Stop Saying “Working Class in the Arts”
Every few months, another editorial lands (today's was from The Guardian). Another lament about the “working class and the arts.” Another sermon from London about how Manchester, or some other city, will “lead the way.” And every time, the same lazy phrase gets wheeled out: working class.
Let’s be clear: it’s 2025, and that term no longer fits. It’s a label that serves the people who use it, not the people it’s supposed to describe. It turns flesh-and-blood lives into categories. “Working class” in the mouths of commentators really just means poor, tired, pissed off, disabled, unseen, for the rest of us.
Art is being made every second
We don’t need inquiries to prove whether art is happening in deprived communities. Art is happening constantly. Every second of every tiring day:
- A poem on Tumblr at 3 am.
- A blog post dashed off between double shifts.
- A novel uploaded quietly to Amazon, never marketed because the author is a full-time carer.
- A garage band in Merthyr uploading tracks to Bandcamp with no funding, no coverage, no connections.
This is art. It’s happening. What’s missing isn’t production—it’s visibility. It isn’t that people aren’t making, it’s that the institutions that claim to care about “representation” refuse to see them unless they fit the mould: young, “emerging,” and palatable.
The “working class” label is broken
The phrase “working class in the arts” suggests that class is a fixed stage you either stand on or you don’t. But the reality is fluid and brutal:
- The ex-warehouse worker who finally has time to paint after redundancy.
- The disabled carer writing in fragments between appointments.
- The person in their fifties or sixties who never had the chance to call themselves an artist because they were too busy fuelling the economy that drained them dry.
If these people aren’t counted as “working class artists,” then what exactly is the category worth? It excludes as much as it includes. It makes invisible the messy, everyday truth: art is not a class identity. Art is a human necessity.
The Manchester blueprint won’t save us
Yes, Manchester is pioneering a “class ceiling” inquiry. Yes, Nazir Afzal is heading it. Yes, the city gave us Shelagh Delaney and the Gallaghers. That matters. Local initiatives are always welcome when Whitehall has failed.
But let’s be honest: we’ve seen this before. Reports. Blueprints. Consultations. Every time the story is the same: people wring their hands, publish a figure—26% “working-class representation” in 2020, 19% by 2023—and declare it a crisis. And then what? Nothing changes.
Because the framing is wrong. The problem isn’t a lack of working-class art. The problem is that most art is invisible unless it’s blessed by the right institutions.
Recognition is the only ask
Most of the people producing art in poverty, on benefits, or while caring don’t expect to make a career or a living from it. They’re not naïve. They know the odds. What they ask is simpler, more radical: to be recognised.
To not be written out of the story.
To not be told the arts belong to the young, the funded, the networked.
To not be turned into case studies while the “real” stage is kept elsewhere.
“I don’t need a grant,” Lloyd, a carer in Cardiff who writes poetry in the evenings says. “I just need people to stop pretending people like me don’t exist. My poems aren’t for a prize, they’re for surviving the day.”
Wales already knew this
We’ve been here before. Wales was once alive with miners’ libraries, brass bands, and chapel choirs. Communities that were dismissed as “working class” built their own cultural infrastructure because no one else would. The Tredegar Workmen’s Library, the South Wales Miners’ Library, the pithead reading rooms—all of them prove that art and knowledge weren’t luxuries; they were lifelines.
In 1969, the Open University picked up that same principle: education and culture should be available to everyone, everywhere. It wasn’t about class branding; it was about access. A single mother in a tower block, a steelworker on nights, a disabled veteran—they all had the right to study, to create, to think.
Fast-forward to 2025, and we are still waiting for the arts to embody that principle. Instead of asking how to “fix” working-class representation, we should be asking: why is opportunity still distributed through nepotism, parental money, and postcode?
Wales as a case in point today
In Cardiff, Newport, and the Valleys, art remains intricately woven into the fabric of community survival.
- Valleys Kids runs intergenerational projects where teenagers share space with grandparents.
- Oasis Cardiff brings refugees and locals together in song, dance, and film.
- Grassroots Cardiff, still hanging on despite austerity cuts, gives young people tools to record, write, and produce.
These are not side stories. They are the real infrastructure of the arts. Not inquiries. Not headlines. Not labels.
Meanwhile, the national stage fiddles with crumbs
The editorial applauds Bridget Phillipson’s promise to restore maintenance grants. Great—if it ever happens. But let’s be honest: these measures barely scratch the surface. What good is a grant for “arts students” when the wider economy is designed to crush anyone without inherited wealth?
Mark Rylance was right years ago to point out that some public schools enjoy multiple theatres while state schools lose drama altogether. But again, we’ve known this for decades. It’s not news. It’s a systemic refusal to value art unless it comes stamped with privilege.
Even Equity’s calculations—£1 spent in the arts returns £1.27 to the local economy—end up framed as economic justification. As though the only reason to support art is because it makes money back. The real value can’t be reduced to that. Art keeps people alive. It’s the difference between despair and survival.
Enough with the sermons
So here’s the challenge: stop writing condescending think-pieces about “working class in the arts.” Stop pretending Manchester—or any other city—will solve a problem that begins with how you frame it.
Art is not missing. Artists are not missing. What’s missing is respect. What’s missing is redistribution. What’s missing is a recognition that art isn’t a career track for the lucky—it’s an act of survival for millions.
Stop counting percentages. Stop drawing class lines. Start listening.
Art of FACELESS believes art belongs to the tired, the poor, the disabled, the carers, the silenced. It belongs to everyone who is creating unseen and unheard, every day. If you keep calling it “working class art,” you’ve already admitted the truth: the game was rigged before it began.
