Meet the menders
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  4. Category D, Seeing and reflecting
Seeing and reflecting

Discipline 9. Cultural, creative and heritage practitioners

A tall young person with a shaved head and hoop earrings on a stepladder, painting a mural of a roofline, a river and a tree.

Maturity of support

  • 3Codification
  • 4Institutions
  • 4Training
  • 4Communities
  • 4Academia
  • 3.8Overall, mean of the five

This discipline uses community arts, participatory culture and heritage activities to engage with and activate communities. This includes socially engaged artists and culture-led regeneration. The work is distinct from the wider arts sector in its focus on civic renewal, and distinct from general renewal work by foregrounding culture – storytelling, memory, ritual, and the creation of shared symbolic capital. The practitioners we talked to often described their work as meaning-making – helping communities and places to tell their stories and deepen a sense of pride or identity.

There is a case for also including civic uses of sport in this section, which do similar work through community participation, regular gatherings, and helping to form local identity.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

This discipline scores highly, but more of the support available is focused on the wider cultural sector, as opposed to civic applications. There are many relevant institutions: funders such as Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund; sector bodies such as the Museums Association, Historic England and the Heritage Alliance; ArtWorks Alliance, the UK community of practice for participatory arts, which maintains a Code of Practice, and place-based exemplars in most regions. Codification is emerging; for example, a network led by Battersea Arts Centre is developing practitioner standards for socially-engaged practice and there is the Museums Association’s Code of Ethics for Museums, revised in 2025, and heritage engagement guidance from Historic England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s inclusion, access and participation principle.

There is lots of training available at postgraduate level – applied theatre, community arts, heritage management, museum studies – and there are apprenticeship standards for collections technicians and cultural learning and participation officers. The academic literature is substantial and long-running. Practitioner communities are also active and well-attended.