’s really
difficult.
‘Our aim is to bring different communities together, to celebrate difference but look for
commonality as well. There’s a nostalgic sense of what a community is but the
communities here are changing all the time: we want to embrace that. When you see your
own community coming together, you start to realise that it’s not as bad as you thought
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◥ 103 Coda
’
and you join in. Life is about relationships and we are all in a relationship with each other.
Acton Community Forum started off small but now manages a wide range of community
activities: an arts forum, an annual carnival, Black history month, networks for children and
young people and for women, South Acton network and the Oaktree as well as two other
community centres in the borough. The team was, therefore, well placed to take on the Be
Creative Be Well programme, which it saw as a way to solve the catch-22 situation it has
faced in the past, of being ‘too community’ for arts funders. It has taken the opportunity to
bring quality arts and creative people to its community arts programme and to try to break
down unnecessary barriers between professional and amateur so that more people can start
to see the things that they’re doing as creative and valued.
‘In our visual arts exhibition, we had professional artists’ work hanging with amateur work
so that visitors walking around could see a young person’s piece side by side with a piece
by somebody who sells their stuff for thousands of pounds. We do this so that young
’
people will be inspired.
Putting it to music
Perhaps the most significant – and certainly the most artistically ambitious – element in South
Acton’s Be Creative Be Well programme was devising and performing a community play that
confronted the question of the area’s identity and the labels it has been saddled with.
Interestingly, it approached these tricky socio-historical and political issues in the guise of a
musical:
‘It was basically about people off an estate realising they had talent and had something to
give the community. Although they couldn’t put their musical on in the West End, they
could perform in their own neighbourhood – I was Jasmine, who worked in the laundrette,
we had a West Indian hairdressers and so on. When everyone came to see us and we
started making money, a West End producer – seeing a potential threat to his profits –
tried to buy us all out. But the community came together and fought back and won.
’
The show ended with the whole cast performing a song celebrating the multicultural nature
of regeneration and future of their estate.
The production was in fact mounted at Watermans Theatre and was completely sold out for
its two-night run. Some older residents were bussed over to see it and gave it a warm
reception. Others came partly out of curiosity, not knowing quite what to expect from people
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◥ 104 Coda
who had no experience in theatre at all. Many were surprised, first that it was a musical and,
then, that it was historically interesting and had a powerful message for a contemporary
audience. Local officials and councillors, including one who was to become mayor, were
equally startled that so many people from the estate had come together to make this
possible. The performers, too, had been surprised – they, too, hadn’t realised that they had
signed up for a musical:
‘That was a real challenge – we didn’t know about singing, hadn’t been to auditions. The
discovery that you could sing was amazing. When you grow up thinking you’re not worth
much and you’ve suddenly got people telling you how great you are, it takes a while to
digest. It feels really weird when professional directors and choreographers say: that was
amazing. It gives you the confidence to contribute even more.
’
Those round the table today think that the play conveyed to a wider public what the South
Acton Estate is really like. Maybe now people will see it the way they do – a place with a lot
more character than, say, Chiswick.
‘I didn’t really want to come here, but when I was offered a flat and started living here, I
’
discovered that South Acton is a good place to live. I’m glad to say I live here now.
At the end of the day, as the cliché goes, it is the people who make the difference:
‘I’ve lived here for about 10 years. South Acton Estate is a good estate but it’s the people in
it that make the estate: you’ve got the good, the bad and the very, very bad. But the best
thing about living around here is meeting all these different people.
’
The regeneration theme, set to music in their production, is now very much uppermost in
their minds. The South Acton Residents Action Group has secured enough signatures to apply
for tenant management organisation status, which would enable them to take over
maintaining their own estate from the council. There is a community board in charge of a
£50,000 budget that will be distributed around the estate like a community chest. The
regeneration team has based itself round the corner from Acton Community Forum, squarely
in the community, it seems keen to consult and inform local people on what is being planned
and built. A couple of its staff even participated in the musical that brought the Be Creative
Be Well project here to a stirring and entertaining conclusion.
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Crossing back over the road, you can see large photographic portraits of local people on the
hoardings around the new building site. Commissioned for Be Creative Be Well, this gallery
puts the residents of South Acton Estate on public view. It’s something to be proud of.
Case study
◥ 106 Appendix Be Creative Be Well funded projects
Appendix Be Creative Be Well funded projects

