Cultural Capital : The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain

Britain began the twenty-first century convinced of its creativity.

Throughout the New Labour era, the visual and performing arts, museums and galleries, were ceaselessly promoted as a stimulus to national economic revival, a post-industrial revolution where spending on culture would solve everything, from national decline to crime.

Tony Blair heralded it a "golden age." Yet despite huge investment, the audience for the arts remained a privileged minority.

So what went wrong?In Cultural Capital, leading historian Robert Hewison gives an in-depth account of how creative Britain lost its way.

From Cool Britannia and the Millennium Dome to the Olympics and beyond, he shows how culture became a commodity, and how target-obsessed managerialism stifled creativity.

In response to the failures of New Labour and the austerity measures of the Coalition government, Hewison argues for a new relationship between politics and the arts.