My Experience of Coventry City of Culture- A Legacy of Facebook Followers | by Alison Manning | Mar, 2023
Way back in May 2018, we had an inspiring talk at my workplace about the delights that lay in wait for us and our city, and the hard work that had gone in to getting that far, after Coventry had been awarded City of Culture 2021 on a euphoric evening just a few months earlier. OK, I should probably admit I’d arranged the talk, as part of a Learning at Work Week, but it was extremely well-received and others shared my enthusiasm. Encouraged to do so, I was one of many who signed up to Coventry City of Culture on social media that day, in eager anticipation of exciting things to come.
Fast forward five years and, with a heavy heart, I have just unsubscribed from Coventry City of Culture’s Facebook and Twitter, after discovering my likes and follows have been listed as “intangible assets” that are being sold off, along with coffee machines, 55 domain names, a few projectors and remarkably little else, after Coventry City of Culture has spiralled into administration. Besides this dismal list, it leaves behind forced redundancies, disgruntled but mobilised creatives, a disappointed population, unpaid debts and lots of unanswered questions, not quite the three-year legacy it had supposedly planned and we had hoped for.
It wasn’t the easiest of starts, delayed by several months due to the blight of the pandemic, but even then it seemed the opening day was shrouded in secrecy, to allegedly prevent dangerous crowds building. Although some events of the day were shown on YouTube, some of the rest of it seemed to be on a ‘catch it if you can’ basis. A motorcade of interesting old vehicles carried a host of musicians, singers and dancers who would stop and perform at irregular intervals. It was a warm day and we were eating in the garden when we heard the sound of passing music. We literally dropped everything and ran to see what was going on, desperate to be part of the action. We saw the cars pass on a neighbouring street, beeping their horns. We took photos. They didn’t stop and we returned to our melted ice cream, hopeful that more exciting things we could actually properly participate in would follow.
This initial, apparently deliberate, lack of communication unfortunately seemed to set the tone for things to come. An infamous brochure only appeared in venues and through people’s letterboxes after the majority of events contained in it had already happened, presumably to low audiences as no one knew about them. It was the grassroots stuff that made City of Culture, most of which sprang up despite and, in some cases, in the face of direct, inexplicable opposition from the official City of Culture trust. Coventry creatives really came into their own, often roused by official obstruction, creating more opportunities for locals who were feeling ignored or sidelined. The official shop won’t take work by local creatives? Let’s form our own space to sell their stuff- the Sitting Rooms of Culture stall in the market was up and running within weeks. There aren’t openings being made for local artists to exhibit their work? The Litten Tree Buildings Showroom encouraged and exhibited work from many local artists, lots of whom had never exhibited before, as well as hosting film festivals and other events. Sadly, neither of these examples are currently still active, due to logistical circumstances beyond their control, but hopefully they will be resurrected at some point.
It was also the grassroots stuff that became the best means of communication, with local Facebook group Sitting Rooms of Culture, originally set up at the start of lockdown, becoming my and hundreds, if not thousands, of other people’s main source of information on City of Culture events. Without people sharing on this group nuggets of information about what was going on and recommendations of events they had managed to get to, knowledge of events, and consequently ticket sales, would have been even lower than the actual levels. With a whopping £12, 776, 000 spent on events and just £487,000 back in ticket sales something went wrong somewhere. It wasn’t just details of events that were shared on the Facebook group though, but also occasional opportunities for local creatives. I was tagged in one of these by someone I hadn’t really met in person, applied and was pleased to be commissioned to write a poem.
So this should have been the start of me benefitting as a local creative from Coventry City of Culture. I certainly benefitted financially, and it was good in that it encouraged me as a poet and boosted my confidence. Thinking about it retrospectively though, I don’t think they had a well-rounded approach to the project and it felt more like tokenism ie “We have paid ten local artists to write poems/prepare music pieces for this, our work here is done.” What would have been nice was some kind of publicity, promotion, encouragement or exposure of our work. It appeared on an app no one knew about and apart from one or two social media posts we were scarcely mentioned, which seems a shame especially as they paid quite a lot for each work. The commission involved writing a poem related to the artwork displayed in empty shop windows in the city centre. The publicity was so bad that one of the artists whose work I had used as an inspiration did not even know about my poem, despite being involved in the same project, till I told her about it. It would not have taken much effort just to print out the works that were poems and stick them in the windows they related to but would have gained us a much wider audience and made our part of the project more of a thing. Or even just a sign in each window telling you that a poem or a song relating to it was available to listen to with a QR code to scan to hear it (though that would have excluded those who don’t use that technology). I guess they weren’t quite sure what their purpose was and perhaps thought they had fulfilled it by commissioning local artists without really using or promoting their work at all. Several people involved in the project had to purely promote it themselves through social media and local radio. I guess some self-promotion was to be expected and it was good in some ways to have something to promote, but some coordinated central promotion would have been much appreciated. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, it was good to be involved. But it perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise when a final proposed event for the project was scheduled to take place in London. When this was queried as a suitable location for a Coventry project the organiser simply gave the following reason for the setting: “Because I’m based in London”.
What has gone wrong with the overall management of Coventry City of Culture Trust I do not know. It could be down to mismanagement, incompetence, bringing in outsiders with no knowledge of Coventry- I don’t really know enough to judge. There are some clues in the figures though, with the accounts for the year ending 31 March 2022 showing just £5,563 spent on Community Engagement, compared with an incredible £122,989 spent on Travel and Subsistence- this for an event based entirely in one city, ideally focussed on the local community. We can perhaps glean from this where their priorities lay. Perhaps now, by listing one of their main, if intangible, assets as their social media followers, they have finally realised that their greatest asset all along lay in the people of Coventry, if only they could have fully communicated with, committed to and collaborated with local creatives and the wider Coventry community throughout. Thankfully, especially in the absence of any other tangible legacy, the grassroots of Coventry creatives have mobilised, networked, formed effective online (and sometimes in person) communities. Their current task, which is in process, is the fight to find out what went wrong with Coventry City of Trust, to ensure a thorough investigation takes place, battle for accountability and seek answers to the many unanswered questions. Hopefully lessons can be learned for Bradford City of Culture 2025, and any more chosen cities after that.
