Sheffield's cultural industries quarter 20 years on: What can be learned from a pioneering example?

The Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ) in Sheffield was set up in 1981 as a local government initiative. At the time this was regarded as an extraordinary, either brave or foolish, use of public money. This paper argues that the development of the CIQ over 20 years has been adversely affected by early decisions made before cultural quarters were commonplace. Left-wing politics focusing on job creation and a climate of reliance of public funding encouraged the CIQ to develop according to a particularly narrow model of cultural regeneration. Later, a lack of leadership among the public funders discouraged diversification from this model, while elsewhere cultural quarters embraced a broader mix of social and economic activity, leaving the Sheffield experiment as something of a dinosaur. The paper seeks to analyse what mistakes were made, their effects, and what now can be done to update and enliven the Sheffield Quarter.