The Creative Cardiff Network

Professor Sara Pepper (pictured) is Co-Director of the Centre for the Creative Economy at Cardiff University. This is a transcript of Prof. Pepper's remarks at the CIC Place Forum held on 26 September 2024.

The Cardiff Capital region is made up of 10 local authorities and has a Growth Deal funded by both UK and Welsh Governments. There are significant strengths across the region in the creative and cultural sectors and particularly in film, television, drama, factual journalism, news, music and performing arts.

About 10 years ago, two colleagues at Cardiff University, Professor Ian Hargreaves and Professor Justin Lewis, were interested in identifying the strengths of the city and the growing region and developed a proposal for the university Executive Board to see where the university could add value. That is the focus of my presentation today: how and where universities can play a role in developing a cultural ecosystem in particular places.

I am pleased to say that the university Executive Board agreed to a three-year commitment, and I was brought in to work with Justin and Ian to think about what Cardiff could do in this space.

It has since become more commonplace for UK universities to play a role in the development of our places and our creative and cultural sectors – for example through the Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP), Audiences of the Future (AoF) or CoSTAR. But, at that time, I was certainly aware that my career had been in both industry and academia and that early on I needed to listen and talk to as many people as possible to see what was happening in our place. In the first year I had 550+ meetings to listen to what possibilities were both with and without the university.

An early action from this was to build a network. The Creative Cardiff Network is a membership network designed to engage, support and enable the creative workforce in the city. I remember being interviewed by BBC Wales on launch day and being asked if a physicist in Bridgend could join the network and I responded, ‘if you're a physicist in Bridgend and you think it is for you, then please join’. It was about being open to engaging the sector in the widest possible way, but no physicist from Bridgend ever came forward so there was some sort of self-selection.

We had some great models to follow: Creative Edinburgh, Creative Dundee and globally such as Creative Cape Town. We have continued to undertake research into these networks that have grown as their creative sectors has grown and we previously published a report on this called ‘Joining The Dots’, where we mapped all of the creative city networks across the UK at that time and made some recommendations about how to understand their value to places in which they are situated.

The Creative Cardiff Network was not built alone. We worked with partners such as the BBC, Cymru Wales, Cardiff City Council and the Wales Millennium Centre who came on board as founder members. The network was also co-designed with the creative community starting with a campaign called ‘52 Things’ in year one designed with and for the creative community.

The network was not just about bringing people together. It was also about collaboration, innovation and enhancing value creation and exploitation. Sector mapping was also important, and we undertook our first mapping exercise in 2016. We wanted to include freelancers, which was not a common approach at the time. We have since evolved that work to produce the Creative Economy Atlas Cymru with data on the workforce, freelancers, organisations, workspaces and so on.

Creative Cardiff will be 10 years old next year and currently has over 22,000 followers across our media platforms. We have supported recruitment into 7,000 jobs through the network over the past nine years and worked with over 4,000 businesses and individuals and more recently run the Creative Industries Cluster Hubs initiative to drive investment and extend the benefits of Cardiff’s thriving creative industries across the Cardiff Capital Region (CCR).

Two important projects followed Creative Cardiff – Clwstwr and Media Cymru. About four years after we launched Creative Cardiff, the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy gave rise to a Creative Industries Sector Deal and Clusters Programme to support R&D and innovation. There were nine clusters across the UK including Clwstwr (Welsh for cluster) in Cardiff which started in 2019 and ran for four and a half years. The £10m programme provided funding for 120 R&D projects, which realised £2.5m in match funding, around 400 jobs and around a 650% increase in patents and copyrights. But it was much more than funding. We built a framework of support and resources to build capacity.

Whilst we were delivering the cluster programme, we also had the opportunity to bid for the UKRI Strengthen Places Programme which was available to any sector and again focused on R&D. We applied with a programme called Media Cymru and were successful realising £22m in UKRI funding to go alongside the £28m in matched funding working with 23 consortium partners, ranging from the BBC and Channel 4 to much smaller companies and our freelance community. Media Cymru will fund around another 150 R&D projects and 20 large-scale innovation projects over the course of the programme.

A lot of hard work has gone into understanding the Cardiff region’s creative communities and getting these development opportunities and funds in place, but at the heart of this has been a focus on values. What is our place about? What are our creative strengths and assets? Where is our place trying to get to? What partnerships are needed? The diagram below shows how we have done this.

The quadruple helix that we use brings together government, policy, academia, education, business and civil society. The logos on here are just a few, but we have thousands that we could list in terms of the infrastructure and ecosystem that we have built. It shows the complexity of what is required.

I think the final thought from me is a quote I heard when I started this work. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." I think we have gone some way in the region to achieve some forward motion but collectively, across the UK, we have much further to travel together.

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