From Public to Community: Lessons from the Community Arts Movement

‘Public history’ is a funny old term when you stop and think about it. People argue endlessly about what the historian’s role is supposed to be in this process – a guide, a guardian of knowledge, a storyteller, or something else entirely. But in all these debates, one question usually slips through the cracks: What is the ‘public’ actually meant to do in public history? 

And the moment you ask that; you uncover another assumption: why on earth are we separating the ‘public’ from the ‘historian’ in the first place? Are they really two different species? Or have historians, academics, and self-styled ‘professionals’ simply decided to draw that line because it suits them? It’s remarkable how rarely the field stops to confront that. Some will shrug and say, ‘Well of course the two are separate – historians are in universities and the public aren’t.’ But then you have to ask: why do historians lock themselves away in universities and then spend so much time lamenting the very separation they created? It’s an odd sort of self-made exile.  

Now, it wasn’t always like this. If you go back to the last quarter of the twentieth century, you find something far more energetic, far more genuinely rooted in local voices: the community arts movement. It wasn’t public history, not exactly, but it wrestled with many of the same questions – especially how to work with people, rather than performing culture at them. And frankly, there’s a lot in that movement that public history today desperately needs to remember, especially in an age where ‘public engagement’ often means little more than choosing which subscription tier you want or can afford. So, what follows is a look at that community arts movement – how it emerged, what it stood for, and what lessons it offers anyone serious about letting communities shape their own past. 

THE BIRTH OF ‘COMMUNITY ARTS’

Many try to trace community arts in Britain back to at least the 1930s, with travelling theatre troupes and performance groups turning up in towns and villages. But the explosion of community arts in the 1970s brought something genuinely new – something that set it miles apart from those earlier attempts. The touring shows of the 1930s were built on a fairly patronising assumption: that the working classes needed ‘emancipating’ from ‘ignorance’. The 1970s movement flatly rejected that. It started from a much more grounded, and frankly much more accurate, belief: every community already has its own stories, its own views, its own creativity. The problem wasn’t a lack of knowledge; it was a lack of access to the resources required to express it. As Harold Baldry of the Arts Council wrote in 1974, community arts projects were not reliant on ‘organisational form, nor bricks and mortar, but the commitment and dedication of the individuals involved’. 

And that frightened the cultural establishment. 

The Association of Community Artists didn’t see its job as handing out paper and paint. They saw it as part of something much larger – what the United Nations called ‘community development’. And the key to that was simple: communities taking the initiative themselves. Not being guided, nudged, managed or tidied up, but leading. You can imagine how unsettling that was for those used to telling people what culture ought to look like. And if you ask many who today call themselves public historians, you’ll find the same unease. Hand over the initiative to the community? For some, that’s unthinkable. It would mean letting go of the strange priestly authority they believe they hold – and becoming, well, ordinary people again. 

Alongside this push for cultural democracy, the movement took pains to state its aims clearly. The Greater London Arts Association described community arts as something that: ‘involves people on a collective basis, encourages the use of a collective statement, but does not neglect individual development or the need for individual expression’. Hard to disagree with that, really. And as Raymond Williams pointed out back in 1983, ‘community’ is one of those rare words that nobody ever seems to use negatively – no easy opposite, no clean way to criticise it. Yet despite that, both then and now, there’s always been a streak of suspicion toward the very idea of community. Not because communities are dangerous, but because genuine community power threatens the people who like to think they’re running the show. 

THE DEATH OF THE ‘COMMUNITY’ AND THE BIRTH OF THE ‘PUBLIC’

When the Thatcher years rolled in, a lot of the big community projects that had been bubbling away through the seventies suddenly found themselves out of favour. The push was all towards the individual, not the collective. So, when the 1990s arrived and ‘community arts’ quietly disappeared, replaced by the much friendlier-sounding ‘participatory arts’, plenty of people in the cultural establishment breathed a sigh of relief. As François Matarasso points out, this wasn’t just a new label. Changing the word changed the whole idea. What had once been about groups working together for their own purposes became something far tamer – arts programmes run for people, not by them, and supported by public funds as long as they didn’t rock the boat. 