Organisation/ Project name Project Description Funds Dates Lead contact
contact awarded
London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
Arc Theatre Changing Spaces The Changing Spaces project aimed to support three targeted groups in creating performance £6,501 April Josh Cass
pieces in response to the changing physical landscape of the LSOA, to be shared between the -July 2010
groups before being presented at a community celebration day.
Studio 3 Arts and Me and Us Me and Us aimed to engage a diverse group of local people in arts activities they had never £15,000 June Martin Swan
Arc tried before, providing an opportunity for people who are often disengaged to be creative, have -September
their voices heard and have fun. 2009
Green Shoes Arts Dancing Heath Dancing Heath aimed to improve the health and mental wellbeing of local residents through £5,672 May Lauren Crowley
the facilitation of dance sessions, the creation of new networks and signposting to ongoing -October 2010
physical activities, as well as giving 15 young dancers the skills they needed to deliver dance
taster sessions to their community. A community celebration event was planned to bring
together all those involved and publicise ongoing local activity.
Studio 3 Arts Gardenforce! Gardenforce! aimed to enable and empower a group of disengaged and isolated local people £18,480 April Martin Swan
in the LSOA to bring positive change to their own lives and the local environment by bringing -December 2010
art and creativity directly to local gardens and private, public and communal green spaces.
London Borough of Brent
Harlesden Youth Harlesden Youth Theatre hosted drama workshops for students from years nine to 12 at three £5,000 May Sarah Ullman
Theatre local schools in the NW10 area, led by Sarah Ullman and culminating in a production of -October 2008
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good at Tavistock Hall.
Harlesden Youth A second production by Harlesden Youth Theatre was cancelled after several workshops. £1,777 n/a Sarah Ullman
Theatre
Bigga Fish Bigga Fish planned a programme of 40 sessions teaching a group of 25 young local residents £14,000 May Nii Sackey
samba drumming, dance and digital music mixing. A second group of 20 older locals were to -December 2010
develop performances for local settings exploring the traditions of steel pan music and how it
can relate to modern youth culture.
Sports Clinic & Sports Clinic & Events planned a series of 24 two-hour photography workshops, broken into 12 £7,000 June Carlos Salvador
Events sessions over six weeks, ending with an exhibition at the local Pocket Park Festival. -August 2010 Joao

contact awarded
Harlesden Hub Harlesden Hub Poetry Group planned 20 two-hour poetry workshops, the publication of a £2,700 April Ursula Troche
Poetry Group booklet and performances/readings at the Tubbs Road Pocket Park Summer event 2010. -December 2010
Helena Roden Helena Roden’s project aimed to involve local residents in the transformation of Tubbs Road £6,000 August Helena Roden
Pocket Park via a series of creative workshops to encourage residents to collaborate and design -September
a birdbath. 2010
Wayout Dreams Wayout Dreams Community Centre planned 12 two-hour music workshops for young people at £5,000 April Kola Aluko
Community Centre NW10 and performances at Tubbs Road Pocket Park in summer 2010. -August 2010
London Borough of Camden
Queens Crescent Queen’s Crescent This project worked in partnership with Creative Kilburn on the development of the Queen’s £3,336 January Foyezur Miah
Community Festival Crescent Festival 2009. -July 2009
Association
Real Arts Queen’s Crescent Real Arts aimed to deliver a series of carnival and parade workshops producing lanterns, £2,530 July 2009 Emma Pask
Community puppets and dance movements in the Haverstock area, resulting in a parade and participation
Festival Parade in the Queen’s Crescent Community Festival.
Creative Health Labs Redreaming A programme of 60 two-hour workshops was devised to include music-making, dance and £17,000 May Rokiah Yamon
Communities visual arts culminating in a weekend of celebrations and showings at 176 Zabludowicz -October 2010
Collection gallery in October 2010.
Creative Kilburn Queen’s Crescent Creative Kilburn created a programme of physical activity including the Coca-Cola challenge, £12,664 January Ags Irwin
Festival Roundhouse circus skills, an outdoor gym launch at Lismore Circus, Dr Bike and parkour skills -July 2009
workshops.
Creative Arts Brazil Recy-festa The Recy-festa projected aimed to deliver three three-hour creative workshops at the Thanet £7,000 September Aguinaldo
project Centre. Members of the community were invited to learn music, costume-making and -October 2010 Tavares
decoration, using recyclable materials to transform them into new objects of cultural and
decorative value to the community, such as musical instruments, fancy dress costumes, murals
and banners. The project ended with a community celebration.
London Borough of Croydon
Age UK Croydon This projected planned a series of 16 workshops for elders in the Handcroft LSOA to reduce £6,075 September Sue Orchard
isolation and improve mental wellbeing locally. -March 2011

