The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, came to Frieze yesterday to launch his promotional campaign for London’s creative industries, London Creates, and highlighted his plan to build more artist studio spaces in the city.
Speaking in front of the Yinka Shonibare work in Frieze Sculpture, Khan and Justine Simons, the deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, spoke about their intention to partner with other stakeholders across the public and private sectors in order to build 71,000 sq. m of affordable workspaces by 2026.
Simons told The Art Newspaper that the mayor’s office will “protect artist studios by hardwiring them into the planning system” while offering “support on business rates that are below the market rate”.
The studios will reside in 12 so-called Creative Enterprise Zones, which aim to support 800 creative businesses and help 5,000 young Londoners break into the creative sector over the next three years.
The initiative comes after Khan invested £14.7m in six pilot zones across London in 2018—in Brixton, Croydon, Deptford and New Cross, Hackney Wick and Fish Island, and Hounslow and Tottenham. Research released by the mayor’s office in June found that, on average, creative businesses working in each of the pilot zones grew by 22%, compared with a fall of 4% for those outside of a zone.
Zones have now been newly created in the London boroughs of Brent, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing, Waltham Forest and Westminster.
In July this year research by the artist support charity Acme revealed that many of London’s artists are close to giving up on their career in art. Close to a third of those asked in the survey said financial pressures will force them to change careers within five years.
“When we first started looking at this, we could see the data on all affordable studios going downhill,” Simons said. “We’ve managed to begin to reverse that trend. There are still challenges, but we’re seeing a net gain in London.”
Thangham Debonaire, the shadow culture secretary, liaised with Simons on the success of Creative Enterprise Zones before announcing a national cultural infrastructure plan for the arts at the Labour party conference this week, which will seek to roll out the policy nationally.
“A lot of London’s cultural infrastructure is now protected in the planning system,” Simons says. “It’s now part of the architecture of the city. It will be permanent and affordable.”