Meet the thinker – Tim Jones
Tim Jones of TJ Culture
This fifth instalment of 'Meet the Thinker' introduces Tim Jones, a giant of cultural placemaking in London.
Tim is someone who is always blazing a trail and thinking of ways of improving approaches to embedding culture in our cities. We’ve looked up to him and his work for nearly a decade, all the way from Down Under. Starting his career as a theatre director, he has now staked out a strategic capability that looks at a variety of levers and mechanisms for structurally making space for culture in cities. And he’s playing with the big boys like the City of London Corporation, a unique local government that is over 1000 years old and governs the Square Mile of the City of London.
Recently, he was the Culture Mile Manager for the City of London Corporation. This was a new position for a new proposition designed to materialise a cultural district in a traditional business district, leveraging the few but heavy-hitting institutions within the City of London, including the upcoming London Museum. I sat down with him to discuss the legacy of the Culture Mile, the rise of Business Improvement Districts and whether they can - in a lasting way - embed culture in the city.
Tell us a bit more about the Culture Mile project and its objectives…
The Culture Mile was really a prototype that was born out of the recognition that creativity is a skill for the future that is relevant and central to global employment hubs (like the City of London). It leveraged the fact that - while not defined by its cultural institutions - the City of London is home to several of them, including the Barbican, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the London Symphony Orchestra and soon-relocated-and-relaunched London Museum. Each organisation contributed within a distributed model, activating the spaces in between, delivering creative learning opportunities and getting culture beyond its walls in more accessible ways to reach the day-in day-out users of the City of London.
Implementing this approach was - of course - very difficult during a global pandemic. Whether it was the finding creative ways to reach isolated members of the community or engaging those without the luxury of pivoting to online because they didn’t have an internet connection to start with, there was still a place-based agenda, even though the target audience assumptions that had underpinned the program didn’t apply.
What sort of programs and experiences did the Culture Mile revert to given this challenging context?
We quickly realised that instead of presenting ‘institutional’ content in the public realm and meeting patchy success at reaching people, we needed to use culture, communications and placemaking as a means to build community. Our program ended up being quite diverse and multi-faceted and included initiatives like:
Creating an arts radio station that broadcast for a few weeks at a hyperlocal scale, to build a sense of playfulness, optimism for local residents
Developing cardboard packs that contained A4 sheets, exercise, instructions to promote creative activities and fend off boredom
Collaborating with the Culture and Commerce Taskforce to identify tangible ways in which culture could lead the post-Covid recovery (the findings of which can be found in Fuelling Cultural Renewal)
We got great community recognition and thanks for this work. People used the coloured chalk to leave us heartfelt messages on the pavement and sent in photographs. I’ve never experienced more genuine thanks for the work we do.
The Culture Mile - in its original form - is no more. What has replaced it and what does it mean for place-based collaboration to support culture?
The pandemic meant that the agenda we’d started in one corner of the ‘Square Mile’ needed to be applied across the whole financial district. Covid-19 had demonstrated that the technology now exists so that, in the majority of cases, financial and professional services workers could work happily from home. So what do we need financial districts for? The whole City had to urgently pay much more attention to what would encourage people to travel in, to spend time, to feel welcome and an affinity for this part of the City.
This led to the rise of the City of London’s ‘Destination City’ initiative into which all of the Culture Mile work was absorbed. At the same time, we had the idea to create a broader model that raised funding from participating businesses in the local area and dedicate some of that to culture. Given we’re in the City of London, it’s fair to assume that the BID levy would be a decent amount of money. This proposal went to ballot successfully in 2023 and that’s how the Culture Mile BID was formed.
Can BIDs be a source of sustainability for culture?
It depends what we mean by culture. It’s not a magical pot of money that replaces funding that arts nonprofits rely on. BIDs have annual budgets that have to cover a lot of bases, such as additional cleaning, security, lighting, public realm improvements. Some money can be tied to cultural outcomes but everything needs to be clearly beneficial to the interests of the businesses in the area, particularly the levy payers. In my experience so far, the cultural vocabulary of many BIDs is quite narrow and tends to be pretty marketing-driven: light projections on building facades, Christmas-time activations, outdoor cinema screens.
Embedding culture in the remit of a BID requires looking at cultural engagement patterns in a more detailed way, relying on the data that we have about that. If culture is going to work in that context, we have to think about how to insert it seamlessly; we need to consider the product carefully; it has to meet audiences where they are. And that can be a challenge for the cultural industry that is used to certain models and modes of engagement.
It’s an area of innovation that needs to be trialled and tested within the Australian context. It will take some experimentation to figure out how culture can find its home within the BID model and justify on-going investment by businesses who contribute.
