Abstract

Creative People and Places (CPP) is, in the words of Arts Council England, ‘A National Lottery-funded programme created […] to allocate investment to parts of the country
where involvement in arts and culture is significantly below the national average. Its aims are to transform the opportunities open to people in those places, support the public in
shaping local arts and cultural provision and, in so doing, increase attendance and participation in publicly funded art and culture’ (ACE, 2021: 66). This Learning Partner report focuses on one aspect of the University of Lancashire’s work with the West Cumbria CPP programme, Everyone Here, which the University have been involved with from the initial conceptualisation and bidding phase in early 2020 through to the present (with Everyone Here now at the end of its first 4-year funding phase). The report concerns issues of cultural infrastructure and cultural ecology in West Cumbria and how these relate to challenges faced by Everyone Here as it initially sought to established itself, and its subsequent work in influencing how both of those things – cultural infrastructure and ecology – have been confronted and renewed through the action research ethos that Everyone Here’s practices bring into being.