contact awarded
Eye Music Trust Coulourscape Eye Music Trust planned intergenerational workshops, including parent/toddler groups; primary- £25,500 March Simon
age children learning about sculpture and percussion; teenagers/young adults learning about -June 2010 Desorgher
computer music and sound engineering; song writing/singing workshops; and creative writing
for older residents. It resulted in processions and performances, with a legacy of equipment and
skills including CDs and a book, and culminated in a community celebration in June 2010.
Winston Philips and Chameleon This projected aimed to transform the Handcroft Road Resource Centre, incorporating ideas £20,000 January PINS
PINS Project - from local residents. Well London provided funding for a range of new equipment including the -June 2009
Handcroft music cube, computers, IT software, plants, two plasma screens, a fish tank, gaming equipment
Refurbishment (such as Wiis and Xboxes), tables, chairs, sofas and massage chairs. Croydon Council also
contributed by fitting a new kitchen into the Centre. It is now a very modern and inviting space
which could be used in a variety of ways to support community led activities in the area.
London Borough of Ealing
Acton Community This project planned a series of activities at the Oaktree Community Centre in South Acton, £15,000 April Rachel Pepper
Forum culminating up to the Acton Carnival in July 2009. These included dance taster sessions in a -December 2009
variety of styles including salsa, ballroom, street and bhangra.
Acton Community South Acton Together with the South Acton Theatre Project and Pupil Parent Partnership, this project provided a £22,000 April Rachel Pepper
Forum Theatre Project series of taster sessions and short courses for and by LSOA residents of all ages. This built on the -December 2010
and creative previous year’s successful Be Creative Be Well activity, existing local activity and new activity emerging
workshops from feedback and consultations, including visual arts, crafts, carnival sculpture and costume.
Pupil Parent Creative This project aimed to work with 30 young people experiencing barriers to inclusion and their £10,000 April Brian de Lord
Partnership Workshops families. Groups of young people, families and community elders would be brought together to -December 2010
address issues and explore similarities and differences through cultural visits, workshops and
community-led talks, with the aim of improving intergenerational/intercultural relations,
community cohesion and developing a better understanding of difference.
London Borough of Enfield
Tiger Monkey Angel in The project focused on five inter-linked creative ventures – public art, film, creative learning, £28,006 April Emma Ghafur
Edmonton public engagement, and individual enrichment – to support wellbeing using a unifying theme -December 2010
and developing greater trust, encouraging a sense of unified community and understanding
between the diverse people and generations within the neighbourhood.
Tiger Monkey Angel N18 A community film, where local people could record their relationship with, interest in and £11,433.30 July 2009 Emma Ghafur
experience of dancing was planned along with the staging of a modern tea dance. -February 2010

contact awarded
Richard Neville and Storytelling This project saw Richard Neville work with Enfield Library and Museum Service, St John and St £10,470 June 2010 Richard Neville
Enfield Library workshops James Primary School and Raynham Primary School to run storytelling workshops at the Fore -February 2011
Service and Museum Street library. The workshops encouraged grandparents, parents and children to exchange
stories passed down through the family, leading to a book, DVD and exhibition.
London Borough of Greenwich
New Global Image Connecting Connecting Barnfield used performing and creative arts to generate greater awareness in £20,119 April Iris Essien
Barnfield community development, encouraging participants to be ambassadors and championing the -October 2010
need for people’s participation in actions on issues that matter to them.
Avant Gardening Blooming in The Avant-Gardening programme planned a range of activities and workshops designed to facilitate £11,881 March Paul Green
Barnfield communication and interaction on the estate. The workshops would be artist and participant led -September
and range from green crafts and gardening workshops to cooking and sports events, leading to the 2010
development a multimedia digital magazine showcasing the project and the residents.
The Barnfield Project Two talent Greenwich Well London talent brought the community together in celebration of the community, £2,400 July 2010 Kelly-Ann
(London Borough of shows to promote community cohesion and healthy eating. All project activities aimed to bring young -March 2011 Ibrahim
Greenwich) people together and showcase their skills, hidden talents and reduce barriers. The project took
into account the Well London core objectives of healthy eating, physical and mental wellbeing.
Stream Sing Barnfield A community song and music project featuring community workshops and events to share £14,786 June 2009 Isabel Lilly
compositions. It aimed to record the results on to a CD and distribute it locally. -March 2010
London Borough of Hackney
Immediate Theatre Dance with Me Dance with Me planned a week of intergenerational dance activities for local people, run in £14,408 May 2009 Tony Gouveia
partnership with East London Dance, ending with a public performance for the local community.
Immediate Theatre Creative In partnership with L’Est and local arts organisations, Immediate Theatre planned a programme £35,500 April 2010 Tony Gouveia
Workshops and aiming to develop a creative community in Woodberry Down. The programme used arts activities -March 2011
Festival of Light to encourage creative exploration of the local area’s heritage and enable residents to celebrate
relationships with different cultures and their environment, leading to a Festival of Light in October.
London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
Phoenix School A series of floristry, arts/crafts, golf and capoeira workshops at Phoenix School. £14,990 Weekly until Marcia Clack
July 2010
Somali Women Twenty weeks of taikwondo classes were planned for young people. £15,000 Completed Kissu Denton
Support and Savage
Development Group

