Great Northern Conference: 'One North' approach to promoting culture can help region rival London

Experts including Jude Kelly from One Creative North and Dianna Taylor from Future Humber discussed the need for more collaboration between both firms in the North and different regions.

Ms Kelly, who was previously artistic director at London’s Southbank Centre, said: “London and the South East are quite happy to be bundled together, but the idea of ‘the North’ is something you only talk about if you aren’t from the North.

“If you’re from here, you don’t talk about the North, you talk about Liverpool or Leeds or Sunderland or Middlesbrough.

“We’ve been driven to compete to be noticed and to stand out. We’ve always had to have outstanding features in our own regions and fight for them to be noticed, and that creates a very complex issue around how we collaborate.

"And who are we trying to be noticed by? Not by each other, but by the South, because that's where the investors are going.

“There's anxiety, because it's always been like this, and people are keen for collaboration, but they’re worried it might mean giving away a bit of their own pie. I think the psychology of collaboration needs to be looked at between us all. I think we’ve got to learn to go beyond the idea of flying the flag for one city, and fly the flag for the North, but we’ve got a long way to go to do that.”

Speaking on the need for cross-industry collaboration, Ms Taylor added: “Showcasing that regional identity and place narrative is unbelievably important and it's about doing that together. We can only do that if we bring in private, public and the creative industries together.

“We can absolutely demonstrate and evidence the value that working together can bring across the industry. There’s a lot of shared expertise and support for creative industries across the arts and culture and heritage.”

Rebecca Ball, from Arts Council England, which acted as a support partner for the session, cited transport issues as a major barrier to Northern collaboration.

She said: “That sense of collaboration absolutely comes back to the workforce for me. If we’re going to have a really powerful creative industry in the North, we need to be able to have a workforce that can get to different places.

“A huge amount of our workforce in the creative industry are freelancers, and we need to be able to make sure they can work in Liverpool and Hull and Manchester, in the same way that people can work in London and the Southeast.

"This is all about having a successful workforce, and one of the barriers to that is transport.”

Bernard Hay from Creative PEC also noted the role of the region's universities in the Northern creative sector.

He said: “One partner I think is crucial to this is the universities. We've done some work looking at particular barriers that creative firms across the country face, and interestingly, creative firms in the North are far more likely than elsewhere to cite proximity to universities as being really important to their growth model.

“I think that tells us something about the strength and opportunity in the North of England, but it's about how we bring universities into our collaboration work.”

Speaking on the need for wider collaboration, Ms Kelly added: “We also have to want to collaborate, and we have to really believe that the new ideas that will come from it will bring us more benefits.

“It is not just about sharing more of what we’ve already got, but about releasing so much more potential and economic power.”