ABSTRACT
Industries Task Force that more than one million people were now employed in the sector. The new so-called guru to Tony Blair, economist and journalist Charles Leadbeater has talked about the future Hollywoodisation of the UK labour market (Leadbeater 1999). He was referring to the process by which many scripts are written but only a few make it into production. Leadbeater wanted young British ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ to adopt a more resilient approach, where failure in one venture becomes an incentive to succeed in the next. At the same time, up and down the country, local councillors discuss ‘cultural regeneration’. In de-industrialised regions the prospect of attracting some artists with the lure of cheap studio space is the most desirable of outcomes for policy-makers. It creates interesting stories for the press, it holds the promise of gallery owners and more mainstream media companies moving in and with these the whole panoply of coffee shops, bars and restaurants, i.e. the ‘Shoreditch effect’. Such high hopes are not wholly restricted to urban areas; one recent report in the Guardian described an attempt to encourage creative and artistic skills among the nation’s farming and agricultural community, as they too face the same threat to their livelihoods as did industrial workers twenty years ago (Gibbons 1999).
