Working-Class Creativity, Ageing & Belonging in the Arts - Flourishing Lives Webinar
This blog has grown out of a recent webinar I delivered on class, creativity and older people. It’s based on my own experiences and observations as a working-class practitioner, and the conversations I continue to have with older people in community spaces.
“We’ve always been creative, we just didn’t call it art”
Throughout the webinar, I shared photographs of my family and upbringing. I grew up with stories of my grandad Frank singing opera whenever he had the chance, at work, at parties, anywhere really. I also grew up on talent show circuits as a child, and my mum is still the karaoke queen. I spoke about the creativity on Castle Vale, the estate where I grew up and where my family still live.
Those experiences shaped my understanding of creativity long before I ever entered formal arts spaces. And I think that matters, because so often working-class creativity exists outside the places institutions traditionally recognise as “culture”.
When I talk about class and the arts, I’m talking about the barriers I still navigate now as a working-class person in the arts, barriers rooted in the same structures that shaped many older people’s experiences of culture decades ago.
When I sit in rooms with older people, I can still see those histories present in who feels comfortable, who hesitates, and who says “this isn’t for me.”
I also want to acknowledge that there is no single working-class experience. Mine is just one perspective, shaped by my own history, place and circumstances. Any conversation about class also has to sit alongside race, disability, gender, sexuality, faith, geography, and the many other intersecting experiences that shape how people move through the world and through cultural spaces.
Why These Conversations Feel Urgent
These conversations feel increasingly urgent because we are watching the long-term effects of classism in the arts play out across people’s lives and across the sector itself.
At the same time:
The cost-of-living crisis continues to widen inequalities
Arts provision in state education has been dramatically reduced
Community centres, libraries and voluntary organisations, often the places where working-class people experience creativity, are under increasing threat
The arts sector is under pressure to engage so-called “hard to reach” communities while class diversity within the workforce continues to decline
We also have a rapidly growing ageing population that remains deeply underserved
If the same communities are described as “hard to reach” year after year, I think that tells us something important about our systems and models, not about those communities.
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Class?
In the UK, class is not just about income or material wealth. It’s about whose lives are recognised, respected and celebrated and whose are criticised, demonised or overlooked. The word “class” often disappears from conversations where we are otherwise comfortable discussing privilege. We might talk about white privilege, male privilege, or nepotism in the arts, but class frequently remains unnamed.
Class Therapy founder Nell Ash speaks about understanding class through a “kaleidoscope” rather than a single lens:
“A kaleidoscope view of working class life means bearing witness to many shards at once.”
And that feels important to me.
Because class lives in:
Accent
Language
Behaviour
Confidence
Clothing
Taste
Communication styles
Relationships to authority
Histories of exclusion
What feels familiar or natural in particular spaces
Arts spaces are full of these signals. If you grew up middle or upper-middle class, many of those signals can feel invisible or neutral - if you didn’t, they can feel like constant, low-level tests.
Class Is Embodied
Class is not just theoretical, it’s emotional and embodied. It lives in:
Childhood experiences of education and institutions
Feeling out of place
Relationships with authority
Fear of saying the wrong thing
Imposter syndrome
Histories of exclusion that can stretch across decades
And for older working-class people, these experiences often accumulate over a lifetime. When participation in arts and culture is lower in later life, it is often framed as a matter of choice or personal interest. But frequently it reflects something much deeper: lifelong structural exclusion.
Because cultural participation builds over time and we know less access early on can mean less familiarity, confidence and a sense of entitlement to participate later - with those barriers often misread as personal failings rather than structural ones.
The Myth of the Arts Meritocracy
Talking honestly about class also disrupts something the arts sector often likes to believe about itself.
That the arts are naturally inclusive.
That talent alone determines success.
That if you work hard enough, you’ll make it.
But class exposes the cracks in that story. Because we have to ask:
Who could afford unpaid opportunities?
Who viewed the arts as a realistic career path?
Who already understood the “rules” of cultural spaces?
Who could take risks?
Who already spoke the “right” language before they even entered the room?
In many arts settings, the way we speak, critique, network, and define professionalism is shaped by middle and upper-class culture but presented as universal.