Matarasso explains it nicely, far better than I can: ‘Art forms and activities that offered opportunities for celebration, such as parades, carnivals and outdoor events, took precedence over those that demanded more intellectual, aesthetic or political engagement from participants, audiences or the artists themselves’. Nothing wrong with a carnival, of course. The issue isn’t the activity – it’s the shift in who gets to decide what it all means. It’s the difference between turning up to something and shaping it. And that’s exactly where I want to move towards public history. 

Because what happened to community arts is happening again with public history. The word ‘public’ sounds brilliant – open, friendly, accessible, something for everyone. But scratch the surface and you often find a very different picture. The public are invited in, yes, but usually only within boundaries set by institutions, experts and funders. It’s participation, certainly – but participation on someone else’s terms. You’re allowed to join in, but not to steer. And while no one today would openly admit to wanting only a select few to take part, you do sometimes get the sense that many in the heritage and ‘public history’ world feel far more comfortable with a tidy, familiar audience than with the unpredictable, sprawling reality of real communities. 

And that’s the crucial point. Participatory arts meant people could join in, but they didn’t get to decide the purpose. And much of public history works in the same way today. Visitors press buttons in museums, listen to podcasts, take part in workshops – all good things in themselves – but the real decisions about what stories get told, and how, and by whom, are still made somewhere else. The public are present, but the initiative isn’t theirs. So instead of shared creation, we end up with something much safer: managed consumption. History for the public, not history with them. 

But the old community arts movement, before the language was softened and the politics stripped out, had a much more powerful idea at its centre. It treated communities not as audiences or recipients, but as creators – the ones who actually make the culture rather than just absorb it. And that idea matters. It cuts right to the weakness in so much of what passes for public history today: that for all its enthusiasm and good intentions, it still clings to the same top-down structures and expert-driven assumptions the community arts movement tried to challenge fifty years ago. If we’re serious about creating meaningful engagement with the past, we need to understand the difference between letting people take part and letting them take the lead. And it’s at this point that the lessons of the community arts movement stop being interesting historical footnotes and start being absolutely essential.

THE ‘PUBLIC’ HISTORIAN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE ‘COMMUNITY’ HISTORIAN

In the same way Matarasso shows that changing the word from ‘community’ to ‘participatory’ altered the whole point of the movement, I think we need to do the same with public history. Whilst of course, we should not give up the fight to reclaim public history for what it truly is, we ought to stop worrying so much about ‘public historians’ and start talking about ‘community historians’ instead. And the wonderful thing is, you don’t need a degree, or a badge, or a job title to be a community historian. Anyone can do it. In fact, most people already are – they just don’t call it that. Because real history, the sort that matters to people’s lives, doesn’t begin with experts handing down wisdom from on high. It begins with people telling their own stories, digging into their own places, and sharing what they know. It’s ordinary people who know the fields, the streets, the buildings, and the memories better than any outsider ever could. 

If we want history to mean something, we’ve got to stop acting like it’s some great secret only historians can unlock. Throw away the umbrella, get off the high horse, and get down into the mud with everyone else. Because once you’re there, you realise very quickly that just because historians might have collected more information over the years, it doesn’t mean they’ve got more to say about it. A community historian knows that the best history happens when everyone joins in – when you listen before you talk, when you share rather than guard, and when you treat the past as something we’re all responsible for, not something that belongs in a museum case. So, whereas BBC Radio Three’s first broadcast was titled ‘How to Listen’, perhaps the more pertinent question is: ‘To whom should we listen?’” 

That, really, is the whole point: history isn’t ours to give. It’s ours to make together.

Bibliography 

Arts Council of Great Britain, Community Arts. The Report of the Community Arts Working Party (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974). 

Franklin, Geraint, ‘Murals and the Community Arts in England 1968–86: A Thematic Study’, Historic England (2023). 

Jeffers, Alison, and Gerri Moriarty, Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). 

Kelly, Owen, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia, 1984). 

Matarasso, François, ‘“All in This Together”: The Depoliticisation of Community Art in Britain, 1970–2011’, ICAF (2015). 

Matarasso, François, ‘A (Very Short) History of the British Community Arts Movement’, A Restless Art, 8 March 2018 https://arestlessart.com/2018/03/08/a-very-short-history-of-the-british-community-arts-movement/.