contact awarded
Albert and Friends Circus Skills Ten two-hour circus skills workshops for young LSOA residents were planned for half-term. £5,421 May Amy Lumsden
-August 2010
Somali Women A series of 43 workshops on yoga and salsa was planned, funded in partnership with the £7,000 June-March Kissu Denton
Support and YMCA. 2011 Savage
Development Group
London Borough of Haringey
Entelechy Arts Ltd/ Big Chair Dance Older residents from the Noel Park area participated in a series of dance workshops as part of a £12,000 June-July 2008 David Slater
Capital Age Festival pan-London cultural event with older people: The Big Chair Dance. The workshops culminated in
dance performances both in Royal Festival Hall and the Haringey Asian Centre. The event was
enthusiastically received by all of the local groups who had contact with it: members of the Council
of Asian People, The Somali Welfare Association and the Over Fifties Group from Shropshire Hall.
Salsa Direct Team Brazil A Brazilian carnival project, encompassing samba drumming, Latin dance, capoeira, juggling, £36,817.74 April Nina Jaffa
song writing/recording, and carnival costume/banner-making workshops, leading up to the -December 2010
Haringey Carnival on in June. There were activities planned during the Easter and summer
holidays, mural creation, and a community festival in Noel Park.
London Borough of Hounslow
APORN Art and Health A series of arts workshops including multimedia, pottery and painting. £12,195 May 2009 Charles
-March 2010 Rukwengye
Bounce Theatre Sit and Share Sit and Share planned a programme of three generationally focused projects using the £21,700 January Louise Pendry
traditions of storytelling to promote wellbeing, culminating in an outdoor performance for the -December 2010
whole community.
Sure Start Hounslow A programme of activity was planned to bring together a diverse range of community groups £10,000 January Barbara Harvey
working on projects contributing to greater community cohesion, engendering engagement of -October 2010
all sections of the community and an improvement of the local built environment. The plan
included the design and creation of banners and stage curtains for local venues, mosaic work,
graffiti art and a tranquillity garden in a local school.
London Borough of Islington
All Change Arts Snapshot All Change worked with Canonbury Youth Project and Rose Bowl Youth Club on three creative £7,000 November Suzanne Lee
arts projects to improve the mental wellbeing and physical activity levels of young people in the -March 2009
Canonbury area.
Clod Ensemble Memory Soup The project consisted of six cooking-based workshops where the participants created different soups £5,000 September Suzy Wilson
while talking about food. The final session saw the presentation of a series of recipe postcards -December 2009
designed by the artists involved on the project and a film documenting the making of the soup.

contact awarded
Jamie Marriott My Endz Jamie Marriot was charged with running a series of youth music and media workshops, £1,610 February Jamie Marriott
promoting mental wellbeing and social cohesion through music. The work produced would then -April 2010
be showcased at a community event in which local residents were invited.
Next Phaze Canonbury Music Jamie Marriot was charged with running a series of youth music and media workshops, £13,200.00 April 2010 Jamie Marriott
Project promoting mental wellbeing and social cohesion through music. The aim was to continue the -March 2011
workshops after the initial programme through the provision of additional Well London funding.
Almorah Road Almorah Arts aimed to give local people opportunities to participate in a varied arts programmes £5,000 June Ben Bell, Joy
Community Centre with the primary aim of promoting healthy community relationships (community cohesion). The -September Faulkenar
core activities were the design and painting of a mural on the outside of the centre and a 2010
summer programme of intergenerational arts workshops including a community fun day.
The Bridge Twenty-four weekly creative workshops exploring elders’ memories, celebrating the skills and £5,000 March Herve Nourisson
knowledge of Canonbury’s elders using mixed and multimedia. During the project participants -September
produced a small zine and postcards to reach the wider community. During the final weeks the 2010
project collaborated with another group in the area to build a bridge together.
Claremont Midsummer Midsummer Madness is a partnership project that brings people from different generations and £13,240 February Paul Tjasink
Madness backgrounds in Canonbury together. It aimed to have participants co-create a multi-ethnic summer -July 2010
pantomime at the Walter Sickert Centre. Creative participation would catalyse social cohesion,
improve health and psychological wellbeing and engender on-going social development.
Urban Hope Community St Stephen’s Community Centre, facilitated by Urban Hope, planned two activities within this £5,000 April Ben Bell
Gospel Choir and project for the benefit of residents of Canonbury. The first was a creative film project enabling -October 2010
Film Workshops young people to document and reflect on their life experiences as well as documenting and
reflecting on the One Canonbury initiative. The second activity was setting up a One Canonbury
Gospel choir.
London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Biddy Samuels Lancaster Voices An eight-week series of choral and drumming workshops culminating in a community £2,200 January Biddy Samuels
performance. -March 2011
Lancaster West Refurbishment This project saw the refurbishment and relaunch of the EMB Rooms with the aim of improving £7,000 April-May 2010 Adelola Dairo
Management and re-launch of community usage of the space.
Association Limited EMB Rooms
Lisa Nash Ways of Being Ways of Being was a series of 15 film, photography and spoken word workshops for residents £8,500 May Lisa Nash
to explore and express aspects of their daily lives and identity creatively. The project planned to -October 2010
conclude with an exhibition/installation of the works produced, providing the participants with
a set of sustainable skills on which they can build.

