Tag: Gresham College

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Enjoy The Birth of Modern Theatreland: Covent Garden and the Two Theatres Royal – a lecture by Professor Simon Thurley

The excellent talks given throughout the year by Gresham College’s invited speakers are always worth seeing. Occasionally, theatre and arts-related talks come up, and I am happy to recommend them to you.

Here is a recent talk given by Professor Simon Thurley about the early incarnations of theatre in London in an area we today call Theatreland.

In this, the second lecture in the series Buildings in the West End of London, Professor Thurley looks at the significance and impact of these three great institutions on the development of London.

The talk lasts 51 minutes and is free to view whenever you have time.

Watch the talk by clicking on the image below or open in a new window here

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Remembering Anthony Field CBE

This day in 2014 the world lost one of its most passionate advocates for the arts when Professor Anthony Field CBE, passed away.

It is strangely fitting that someone so important to the arts world, a high-level accountant, should have passed away at the end of the tax year. But this was just one of the very neat things about this most precise and orderly of men, but with a deep creative and artistic seam that ran through him as “Blackpool” runs through a stick of rock.

Starting out as an idealistic young actor (and auditioning for Gielgud), he gravitated towards accountancy as a steadier way to keep himself fed and housed while figuring out the theatrical world. He was one of the figures who creatively helped to dismantle stage censorship in the 1950s. He was Finance Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1957-1984, overseeing a budget which increased one hundredfold in that time. He was passionate about all branches of the arts. He, and his untiring support, is the reason so many UK regional theatres survived the bulldozer to still serve their communities today.

His many achievements are too numerous to mention here, except that alongside maintaining the arts, his other passion was education, supporting new young producers and managers, creating the very first Arts Management courses himself in the 1960s. A young producer starting out would always find Tony’s office door open for some advice, support and encouragement.

So many of today’s top producers, arts executives and managers were encouraged and inspired by Tony, that its hard to imagine anyone who hadn’t benefitted from having known him. As one of the producers who helped us prepare his entry in the Olivier Awards 2014 “In Memoriam” tribute at the Royal Opera House said to me, “I never met him but it sounds like I owe him a lot”.

After The Arts Council, he , in his friend and colleague Richard Pilbrow’s own words, “saved” one of the world’s most respected arts consultancies, Theatre Projects, from collapse, securing its continued existence and growth.

Those of us who worked with him at Anthony Field Associates, my colleagues John Causebrook and Darren Black, were amazed but somehow not surprised that he maintained his routine of coming into the office daily, keeping a number of appointments, and producing enlightened and informative article for various journals, right up to the end.

We all miss him just as much today as we did on April 6, 2014.

Thanks to technology, we can enjoy a lecture of his from 2012, when he was invited to give the closing lecture in the LONDON THEATRE series by Gresham College. Entitled THE FUTURE OF LONDON THEATRE, it contains some of his most important ideas and themes. As always with his lectures, it was amusing, enlightening, warm and passionate. Watch it now and you can sense the decades of experience woven into these words.

Watch the lecture here.

Thank You, Tony, for everything.

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The Cost Of Cutting Culture: A discussion

The Cost of Cutting Culture – can a creative education close the business skills gap?

A lively and engrossing discussion formed the majority of the Lord Mayor’s Gresham College Lecture on Thursday 9th January, attended by a packed audience and a knowledgeable panel including William Russell, Lord Mayor of London, and the directors of the City of London’s key cultural institutions: Kathryn McDowell CBE, DL, MD of the London Symphony Orchestra, Lynne Williams who is Principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Sir Nicholas Kenyon CBE, MD of the Barbican Centre, and Sharon Ament, Director of the Museum of London.

Introduced by the Lord Mayor, he made the points that over the last twenty years the tech companies have replaced the oil and engineering firms as as the world’s largest employers, with a raft of implications for what the jobs of tomorrow will look like.

With the changing demands at work, and the threat of automation to 40% of the UK’s current jobs, creative skills are becoming more important and desirable in the workplace. The so- called “Fusion Skills” – social, analytical and creative skills – will progressively play a larger part in the job descriptions of many future UK Jobs.

The alarming situation is that there is a genuine demotion of the arts in the UK school curriculum. The arts are not represented at GCSE Level at all.

The UK’s future workplaces will need to attract the best candidates by offering creative work environments but also extensions of that out into the environment. People aspire to work and live in areas like Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Camden, as they are seen to have a creative vibe which enriches their environments. 

Culture Mile is a move to create a similar creative hub destination, a creative partnership between The Barbican Centre, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the LSO and the Museum of London. It aims to create a thriving and intriguing cultural community which runs from Farringdon to Moorgate- the Culture Mile.

The discussion covered what businesses can do to support and drive creativity, and the role of the Culture Mile in supporting a creative society.

Each organisation outlines the way that their work has developed to encompass outreach and life-long learning opportunities in the community, with particular drive to unlock each person’s creativity. The links between culture ,commerce and finance were also discussed.

Questions from the audience included issues such as sponsorship, digital services, and the work of creating a cultural community which could call Culture Mile its home- central to this being affordable housing.

So, lots to enjoy and lots to think about for the future, in a very listenable hour.

You can watch or listen to the whole event via the link here.