Reimagining Cities

It’s 35 years since Glasgow became the first European Capital of Culture in the UK, with Liverpool next to gain the title in 2008. The bidding process which would determine which UK city would next take the title, in 2023, was abruptly stopped, thanks to Brexit. Interestingly, Great Little Britain had already decided that the benefits of this “Capital of Culture” status were so good, we in the UK should have our own UK City of Culture… so we stole the European idea: Derry/Londonderry was the first, followed by Hull 2017, and Coventry 2021. Now Bradford is the UK’s current City of Culture (UKCC 2025), reshaping public perceptions and putting its young people and its homegrown talent centre stage to great effect, while Chemnitz in Germany and Nova Gorica (Slovenia) with Gorizia (Italy) wear 2025 the European Capital of Culture crowns.  

After John Wassell, Walk the Plank Co-Founder and Creative Producer, produced the Opening for Liverpool08, and Walk the Plank’s work featured within the whole year’s programme, our next encounter with ECoC was in Finland, when we created the opening for Turku2011, working beside a frozen river, again with director Mark Murphy, to re-animate the city’s shipyard with aerial dance, circus, choirs, fire and fireworks.  

In 2016 we worked in Malta, bringing a water pageant to Valletta’s harbour in the build up to their Capital of Culture year; and the following year, we built a creative team of Cypriot artists – writer, composer, designer, animation and digital content creator – to work with a cast of local dancers and gymnasts to ensure Pafos2017 could open with a spectacular presentation of the love story of Galatea and Pygmalion in the town’s newly transformed civic space.  

These experiences led to us developing two transnational projects focused on building artists' capacity to take advantage of the ECoC opportunities. The School of Spectacle involved Pafos2017 (Cyprus), Plovdiv2019 (Bulgaria), Kaunas2022 (Lithuania), Vezprem2023, Tartu2024, and Limerick – who had unsuccessfully bid for the 2020 title in Ireland, but wanted to keep the momentum generated by wider European links going.    

The success of that first iteration of our “learning-by-doing” School, bringing together emerging artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, led to the School of Participation, with returning partners in Plovdiv and Kaunas, and new partnerships forged with Graz (ECoC 2003), Novi Sad (ECoC 2021), and Coventry (UKCC 2021)… carried out between 2019-2021 despite the constraints of the pandemic.   

Cross-cultural collaboration with creative practitioners can help amplify multiple perspectives – instead of a world view dominated by a western European/British viewpoint, these projects helped us make space not only to create but also to imagine new ways of creating.  

Our skills - in animating the public realm through ambitious, site-responsive performances which connect local people to the making of these moments of civic celebration – are useful in this context: they enable citizens to step into the light when the ECoC follow spot is switched on. They come forward as active citizens modelling the clay of contemporary culture with their own experiences – shaping the stories, singing the words that their own writers have written, in their own languages.    

In north Norway last year, we were commissioned by Bodø2024 to create the highlight event for their summer programme. Working with Norwegian writer, Endre Lund Eriksen; composer, Goril Nilsen, and many local people as performers and artists, we invited the audience to work in the bright sunshine of the Arctic in summer, to help raise a beacon at the edge of the city where the land and the sea meet.   

We are in a dialogue with Kiruna2029 in northern Sweden about how to build capacity of its young people over the next four years, given the small population of the town, and their desire to develop homegrown talent alongside invitations to world class artists for its ECoC. Walk the Plank’s approach is designed to use our expertise to draw out the passion of the town’s youth, in the shadow of the largest iron ore mine in Europe.   

The legacy of our connections to the network of ECoC cities can be seen in projects like Creative Embassies. Fired up by his participation in the European Tandem programme, Ben Turner, Walk the Plank Salford Producer, advocated for our participation in an initiative that was all about continuing the legacy of the ECoC title in cities like Leeuwarden (ECoC 2018), Faro (bid city for ECoC 2027) and, Kaunas (ECoC 2022). We wanted Salford’s people to benefit from the enriched connections with Europe that the ECoC had given us, and so we nominated Cobden Works as a Creative Embassy, and have engineered projects to enable us to invite musicians and sound artists from Europe to work with us – despite the absence of the European funding which previously supported such work. We desire to meet other European artists and creative practitioners by working together, in spaces in Salford and Lithuania and the Netherlands and Portugal, placing the tools of our trade – making skills, languages, bodies and voices, imaginations, emotions – central to how we meet as Europeans. 

Dr Beatriz Garcia -  consultant, researcher and Chair of our Board - has led much of the research into the impact and value of the ECoC initiative – and found plenty of evidence that this model for culture-led regeneration offers a chance to change the narrative around a city’s image and identity, as well as offering economic, physical, social and broader creative impacts in the longer term. The chosen cities are rarely the capital city, so the ECoC can offer a radical redistribution of years of centralised investment as well as an important change in perception of the status of cities previously considered to be on the periphery.    

IETM (the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts) is one of the largest of the European cultural networks, and we have been members for 10 years. We have been nourished by contact with European colleagues and, increasingly, colleagues from the global south within that network.  Any commitment to “the European project” requires us to advocate for it, interrogate it, and help to refashion it too… if we can rebuild the formal links with Europe that we used to have, as well as maintain the informal links we cherish and nurture.    

A recent meeting facilitated by Culture Action Europe made me feel optimistic as we think about ways to offer young people here in Salford and Greater Manchester the chance to think of themselves, once more, as part of a global community, with a European identity. We will continue to explore how we might use the projects that we have – such as Manchester Day* and Salford 100 celebrations, to support any dialogue that builds bridges with our European neighbours. As European Cities of Culture gather to blow out the 40 candles on the ECoC cake this year, we wish them all ongoing success in their adventures around art and culture. 

*We're working in Barcelona for La Merce Festival 2025 which this year has nominated Manchester as its Guest City partner. The Festival is working with Xtrax, who have curated a programme of Greater Manchester-based work which includes Walk the Plank’s Fire Garden. Next year we will reciprocate their welcome, inviting Catalan artists to perform as part of Manchester Day 2026.