contact awarded
Brown Baby A project comprising three strands – Collective Collection, Community Choir and Mosaics and £21,000 April Toby Laurent
Murals – aiming to provide something for everyone in the community, with opportunities to -December 2010 Belson
meet new people, learn new skills and improve the local environment.
HISTORYtalk The project planned six sessions of classes for 30 children with a group of older residents £4,500 April-July 2009 Pat Fuller
taking rationing as the main theme. Through memory sharing, pupils would gain a valuable
insight into the diets of people in wartime Britain. The pupils would be encouraged to grow
vegetables and learn from older participants about the ways in which vegetables were used to
supplement rations during and after the war.
Rugby Portobello Youth arts and grafitti workshops organised by Rugby Portobello Trust. A wall by Grenfell £5,000 July Rupert Taylor
Trust Towers was transformed, depicting superheroes. -August 2009
London Borough of Lambeth
Springfield A series of creative activities running at the Springfield Community Flat was planned for young £3,912 July Sue Peake
Community Flat people during the 2008 summer holidays, including jewellery-making, circus and drumming -August 2008
workshops.
North Lambeth and Taster An extensive taster programme covering a range of dance for parents/carers and toddlers, girls £6,000 October 2009 Kristine Keiffer
North Southwark Programme aged eight-13 and adults (including elders and people with disabilities). In addition there -June 2010
Sports Action Zone would also be costume-making classes.
Trust Arts Project Spring Forward Spring Forward 2009 was a dynamic two-month long public festival celebrating and promoting £5,000 July-August Belinda
wellbeing in the community through the arts across Lambeth. As part of part of Lambeth’s 2009 Sosinowicz
Mental Health Promotion Strategy (in collaboration with the primary care trust and South London
and Maudsley (SlaM) mental health services), it highlighted the importance of arts and creativity
to wellbeing. This was an opportunity for the public, service users and providers to experience
workshops, exhibitions, discussions and performances that were distributed across Lambeth.
Trust Arts Project The Big Tea This project aimed to enable local people to design and deliver a large scale community project. £34,500 November 2009 Belinda
It aimed to build long-term relationships through meaningful public consultation and inclusive -December 2010 Sosinowicz
engagement, such as creative and skills based workshops (including mosaics, crafts, dance,
photography and graphic design, baking and food art), training, and resident steering and
action groups, culminating in a community Big International Tea and Party.
London Borough of Lewisham
Sage Educational Making Learning A storytelling project for young people and adults, based at a local school. £4,500 April-July 2009 Delena Davison
Trust Irresistible

contact awarded
Sage Educational Intergenerational This project planned for children to work with other generations of local people to document a £5,270 April Beverley
Trust Movie Making number of local community projects such as Farmstead Community Garden development (Well -September Thompson, Ros
London programme). Children were taught to use video equipment and script their films in 2010 Spinks
collaboration with parents and local older people. It culminated in screenings, open to all, at
local community venues.
Trinity Laban Bellingham Bellingham Moves was planned as an engaging, fun and accessible dance programme for £5,650 May Joanna Gamper
Moves children and adults promoting the positive use of public spaces in South Bellingham to benefit -December 2010
residents. Highly focused on enabling active participation in physical activity, the project
promoted engagement in dance to boost participants’ health and emotional wellbeing.
Elevating Success Creative This project aimed to meet to the goals of Well London by providing jewellery-making, fashion £8,080 April Andrew Brown
workshops and design and drama workshops for Bellingham residents, together with public exhibitions at -October 2010
which their creations could be displayed and their achievements celebrated, thus boosting their
self-esteem.
standnotamazed Magic A series of magic workshops for 8-12 and 12-15 year olds was planned, culminating in a £3,000.00 April-June 2010 John van der Put
workshops performance at Bellingham Festival in June 2010.
Entelechy Arts Ltd My Bellingham A programme was designed to facilitate relationships and creative conversations between £4,1030 February David Slater
artists and isolated older people. The work would run parallel and connect with projects -November 2010
developed by Bellingham LSOA arts partnership organisations Greenwich and Lewisham Young
People’s Theatre and Artefacts Edutainment.
Richard Neville Stories in the Stories in the Street planned to use storytelling and crafts workshops, getting local residents to £4,500 September 2009 Richard Neville
Street produce a pack of postcards containing images and stories from in and around Bellingham. -June 2010
Lewisham Youth My Bellingham Young people aged 11-13 created a drama documentary about the past, present and future in £4,910 April-July 2010 Helen Stanley
Theatre Bellingham, called My Life: Bellingham, to be shown at the Be Well event.
Greenwich and If you’re happy Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre worked with young people in Bellingham on £3,830 May 2009 Emily Hunka,
Lewisham Young and you know it storytelling, drama and music projects to help combat mental health disabilities, culminating in -July 2010 Yvonne Phillip,
People’s Theatre and a one day celebration of healthy living using the arts called Be Well, in Beckenham Palace Park. Liz Amadi
Artefacts The event included Bellingham Big Dance, Bellingham Big Song and Bellingham Big Story.
Edutainment
London Borough of Newham
New Deal for Final Frontier A series of local organisations and artists were funded to run creative activities throughout £6,682 April Howard
Communities West Festival April and May 2009. Funded organisations included Hallsville School of Ballet, Hub Crafts, -September Mendick
Ham and Plaistow Rhoda Webb and the Community Mental Health Team. No individual award was over £500. 2010

