With the future of Womanby Street looking secure for the time being, Fedor Tot chats to Cardiff City Council Leader Huw Thomas about his vision for the city as a creative hub.
You’ve stated that creativity is at the heart of your economic strategy as Cardiff Council Leader. Yet Cardiff Council is being asked to make similar cuts as many other councils across the UK. Historically, arts and culture have been where people look to make cuts: how do you square that with looking to make creativity the economic fulcrum of the city?
We know that we are going to have to save £90 million over the next three years. If you let that dominate your thoughts you lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve in the city, which fundamentally comes down to making Cardiff a better place to live and work and tackling the inequality that exists. How do I think we do that? Well, we provide good jobs and good education and that is partly about making this a place that businesses want to invest in. In 2016 over 20 million people visited Cardiff, bringing £1.2 billion into the city. Culture and creativity creates a sense of place in Cardiff, which encourages companies and businesses to come in and invest here.
So you’re looking more towards cooperation rather than funding?
We have to be honest, we no longer have the money that, in the past, local government has had, but we do have that ambition and we do have the capacity to act. I’ve stood up on several stages and said local government no longer has all the answers to our problems but everyone in the city working together probably does. Take the Tramshed, for example: five years ago that was a disused council building, and through working partnerships we’ve turned that into one of the most exciting venues in Wales.
How are you looking to help the more peripheral areas of Cardiff – little cafes that put on an open mic night, live music pubs? The Save Womanby Street campaign has been vital, but that’s a central location.
You need a critical mass and you build outwards from there. Save Womanby Street was driven by a fear, I think, that Cardiff was going to lose its heart. We need to look at the city as a cultural ecosystem: as you say, there is a strong centre with probably more challenges at the periphery. That’s why we’re working with Sound Diplomacy, a specialist music industry consultancy that’s worked in Berlin and San Francisco, to see how the whole city ecosystem needs to work to support live music.
Sound Diplomacy has labelled Cardiff “the UK’s first music city”. What will this actually entail?
We’ve asked them to look at the entire music scene, from people getting involved in music-making in their bedroom to playing in the Principality Stadium. It was a recognition of our wish to have a full-system approach to music in the city, rather than just concentrating on live music. To recognise the centrality that music has to the wellbeing of people – that’s what we want to see when we talk about Cardiff as a music city.
There’s only so far goodwill can go until you actually need to put funding forward – at what point does funding have to start to be seriously looked at?
It’s very difficult to talk hypotheticals without examples. What is clear in the age of austerity is that spending public money has to be vigorously tested. If there was an amazing opportunity that cannot be delivered without cash, particularly if there’s a case for economic growth off the back of it, then of course we’ll look at it.
We might have all the goodwill in the world but we need people to work with us. That’s the plea from me – if you’ve got some ideas about how we can improve the city, come out and engage with the council and let’s work together to deliver our vision and your vision.
Info: twitter.com/huwthomas_Wales
This article is part of our Music Special Edition, which includes a look back at some of the historic venues of South Wales and the success of Save Womanby Street, to be published soon! A filmed version of this interview is also available.
photo Nick Treharne