Arts for All, All for Arts – An Arts Town for Everyone

Sara Downham-Lotto 2025

Exploring role of the arts in local UK market town community. 

Arts for All, All for Arts – An Arts Town for Everyone, is a small esearch project Arts Lab devised in collaboration with UK’s Northumberland County Council.

The market town Hexham, is actively becoming an ‘Arts Town’, focusing on community engagement and creative projects centered at the Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, its main cultural hub. The town already boasts a vibrant arts scene with the Queen’s Hall offering theatre, exhibitions, and music, alongside historic sites like Hexham Abbey and an Art Deco cinema. The Arts Town initiative involves community feedback to guide future cultural development, building on Hexham’s existing artistic and cultural strengths as a market town. Arts Lab played a small role in this.

Autumn 2025, during a day-long drop-in workshop at the Hexham Community Arts Fair, Sara invited local visitors to participate in a 2-part activity called Does Art matter to You. The project was explained as follows:

Hexham is in the process of becoming an Arts Town. Really important is that you, as someone who lives here, get a say. Is this even something that you might be interested in in the first place? The Count Council wants “a town which celebrates and engages with the arts together”. Is the idea of Arts Town Hexham some pie-in-the-sky idea that thinks it’s for everyone, but is for just a few? Or can we find ways of making Hexham even more special ….. involving you?

Your voice really matters to us. 

We hear you when you say “the arts are not for me”, and want to understand why. Hexham has a number of resources for everyone – spaces, facilities, artists, exhibitions, theatres, etc. – and only a few people are using them. This is our first step to encourage you to get involved in any way that suits you and benefits you and your immediate community.

Participants were invited to complete a questionnaire with 7 simple questions. They were then asked to contribute to a collaborative collage, placing coloured pre-painted cards onto a giant patchwork. Asked ‘does art matter to you; if so, why?’ participants wrote their responses on the acetate and placed them wherever felt most pleasing to them over the top of the collage.