The Emotional Weight of Class
I also think it’s important to acknowledge the emotional complexity class can carry on all sides.
For some working-class people, there can be shame around:
Not knowing the rules
Not having time or resources to dedicate to creative practice
Feeling pressure to create a more “acceptable” version of yourself
Feeling reduced to narrow stereotypes of what working-class identity should look like
For some middle-class people, there can be:
Guilt around advantage
Fear of saying the wrong thing
Anxiety about judgement
So it’s not surprising that class conversations are often avoided, but avoiding them doesn’t make them disappear.
Access or Redistribution?
Eventually these conversations lead to a much bigger question: Are the arts about widening access to existing systems?
Or are they about redistributing cultural power?
Because those are not the same thing and this question challenges:
Who decides what counts as art
Whose creativity is valued
Who leads organisations
Whose lives are reflected in cultural spaces
Which forms of creativity receive recognition and funding
And language matters here too, terms like “hard to reach” audiences can become ways of talking around class without naming it directly, when what we may actually mean is:
Historically excluded
Under-recognised
Poorly served by institutional models
Not reflected in current structures
Working-Class Creativity Has Always Existed
Working-class creativity has always existed, it simply hasn’t always been recognised by institutions.
Often it:
Happens outside formal arts spaces
Is embedded in everyday life
Is social and collective
Isn’t labelled as “art”
So many older people I work with carry rich creative histories, but they don’t necessarily recognise those experiences as the kinds of creativity that “count”.
Yet creativity exists everywhere:
Storytelling
Humour
Karaoke
Amateur dramatics
Sewing and repair
Cooking
Hair and beauty
Gardening
DIY
Fashion and personal style
Faith celebrations
Social clubs
Shared memory and local language
Perhaps one of the questions we need to ask ourselves as practitioners is:
What forms of creativity do our programmes already recognise and what are we missing when classism is present?
Bringing Ballet Into Community Spaces
One example I shared during the webinar came from LinkAge Plus at Toynbee Hall and its long-term partnership with English National Ballet.
The Dancing East programme offers free weekly creative movement sessions for people over 50. Classes are led by professional dancers, often with live music, and participants are also supported to attend performances at the ballet.
What feels particularly important is that the programme does not expect people to first enter formal ballet spaces independently. Instead, ballet is brought into a community setting where people have a sense of ownership and trust - confidence, familiarity and choice are then built gradually from there.
When speaking to participants, what stood out most strongly was not simply how they felt about the activity itself, but how they spoke about creativity, confidence and belonging.
People said things like:
“Growing up as a working class person… it’s not part of your make-up.”
“I’ve never been to a ballet before… I wasn’t brought up to go.”
“People might think creativity only happens in galleries and theatres…but for me, it happens at the community centre with other people.”
And perhaps most movingly:
“I’ve surprised myself with what I turned out.”
The programme demonstrates what can happen when cultural organisations work in partnership with trusted community spaces rather than expecting people to adapt entirely to institutional environments alone.
Rethinking “Creative Excellence”
Lately, I’ve also found myself thinking a lot about the phrase “creative excellence” not because excellence itself is unimportant but because I think we need to ask:
What do we actually mean by excellence?
And who gets to define it?
Words like “excellence” can sound neutral, but they are shaped by particular histories, values and forms of cultural recognition. If we are not careful, they can reinforce the very inequalities we claim to challenge - where certain forms of training, language, confidence and expression are rewarded while others remain invisible.
I think this tension is reflected in recent conversations around the future of arts funding and cultural policy in the UK. There is often strong emphasis on improving access to “excellent culture”, but much less focus on recognising that creativity already exists within communities and may need resourcing and valuing rather than introducing.
Because if our definition of excellence remains narrow, and our solutions focus only on helping people access existing systems, then we risk overlooking the creative lives people are already living outside the structures we are used to valuing.
And ultimately, that brings us back to the central question:
Are the arts about widening access to existing systems?
Or are they about redistributing cultural power?
A huge thank you to Flourishing Lives for making this webinar possible and their support throughout the process.
Find a list of further reading here.
