This is Nelson
- Natalie Hughes
- Jun 5, 2024
- 1 min read
This text was commissioned in partnership with Corridor 8. We invited writer Natalie Hughes to reflect on the beginnings of This is Nelson, the culture and community programme that forms part of the Nelson Town Deal investment.
Sample text: Counted amongst one of the most deprived areas in England is Nelson, a town in East Lancashire. It is a casualty of the decades of neglect that have characterised our post-industrial North. In 2021 Nelson was awarded a £25 million New Town Deal grant as part of the Government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda. In Nelson’s investment plan, the town is described as suffering from ‘a weak… identity which is detrimental to community cohesion and town footfall’. The plan goes on to position culture as the force that will galvanise the make-over of the town by making a feature of the area’s heritage and renewing local pride.
Culture as a stimulus for social and economic change is no new concept, and its instrumentalisation has been widely critiqued over the past fifteen years. In this context, my day-job as an arts producer often working in areas similar to Nelson on publicly-funded projects means I constantly question and regularly feel uncomfortable with the mammoth sized, neo-liberal flavoured task of amelioration handed to The Arts. It was with this head on that I was invited to In-Situ by Anna Taylor to write about This Is Nelson, the cultural strand of Nelson’s New Town deal.
