This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Sitting in his cramped office, amidst slanting autumn sun, and flanked by a distant view of Pennine hills, Sebastian is busy writing copy for the Bruddersford Arts Centre spring catalogue.
The double-page spreads allocated to celebrity visitors — Rachel Cusk, Ali Smith et al — have been and gone. Now Seb is hard at work on the seminar and workshop sessions that crowd out the catalogue’s second half.
“Why not join our Bruddersford ‘Narratives from history’ day?” he begins. “Your challenge will be to write a story inspired by a local artefact or a personality from Bruddersford’s rich, multicultural heritage. Expert tutors will be on hand to advise and encourage.” Then, mindful of the rubric that features on the catalogue’s cover — “A progressive arts hub for citizens of Bruddersford and the world beyond it,” he adds: “No knowledge of history required.”
Bruddersford, a former mill town with a population north of 100,000, is proud of its arts centre. Arts funding may be in sharp retreat and local government forever pruning its budgets, but somehow the three-storey building plus basement theatre has managed to cling on.
Bruddersford, under Sebastian’s eager tutelage, is particularly keen on experimental theatre
Its current sponsors include the town’s Labour council, the nearby University of Bruddersford, and one or two local charitable foundations. There is a staff of six, of whom Seb, in the role of Events and Outreach Co-Ordinator, is the principal ornament.
When asked by the Bruddersford Bugle to file a few first principles about the post he holds, Seb — a thirtysomething graduate of the University of East Anglia trained up at the ICA — declared that the arts were “an invaluable community resource, participative and inclusive, designed to stimulate the creativity of all those involved”.
Bruddersford, under Sebastian’s eager tutelage, is particularly keen on experimental theatre and “installations” of the kind in which empty rooms papered with old newspaper headlines are touted as paradigms of nuclear meltdown.
There are not many takers, but Arts Council England, as Seb frequently reminds his superiors, is “very supportive”.
By now Seb is onto the widely-advertised (and surprisingly expensive) mentoring scheme. “Here, in a process-led initiative, you will be encouraged to grow your project in exciting and innovative ways.” A busy and rewarding life, this, but not without its moments of controversy.
There was a corking row when one of the charitable foundations was discovered to have a tiny investment in fossil fuels, and a terrific set-to when the local Heritage Trust petitioned for an event to commemorate the centenary of the Bruddersford novelist Sidney Hardwick, author of Champion Lad, Up On T’Moor and other works.
Was it really appropriate, Seb complained to his boss, to promote (and thereby be thought to validate) the work of a man whose reactionary tendencies and innate patriarchialism had been called out by feminist critics? In the end, after a fusillade of letters to the Bugle, the Hardwick event was allowed to take place in a satellite building. It was surprisingly well attended. In his more disillusioned moments, Seb can be heard muttering about pearls before swine.
