A Creative West Midlands

A Creative West Midlands

Understanding the Creative Engagement of West Midlands' Residents

A Creative West Midlands is a data-led initiative developed to better understand the creative engagement of people living in the geographic West Midlands region, and to provide powerful tools to the creative and cultural sectors - as well as to Local Authorities and policy makers - to increase creative opportunities for residents across the region.

It builds on a previous research project from 2021, Identity, Confidence, Connection, which was created to support the development and delivery of the creative programmes for Festival 2022 (as part of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games) and Coventry UK City of Culture 2021.

A Creative West Midlands aims to learn from and update that work, to include analysis of more recent Census (2021) and National Participation Survey (2024) data, available for the first time at Local Authority level. Strategically, this work responds to demand from the cultural sector, as part of ‘Collectively Strategising Culture: Our Plan’.

Culture Central has worked with Indigo Ltd, Warwick Business School and Counting What Counts to develop a range of tools including:

• A Creative West Midlands report

• Place profiler online tool

• Local Authority place profiles

• Raw data sources for those wanting to do a deeper analysis.

Through the innovative combination of national publicly available datasets and a bespoke regional survey, this new set of tools provides a rich evidence base to explore how residents from across the West Midlands experience, perceive, and access creative opportunities at a local level.

The West Midlands Audience Research has been developed and commissioned by Culture Central in partnership with the West Midlands Combined Authority, and is delivered by Indigo-Ltd, Warwick Business School and Counting What Counts. The project is supported through investment from Arts Council England and the Commonwealth Games Legacy Enhancement Fund.

Watch the recording of the online launch here. Download A Creative West Midlands report here. A formatting error in earlier version of this report led to some incorrect figures. These have since been identified and corrected in the current version.