Industrial ruination, community arts, and creativity capitalism in late twentieth-century Liverpool

Many Britons live in cities in which former factories have become galleries, in which the ‘creative classes’ have been called on to regenerate neighbourhoods and in which the ‘cultural industries’ are a well-defined ‘sector’ of the local economy. Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, however, and the scrambling of once clearly defined lines of determination between culture and the economy that it entails, this story does not yet have a history. Focussing on the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, this article is about the ways in which artists, activists, academics, politicians, and planners worked at multiple registers to activate the creative energies of inner-city working-class populations, turn surplus buildings into galleries and museums, and identify the ‘cultural industries’ as a macroeconomic ‘sector’ to be calculated and cultivated by policy. Understanding this newly elevated place of cultural production requires thinking about post-war British social and urban history in terms of the management of obsolescence— the redeployment of people, land, and buildings rendered surplus. To tell this story, Liverpool is used as a case study, a city whose deployment of creativity capitalism was necessitated by its spectacular post-war economic and environmental crisis.