Culture:Unlimited is two things: people and ideas

The People

Image from What Did We Learn This Time? publication

You won’t find us in a shiny London office with a brass plaque. What we need is people with creative minds, and they can’t be corralled by geography, so we’re in Cornwall, Lancashire, London, Bedfordshire, Yorkshire, and Sussex, with some occasional thinking from Lincolnshire. The nearest thing we have to a nerve centre is on the North Cornish coast, near enough to hear and taste the sea.

Image from What Did We Learn? publication

Our Directors are Chris Wood and Nicola Nuttall.

Chris used to be a Director at the Open University before this. Before then he was a Director of a UK charity dedicated to broadening the social horizons of senior executives from the biggest corporations in the country (teaching them about life, not profit). And leading up to that, he had what his Grandma says is not a proper career: graduating with a degree or two in automotive and aerospace design, then as a turncoat at Friends of the Earth (campaigning against the things he’d just learnt to create), and as a manager of one of the first sustainable city programmes in the country. It’s the ideas he’s interested in. How the world works, and how to make it work better – a perfect match for the DNA of Culture:Unlimited.

Image from Culture Shock publication

Nikky ran the Campaign for Learning through Museums and Galleries (clmg) for a decade, which did exactly what it said on the tin. She was asked to do 10 days work in 1997 promoting a report called A Common Wealth about museum learning, but just never let it go (she’s like that). She helped lead museum learning from heresy to mainstream and clmg from a fledgling to raising £7.5m and wielding 30 people. Now she’s back to her roots as a campaigner for the vitality of the cultural sector in modern life. Nikky wants culture to be for everyone, everywhere: to change the cultural sector from being chroniclers of history (and hence mostly an ornamental extra to modern society and a low priority in national policy) to a visceral part of modern life; with a voice about where humanity is heading as well as where it’s been. Culture:Unlimited, then, is her spiritual home.

Clubland by Jordan, from the r2 project

The Ideas

The foundation of Culture:Unlimited is a frustration that the cultural sector was always being hit over the head with ill-fitting national policies that were born elsewhere. Then it had to find a way of saying ‘we can do that’ to get its hands on the loot that was attached to policy. But its heart wasn’t in it. So, when the money moved on, the innovation vanished with it. We wanted to do things the other way round: to look at the uniqueness of the cultural sector in society, test it, refine it, and turn that into policy.

Image from Lighting-up Time publication
We want to get people in the sector to do things because they believe in them, not just because there’s a bag of swag attached, so that the work will weather the changing winds of policy. So you won’t find Culture:Unlimited pretending that museums can banish obesity or make trains run on time. But you will find us being malcontent at the way things are and, crucially, proposing solutions to issues. We don’t want to be grumpy old campaigners listing problems or cataloguing challenges for someone else to solve; we want to be audacious and say what we would do; happy to be shot at, but happier to use some creative thinking to imagine a future for culture. It is the cultural sector after all. If we can’t be creative in our thinking here, where can we be?

So, where to start?

Well, we want to test the limits of:

A photograph of clubland
  • Cultural identity – because museums de-code culture for us all to discuss. Museums’ effects on tolerance, respect and understanding at this point in history, are critical
  • Democracy – because museums are one of the last level-headed debating spaces. They don’t have an axe to grind and they can provide the vital ingredients in democracy: insight into the issues; space to discuss and deliberate; and the tools for collective decisions. That’s special.
  • Learning - because museums are about story-telling inspired by artefacts, and they have nothing to sell except understanding
  • Emotional well-being – because the causes of mental ill-health are mainly social and cultural not medical: museums can be a social and cultural solution to help reduce the 30% of us who will experience mental ill-health every year at a cost of £77bn (that’s more than crime, and enough to double the nation’s education budget)

Those fourfold issues should keep us busy for a while, and we’ve got some more in the lab too.

So much to do; so little time.