contact awarded
London Borough of Star Park Well London community engagement in Canning Town North showed that many residents £7,500 June Matthew Hill
Newham - Parks wanted improvements to local green spaces, particularly Star Park. Be Creative Be Well funding -December 2009
was matched by London Borough of Newham Parks team to undertake a feasibility study to
make improvements and create a new play area.
CTR Triangle The aim of this project was to set up five walks, gradually increasing in distance from 2.5 miles £4,100 April Robert Churchill
to 10 miles, taking part in different parts of the country, commencing with a walk to the -September
Olympic site and ending with a walk on the South Downs. It was intended to increase fitness 2010
and health awareness among people of all ages by offering coaching and encouragement.
East London Dance All Folked Up All Folked Up aimed to deliver a programme of participatory dance workshops and celebratory £25,645 June Emma Kerr
visual, literary and historical events for and with the communities of Canning Town. The starting -December 2010
point was a celebration of Canning Town’s historical contribution to the birth of modern English
folk dance movement and the vitality of the current folk dance traditions in the areas.
London Borough of Southwark
Arts Express Art, documentary The project planned four elements to be delivered through resident participation: a filmed £29,941.15 April Damion Viney
and music documentary combining a record of the project and interviews; a soundtrack to the documentary; -December 2010
workshops art workshops that leading to an exhibition; and 10 linked pieces of art work across the estate.
Arts Express Pass it On Arts Express planned to run a series of creative workshops and create two new works of public £14,963 March Damion Viney
art, by engaging with local residents of all ages from the Cossall Estate. -October 2009
The Midi Music Music workshops Midi Music ran a series of creative workshops based around MCing, DJing, lyrical writing, radio £11,000 January Tamsin Kayembe,
Company presenting, and performance skills. There was an emphasis on an end-of-term performance/ -March 2011 Project
celebration at the end of each block of 10 weeks. Coordinator;
Wozzy Brewster
London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Stitches in Time Stitches in Time planned a variety of textile workshops with community groups across the £13,070 October Di England
Limehouse area, producing four new collaborative pieces of work for display. -December 2009
SPLASH Arts Zoetrope Super This project planned the creation of a moveable sculpture to journey from Westferry to Hind £34,000 November 2009- David Bratby
Sculpture Project Grove. Created by the communities it would pass through, it forms a focus for performance and September 2010
neighbourhood cohesion, giving onlookers and participants the confidence to look beyond
themselves to wider horizons through a mixed media arts project.
City Gateway Healthy Eating The project directly met the healthy eating objective by educating women on some of the issues £6,000 August Jerry Daykin
Video Diaries of healthy eating and encouraging them to share this best practice with their families. The -October 2009
women also took part in exercise classes at the centre.

