Collaboration

Blackpool will establish a new cultural partnership to help the local arts sector recover from Covid-19.

Initiatives including a town centre creative hub and new live-work studios for artists will be pursued with the support of Blackpool Council.

The council said it hoped the partnership would help with "developing a vision and maximising investment in the sector".

Blackpool was recently named one of Arts Council England's priority places for investment.

Recent surveys have uncovered much creative talent and a full ecology of arts activity in the area, from amateur and community arts to professional creative work, but lower levels of investment than other parts of England.

Belfast has become the third UK city to recieve UNESCO City of Music status.

The accolade, announced on Monday (November 8), recognises the Northern Irish capital's unique musical heritage and local efforts to strengthen engagement with music.

A 2018 survey undertaken during the European Capital of Culture bidding process identified music as the city's strongest cultural output, prompting the bid for UNESCO status.

"Being deisgnated as a UNESCO City of Music honours the gargantuan effort that the entire music scene has made to help raise Belfast up and out of the darkest of times," Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody commmented.

Belfast will join the UN body's Creative Cities Network of 59 places, with Lightbody and Emmy-nominated composer Hannah Peel acting as official Belfast Music patrons.

Belfast City Council will consult residents on a City of Music action plan, having worked with a City of Music steering group on the bid submission.

Glasgow was the first UK city awarded the title in 2008, followed by Liverpool in 2016.

Cultural festival LEEDS 2023 is bringing locally-based artists together with international collaborators in two new programmes as part of its year-long programme.

The World in Our City, the City in Our World will include work by musicians, DJs, theatre makers and writers from cities including Kuala Lumpur, Karachi and Durban.

A second programme, Tech for the Public Good, will create an online residency with participants from countries including Ghana, Iraq, Lebanon, Nepal, Mexico and the UK.

Both programmes are supported by the British Council.

LEEDS 2023 Executive Producer Emma Beverley said: “This work will see us foster new connections across borders whilst also supporting and developing local talent.”

A citizen's assembly on the role of arts and culture - the first of its kind anywhere in the world - has begun.

A new website launched on Thursday (October 14) for residents of Coventry to share their views on how arts and culture can shape the city's future.

The ideas given online will be debated by 50 paid participants, who have been randomly selected from a representative sample of the population.

That group's recommendations will help form Coventry's long term cultural planning and a series of creative projects in 2022.

“This poll is a way of getting a sense of how the wider city feels about the issues the assembly is debating, and of feeding other views, perspectives and ideas in for the assembly participants to deliberate," said Janet Vaughan, Co-Artistic Director of project lead Talking Birds.

The website remains open for comments until November 5.

National Museums Liverpool (NML) has announced the winners of a competition to redevelop Liverpool’s Canning Dock.

Architects Asif Khan, Mariam Kamara and Sir David Adjaye will work alongside artist Theaster Gates to transform the area between the Royal Albert Dock and Mann Island.

Competition judges were unanimous in picking the winning team, whose plans start with redeveloping spaces in the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Building “to explore and investigate the transatlantic slave trade and legacies”.

Gates hopes the redevelopment will “give emotional heft to the truth of slavery in the UK”.

“Canning Dock represents one of the most important racialised sites in the UK and it gives me tremendous honour to work with this team to realise the complexity of the site.”

A 'partnership gallery' at Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery will open in 2024, the British Museum has announced.

The museum's Bronze Age displays will be "redeveloped" to make better use of gallery space and create narratives about historical local life.

Three 12,800-year-old woolly mammoth skeletons - the most complete sets in northwest Europe - will be the draw card of the gallery.

The British Museum says the partnership will allow more of Shrewsbury's nationally significant geology and archaeology collections to be shared with the public