Seven years after his death, MP Bernie Grant’s vision for the future of the arts in London is emerging among the Polish grocery shops and rickety Somali-run internet cafes of his old constituency of Tottenham. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre will open to the public this summer, and will be primarily focused around black and ethnic minority artists and arts managers. It’s an ambitious project, including a public theatre, rehearsal space, accredited courses in dance and music, training and office facilities for creative businesses, a bookshop and a café – all in the inauspicious surroundings of an area that’s simultaneously (and not entirely coincidentally) one of the most deprived and the most ethnically diverse in the UK.
Bernie Grant, the man behind the centre, was a controversial figure in the media, despite being immensely popular among his constituents and the black community in London. He campaigned against police brutality and continually called for greater representation of ethnic minorities in the Labour Party, at a time when the politics of race in Britain looked quite different from today.
The Bernie Grant Arts Centre faces a very different cultural landscape. The centre’s Chief Executive, Doreen Foster, feels that the project has nevertheless remained “absolutely true to Bernie Grant’s vision”. She explains, “He was really passionate about creating opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds to develop skills and talents that they obviously had but weren’t being supported, or they were but other people were benefiting from their success. We looked at the London cultural landscape at the time – it has changed a lot since then, but at the time there were not that many places presenting to the world the best that Caribbean creative talent has to offer. This would have been the mid 80s – you couldn’t go to the Barbican and see a lot of the African artists that perform there now, you wouldn’t have been able to go to the National Theatre and see something like Elmina’s Kitchen.”
Foster, who was previously head of the Chief Executive’s Office at the Arts Council, hopes that the centre will reflect these changes. “What we’ve done is taken his vision into the 21st century. The cultural sector has changed significantly and society has changed. People of colour are dominating positions of power and racism isn’t as overt as it was. It has changed to the extent that we’re more able and are progressing and are more integrated than we used to be. In terms of cross-cultural collaboration, more and more of that is happening. As a creative space, we want to become a home for artists who are interested in creating work and exploring cross-cultural issues.”
The centre is funded to the tune of £14 million by the Millennium Council and the London Development Agency. This, along with its location in one of the most deprived boroughs in London, has led to expectations that it will help address the area’s problems.
We’re accustomed to seeing the arts as a kind of strong medicine for troubled young people: reality TV and thousands of community arts projects have fed into the idea that creative pursuits can fix social problems. Foster is keen to distance the centre from any pressure to “solve” Tottenham’s issues. “The problems that affect Tottenham and Haringey are the same as those that affect other parts of London. In terms of deprivation it’s among the highest in the country, but it’s not our role to address those things because we’re not a social centre, we’re a creative space. Having said that, we’ll be impacting the life choices of young adults who know they have a creative talent but haven’t been supported, so I believe we’ll have an impact in that sense and in the levels of confidence in the area.”
These expectations weigh particularly heavily on projects explicitly focusing on minority ethnic communities, perhaps indicating a tacit assumption that minority communities are inevitably problematic and in need of fixing. This assumption might explain Foster’s reluctance to talk about the centre in terms of social development.
“We don’t want to do everybody else’s business,” she says, firmly. “One of the things that happens particularly for black-led projects is we’re expected to diversify to the point that we don’t become experts at anything. We want to be experts at delivering a quality arts provision, and our principal drive is to support the development of the next generation of creative entrepreneurs… What’s interesting is how much more difficult it is to get the support for what you want to do rather than what other people want you to do. It is frustrating because you always hope that it’s going to be different, but things haven’t changed in that people want you to remain in a box, the content of which they understand.”
While the BGAC will cater in particular to artists from ethnic minority backgrounds, its focus will be wider than the usual palette of social commentary and identity politics that ethnic minority artists are so often restricted to by the media and by funding agencies. Foster says, “One of the reasons why we want to be a space that offers artists the chance to think about their practice is that they’re expected to make work that talks about gun crime etcetera, and sometimes people just want to make beautiful work. We want to support challenging work commenting on society’s ills but also support artists who just want to make something aesthetically beautiful. Not everything is a political statement.”
When it opens, the BGAC will already be the biggest black-led arts centre in Britain, but Foster’s ambitions for the centre go even further than that. “One of the things I’d like to achieve in the next five to 10 years is to develop key partnerships with people in African countries, the Caribbean, other parts of Europe, working on virtual collaborations and bringing artists across and commissioning new work. That’s one of the big things for me, as well as being recognised on the international stage as a venue, so people recognise the Bernie Grant Arts Centre as a place to come and see new art being made in Britain… Over next five to 10 years, hopefully artists will be saying, ‘Without the Bernie Grant Centre I wouldn’t have been able to think about my practice and create this work.’”