contact awarded
London Borough of Waltham Forest
the drawing shed The drawing shed, led by Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd, planned to develop a 10-month £31,000 April Sally Labern and
programme of arts events alongside the residents of the Attlee Terrace/Drive and YMCA LSOA. -March 2011 Bobby Lloyd
It aimed to bring other artists and creative practitioners across the arts, including community
theatre, into the project to deliver specific elements. All activities would happen within the
LSOA area. It also aimed to create and use mobile arts studios, the drawing shed and PrintBike
with the aim of sharing this creative resource and other activities.
the drawing shed Led by Sally Labern and Sally Barker, who created a mobile drawing project based around the £9,000 March Sally Labern and
use of a portable drawing shed. This would be a unique, custom-built pavilion that could be set -September Sally Baker
up in different venues, unravelling to reveal materials for an exciting drawing experience. 2009
Waltham Forest Arts WFAIEN planned a series of dance workshops exploring multicultural, traditional and £4,505 May Chantelle
in Education contemporary dance styles for children and young people. These would provide all those -September Michaux
Network (WFAIEN) participating with the opportunity to experience accessible and enjoyable physical activities. The 2009
workshops would include a healthy eating session to highlight the need for a nutritious diet when
pursuing physical activities with tips on how to snack healthily during and after dance sessions.
Social Spider Social Spider aimed to work with Well London partners and residents to support the £3,500 January David Floyd
programme’s goals a number of newsletters created with wider resident involvement. Social -March 2011
Spider would help people produce the content while also teaching and developing journalism
skills, with each block of citizen journalism developing content for the newsletters.
London Borough of Westminster
Stories in the Street My Bangladesh My Bangladesh aimed to work with the Speech and Language team at Queen’s Park Children’s £6,550 July 2010 Richard Neville
Centre. It would collect Bengali/Sylheti rhymes, songs and stories from parents and work with -March 2011
them and their children to make a series of short films of them in Sylhet/Bengali/Chittagong
and English. The resulting DVD and booklet would be part of the library of talking books at the
Children’s Centre and Nursery.
Westminster Arts Queen’s Park Life The project dovetails the Isolated Vulnerable Peoples’ Project (IVP) with the aim of to £7,000 October 2010 Beth Cinamon,
Stories encouraging 12 potentially vulnerable or isolated older people to be active, engaged and -March 2011 Kathryn Gilfoy
involved as valued member of the local community of Queen’s Park. Conducted by skilled
artists, the project of eight sessions aimed to combine contemporary and traditional aspects of
textiles and quilt-making culminating in a showcase in Queen’s Park Library in March 2011
where each participant would be presented with a Creative Citizen Certificate by the Lord
Mayor of Westminster.

contact awarded
Dante or Die Side Effects A programme of dance-theatre workshops planned for elderly people (55 +) and their younger £10,000 August 2010 Terry O’Donovan
counterparts (16 - 24). Eight sessions titled Side Effects would explore participants’ relationship -March 2011
to pills and whether our relationship with pharmaceuticals has changed over the past 50 years.
It would then create a portfolio of performance pieces to share locally.
London Print Studio Step into the A programme of photography workshops was planned to help the local community learn about £10,000 August 2010 John Phillips,
Picture their locality and about each other. Community produced self-portraits would be made into -March 2011 Nadia Yahiaoui
publicly-displayed banners celebrating the rich culture of the community.
Pan-London
London Arts and A series of networking and learning events for Be Creative Be Well artists/commissioned £12,000 Until 31 Damian Hebron
Health Forum projects with a final conference in March 2011. March 2011
Richard Ings External and independent evaluation of Be Creative Be Well programme. Includes 10 case £18,000 Until Richard Ings
studies and an overview of Be Creative Be Well within Well London Report. March 2011
Acton Community Acton Community Forum planned to organise and run the dance stage (with performances from £2,000 20 June 2010 Rachel Pepper
Forum Well London/Be Creative Be Well groups) as part of the Well London World Cup on in June 2010.
Bethany Clarke Photographs of Be Creative Be Well projects. £2,000 n/a Bethany Clarke
South London and Mental Well Being Impact Assessment Training for artists. £6,006 n/a Nerys Edmonds
Maudsley NHS Trust
◥ 118 About the authors
About the authors
Marsaili Cameron has worked in health for over 20 years as consultant, writer, researcher
and evaluator. She co-led a team to evaluate and update Lambeth’s Mental Health and
Wellbeing Promotion Strategy. She also worked with the Greater London Authority health
team and others to develop the first Assembly draft of the Mayor’s Health Inequalities
Strategy. She is a director of the company PublicServiceWorks, which is currently working with
Marie Curie Cancer Care to identify significant ways of improving the experience of young
adults with life-limiting conditions, and embedding this learning across the system.
Nikki Crane has worked in the arts and wider cultural sector for over 20 years. She is a
specialist in the arts and social inclusion and led this work for Arts Council England over a
seven-year period, establishing partnerships and programmes across arts and non-arts sectors.
Nikki launched the Arts Council’s first national strategy for arts and health, bringing together
the Department of Health, Strategic Health Authorities and clinical staff within the NHS. Nikki
has been an independent arts consultant since 2007 and is currently working with a team to
create an arts and health strategy for a new private finance initiative (PFI) hospital.
Richard Ings, who led the evaluation team, is an independent writer, researcher and arts
consultant with over 25 years experience in the cultural sector. His clients have included Arts
Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, CapeUK,
Thames Valley Partnership, National Youth Theatre, Protein Dance, Grassmarket Project, LIFT,
People’s Palace Projects, Glyndebourne, Poetry Society, Prince’s Foundation for Children and
the Arts, Shakespeare Schools Festival and the RSA.
◥ 119 Acknowledgements and thanks
Acknowledgements
and thanks
We are grateful to the following people for their contribution to the research and writing
of this report:
Karen Taylor and Lucy Clark, Be Creative Be Well
David Bradley, Splash Arts

