Cultural policy of the GLC

Loraine Leeson shared a panel with Hilary Wainwright and Linda Bellos OBE to speak about the cultural legacy of the Greater London Council. As a former member of the GLC’s Community Arts sub-committee in the 1980s, she drew on this experience to highlight the usefully different model offered by its arts policies to the top-down, target-driven arts funding structures, which are so familiar today. GLC policies led to a different kind of art, and with new life now being breathed into the Labour movement, younger generations are looking to lessons from the past to learn how things can be done differently.