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The Guardian view on Yvette Cooper’s ‘town of culture’ proposal: a fine idea | Editorial

Instituting a UK ‘town of culture’ award alongside the existing ‘city of culture’ title might look like a desperate post-Brexit search for meaning. But the idea could bring real benefits to Britain’s communities

A group of Labour MPs, among them Yvette Cooper, are bringing in the new year with a call to institute a UK “town of culture” award. The proposal is that it should sit alongside the existing city of culture title, which was held by Derry-Londonderry in 2013, by Hull in 2017, and has been awarded to Coventry for 2021. Cooper and her colleagues argue that the success of the crown for Hull, where it brought in £220m of investment and an avalanche of arts, ought not to be confined to cities. Britain’s towns, it is true, are not prevented from applying, but they generally lack the resources to put together a bid to beat their bigger competitors; only one, Paisley, has ever made the shortlist. A town of culture award could, it is argued, become an annual event, attracting funding and creating jobs.

Some might see the proposal as a somewhat parochial step – a booby prize for the fact that Britain is no longer able to apply for the much more prestigious title of European capital of culture, a sought-after award bagged by Glasgow in 1990 and Liverpool in 2008, and to be held by the southern Italian city of Matera in 2019. (The news that Brexit would render the UK ineligible for the title came, rather bizarrely under the circumstances, as a surprise to many in 2017.) A cynic might speculate that the UK is on the verge of disappearing into an endlessly regressive frenzy of self-celebration in its desperation to reinvent itself for the post-Brexit world: after town of culture, who knows what will follow – village of culture? Suburb of culture? Hamlet of culture?

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SqWgrq
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