Iristide Essien, New Global Image
Kiki Gale and Emma Kerr, East London Dance
Joanna Gamper and Veronica Jobbins, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
Emma Ghafur and Joe Robinson, Tiger Monkey
Tony Gouveia, Immediate Theatre
Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd, the drawing shed
Lisa Nash, artist
Rachel Pepper, Acton Community Forum
Belinda Sosinowicz, Trust Arts Project
Martin Swan, Studio 3 Arts
Damion Viney, Arts Express
Gail Findlay and Alison Pearce, London Health Commission
Adrian Renton and Kevin Sheridan, University of East London
Damian Hebron, London Arts in Health Forum, for organising a series of Be Creative Be Well
artist seminars to support this evaluation
Liza Cragg for providing detailed contextual material towards Section 1 on culture, health
and the policy framework
◥ 120 Acknowledgementsand thanks
new economics foundation for permission to reprint the chart on page 46 and for the
usefulness of its research into evidence-based ways to wellbeing
Bethany Clarke who was commissioned to document Be Creative Be Well for this report
with a series of photographs.
◥ 121 Notes
Notes
Arts Council England
14 Great Peter Street
London SW1P 3NQ
Telephone: 0845 300 6200
Email: [email protected]
Textphone: 020 7973 6564
www.artscouncil.org.uk
Charity registration no 1036733
You can get this publication in Braille, in large print,

on audio CD and in electronic formats. Please contact us
if you need any of these formats.
To download this publication, or for the full list of Arts Council

England publications and details of how to order them, see
www.artscouncil.org.uk
ISBN: 978-0-7287-1509-7
© Arts Council England, 2012
We are committed to being open and accessible. We welcome

all comments on our work. Please send these to Alison Cole,
Executive Director, Advocacy & Communications, at the Arts
Council England address above.

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Be Creative Be Well

Arts, wellbeing and local communities

Richard Ings, Nikki Crane

The report at a glance  8

Introducing Be Creative Be Well  13

1 Be Creative Be Well in context

2 Be Creative Be Well in practice

3 Be Creative Be Well in theory

4 Plonked in the middle of the estate

1. Preparing the ground 85

5 Recommendations to Arts Council England

About the authors 118

Acknowledgements and thanks 119

phase of development and Be Creative Be Well continues to be a key theme, we commend

Moira Sinclair Gail Findlay

The report at a glance

Where did it come from?

What is the key learning?

This report analyses the achievements of Be Creative Be Well by combining evidence-based

Defining the community

Selecting the artist

Preparing the ground

Demystifying the artistic process

Working with local structures

Building levels of engagement

Meeting the challenge of evaluation

The context-mechanism-outcome configuration is defined by Pawson and Tilley as ‘a

The report we have produced follows the context-mechanism-outcome pattern. We begin by

Good art and the social good

Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs)

The object through which people

1.1 Postcodes and poverty

Running down the estate

1.2 The human cost

1.3 Recalibrating health promotion

As a consequence of these shifts in understanding, a much broader range of organisations

The prescription for London

1.4 The contribution of culture and the arts to health

The Arts Council’s leading role

1.5 Areas of low engagement and participation

Beyond access vs excellence

In evaluating the implications as well as the achievements of Be Creative Be Well, this is a

2.1 Choosing the artists

2.2 Briefing the artists

2.3 Developing an artistic programme

‘Feelings of happiness, contentment, enjoyment, curiosity and engagement are

Be active = to engage in physical activity and, by extension, to achieve mastery of a physical

3.1 Place/Take notice

Putting it all into place

As a community-based participatory arts programme, Be Creative Be Well is all about

Breaking the ice

An artist with people

3.3 Cultural life/Keep learning

Certain areas of London might be considered home to particular populations – Portuguese

Not just jigs and bells

‘I feel that when I dance I am celebrating my body, my fitness, my energy, my spirit, my

3.4 Physical activity/Be active

More fruit than cake

Let them eat… fruit

Joining the dance

The report at a glance 8

Introducing Be Creative Be Well 13

1 Be Creative Be Well in context

2 Be Creative Be Well in practice

3 Be Creative Be Well in theory

4 Plonked in the middle of the estate

1. Preparing the ground 85

5 Recommendations to Arts Council England

About the authors 118

Acknowledgements and thanks 119