Sheffield — Cultural Industries Quarter

4.1. Sheffield — Cultural Industries Quarter

The development of the Cultural Industry Quarter (CIQ) in Sheffield was a response to two distinct pressures.The first was the decline of the local steel industry, which led to a dramatic loss of jobs in the early 1980s and prompted Sheffield City Council to look to cultural and media industries as a new growth sector.The second was the fact that by the late 1970s Sheffield had a distinct local music scene based on a group of avantgarde, post- punk electronic bands including The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, ABC and Heaven 17. These bands had major record deals and national and international chart success (it was argued during several interviews that Sheffield was responsible for 5% of the market share of UK singles in 1982), and they and other local bands were dissatisfied with the lack of adequate recording/design/performance facilities in Sheffield. There was a per- ceived inevitability about the ‘drift’ to London of Sheffield talent, which some key musi- cians wanted to reverse. Sheffield’s musical success, therefore, was not being translated into a successful Sheffield music industry or benefiting the Sheffield economy.These musi- cians began to work with Sheffield City Council to establish local music industry facilities:

”What I found, to my surprise, was that there was a layer of music and film-makers who had been producing products for five to ten years, making a relatively successful job of it, in terms of exporting music and song to countries around the world ... Once

I started talking to them they were saying, We’ve got lots of ideas about how this sector should grow and we want to involve a recording studio and attract music makers to this area”.

”... bands like Human League, they respected the opportunity they’d been given by the city council, which developed into employment for them, a good living for them. They easily saw the importance of trying to encourage and support initiatives that developed talent and business and grow the sector (sic!) and provide facilities as well. In the early years they worked alongside us a hell of a lot, Phil (Oakey of the Human League ) popping up, kitted out in make-up and convincing politicians and in the work- ing meetings. One of the features that is now a strength of what we do is, nearly all those people who were involved in the early 1980s are still around and nearly all of them have invested and developed their activities in quite dramatic ways”. (Paul Skelton, City Council Cultural Industries Officer. Unless otherwise stated, all the interviews are with Dr Adam Brown.)

Sheffield’s strategy began, then, with the provision of facilities aimed, on the one hand, at increasing access (a legacy of Sheffield’s strong community arts sector) to the resources to make music (and film) — rehearsal space, recording facilities, a live venue, etc. — and on the other, at providing a means whereby musicians with money to invest (from record deals, advances, etc.) could do so in Sheffield. Over the next ten years, the council was involved in renovating a group of empty build- ings based near the city centre and in the setting up of: The Leadmill live venue and night- club (with local community artists in 1982); Red Tape recording studios (the first munici- pally owned recording studios, opened in 1986 providing training courses and cheap rehearsal and recording facilities); the Audio Visual Enterprise Centre (AVEC, in 1988) where the Human League set up base, along with Axis and Fonn recording studios, the Site Gallery and Sheffield Independent Film; the Workstation managed workspace providing short-term, cheap-rent accommodation exclusively for cultural businesses; The Showroom cinema/cafe bar; and the National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) visitor attraction, which opened in early 1999.The promotional literature for NCPM reads:

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”The NCPM will be the first building of its kind in the world — an innovative visitor centre and educational resource celebrating the dynamism and diversity of popular music ... the centre will entertain, stimulate and inform visitors from around the globe ... Situated in Sheffield city centre’s Cultural Industries Quarter ... its four highly distinc- tive stainless steel drums combine a recognition of Sheffield’s industrial past with an exciting reflection of the mixture of art, technology and vitality that is popular music”. (NCPM promotional document, November 1996. NCPM opened in March 1999.)

All this has been funded through a mix of public and private monies. According to Paul Skelton, the actual level of investment by Sheffield City Council has been minimal:There’s about £35 million worth of capital investment gone in over the last ten years, starting with Red Tape in 1986 and finishing with The Showroom next door. That investment has improved and refurbished all of these buildings, it’s created the basis for a thousand jobs here and created and sustained 150 companies. Of that £35 million, £6.1 million was public money. Of that £6.1 million, only £400,000 over ten years has been Council money. Most of it has come from the government’s Urban Programme and, more recently, (City) Challenge money and European Regional Development funding. Red Tape was funded in the first stage to the tune of about £90,000 by the council in 1985/1986. From then on, we got four phases of Red Tape from elsewhere. The Sheffield CIQ has followed a four-stage development plan, moving from local, region- al and national to an international focus, hence the NCPM promotional literature empha- sises the centre’s local context, whilst its Creative Director stresses that ”we don’t want it to be seen as a Sheffield centre, but a national one” and estimates visitor numbers up to 500,000 per year. Sheffield CIQ thus involves balancing the desires to: ¬ nurture local music (and other cultural) businesses — which, if successful, will be taken

up on the global market, ¬ create a tourist attraction to bring people into Sheffield from elsewhere in the UK and abroad, ¬ use both of the above as part of a strategy of re-imaging the city on a global basis. The CIQ can be seen as an attempt to reassert the local within global cultural flows. It is not, therefore, an attempt to set up an alternative industry in competition with the estab- lished, global music industry, but to maximise the benefit for the local economy of the success of music businesses in that global industry. An early project to set up a Council- owned record company, for instance, was quickly shelved. More broadly, the city, like many others in the deindustrialised west, has been attempting to re-image itself, moving away from the image of industrial steel producer to that of a youthful, creative and vibrant cul- tural centre: Sheffield has made sport a particular focus, acting as host to the ill-fated World Student Games in 1994 and more recently winning the bid to build the UK Sports Institute centre of excellence (Henry, 1998).

According to Paul Skelton, in 1996, the CIQ had gone some way to offset job losses, cre- ate new businesses and encourage a previously marginal sector in Sheffield’s economy:

”It’s taken a long time and we’re quite proud of the thousand jobs we’ve got down here now we’ve created the cultural industries sector. Of those thousand about 350 are brand new jobs which have been created by the activity down here.The other 600, 650 or there abouts are jobs that have been relocated here that existed before ... we’d like to think we’ve contributed significantly to those jobs surviving and growing ... (O)ut of the 150 companies that are down here now, only four over the last ten years have gone out of commission in some way or another ... four out of 150 is quite an amazing track record when you compare it to any other group of companies in any other sector”.

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The claim being, then, that CIQ may well have meant that a number of music businesses have managed to survive when they may not have done otherwise, given the notorious- ly volatile nature of the sector.This is supported to some extent by a recent consultan- cy report by EDAW and Urban Cultures: ”The CIQ has created 1,300–1,400 jobs in an estimated 150 businesses, generating a total turnover of £25 million ... ” although they added that ”at present the sector is no more than of subregional significance”. (EDAW/Urban Cultures, 1997, p. 3.11). The position of the CIQ and the focus of Council policy in this area have been the source of some contention over the years, with some opposition to investment in what some policy-makers have viewed as a ‘soft’ industry. The CIQ team have had to fight hard to protect the policy, both from scepticism in the council and from commitments to other developments (e.g. some sporting initiatives). Indeed, in 1997, under severe budget cuts, the Council abolished the department responsible for the CIQ. Whilst AVEC, The Workstation and NCPM remained secure, questions hung over the future of Red Tape and future investment in the CIQ. However, the restructuring of the council in 1998 under a new Chief Executive and the major EDAW report on the area, which recommended the establishment of a new CIQ executive and Steering Group (an ongoing process at the time of writing) now seem to have secured the CIQ process for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the impact of the NCPM on the area is likely to be crucial, but is at pres- ent unclear. We shall look in more detail at the CIQ strategy below.