Britain’s creative economy owes a debt to our industrial past

For more than a century, titans of the arts have not only risen from the gates of industry, but they have used those roots as springboards

As the train curves around the broad bay towards Swansea, Dylan Thomas’s “ugly, lovely town”, no traveller – especially at night – can miss the smoking, spotlit proof that Britain has not quite entered the heaven, or hell, of a post-industrial economy. The massive Margam steelworks at Port Talbot dates back to 1901, and still employs almost 4,000 workers in Tata Steel’s largest British plant. This week, as their colleagues at Scunthorpe and two sites in Scotland digested news of forthcoming job losses, Tata management assured Port Talbot staff that “no change” was planned for them. We shall see.

The coincidence of Xi Jinping’s state visit and the death notices for several thousand heavy-metal jobs has concentrated minds, as executions tend to do. Whether fatalistic or outraged, obituarists for British steel agree that the new world order, in which China produces 65 times as much steel as the UK (779 million tonnes against 12 million in 2013) and exports it at bargain-basement rates, heralds a future in which even the lights of Port Talbot may eventually dim.

Meanwhile, in another part of the post-manufacturing wood, the release of Spectre – the 24th James Bond film – will give another stardust windfall to a £7.3bn UK industry. Skyfall, its predecessor, took $1.1bn (£712m) at the worldwide box office.

UK films enjoy a trade surplus of £790m. Steel can manage only £100m. On a wide definition, steel now provides 34,500 livelihoods – although stricter measures push that figure below 20,000. On a narrow definition, film pays almost 40,000 salaries. Looser parameters can almost double that total. From Spectre to Star Wars, many “Hollywood” blockbusters now come – lavish tax-breaks in tow – from Pinewood. Incontestably, the movies now sustain many more UK families than steel.

All such comparisons belong to a now-familiar narrative, in which services, sciences and the “creative industries” supplant metal-bashing factories and extractive toil. In his new book The Great British Dream Factory, the historian Dominic Sandbrook zestfully charts the route that has taken Britain from “workshop of the world” to “cultural superpower”. This whimsical nation of boy wizards, glam-rock bands, eccentric detectives and time-travelling saviours touches the hearts (and wallets) of the planet as no ship-builder or kiln-master ever did.

The very factors that defined the old Britain – “manufacturing might and naval ascendancy”, not to mention colonial bullying – stiffened resistance to its culture. Now, global consumers let their guard down to an ex-imperial power that has to charm where once it cowed. Defiantly populist, Sandbrook settles on Elton John as the figure who best embodies “the sheer power of British culture” in the aftermath of industry and empire. Goodbye, Firebrick Road.

According to your outlook, this story counts either as triumph or as tragedy. No one, however, can dispute the general direction of the plot. Even in Lincolnshire, home of the now-stricken Tata works and few people’s idea an aesthetic nirvana, the council’s strategy document calculates that tourism and culture together account for 25,000 full-time jobs – 10 per cent of employment. Now, anyone who has dipped into the seething statistical jacuzzi of the “creative economy” knows that things can get murky in there. Do you count not just the actor and stage-manager but the ice-cream seller, the barman in the pub across the street, and maybe the landlady of the B&B next door, as “cultural” workers?

Since John Myerscough published his landmark report The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain in 1988, more than 30 other studies have argued for culture as a wealth-multiplier that returns several pounds for every quid of far-sighted investment. “Art for art’s sake” expired long ago. Some optimistic estimates remind me of the old gag about the guy in the circus who trudges behind the elephants with a bucket and shovel, dealing with what elephants leave behind. He does so with a smile for 30 years. Gloomily, the clown asks him one day, “Don’t you ever find your job boring?” “Oh no,” the shoveller replies. “I’m in show business!”

Even with the elephant man in mind, the figures look impressive. In 2015, manufacturing supports 2.65 million jobs in the UK. Albeit with a generous remit, the “creative economy” accounts for 2.8 million. We might just have passed the point at which culture outweighs manufacturing as a source of livelihoods. In which case, those ministers who love to trumpet the overseas conquests of, say, Bond, Adele and Potter should think hard about golden eggs, fragile geese and modest public sums that yield huge private profits. JK Rowling lived on benefits in Edinburgh while creating Harry Potter; Adele – due to release her album 25 soon, after already amassing records sales that top 40 million – attended the state-funded BRIT School in Croydon. Time and again, the glittering trail of a British superstar will lead back to the subsidised theatre and, for senior stars, the grant-aided stint at drama school. For more than a century, titans of the arts have not only risen from the terrace at the gates of yard, mine or works, they have used those roots as springboards and as stimuli.

Which brings us, circuitously, back to Port Talbot, and the vast plant that still broods over Swansea Bay. Remarkably, this smallish steel town in Wales bred not only Richard Burton but Sir Anthony Hopkins, Michael Sheen and (among other luminaries) the writer, actor and comedian Rob Brydon.

The historian Angela John – herself a Port Talbot native – is about to publish a study of the town’s drama culture, The Actors’ Crucible. She explores the amateur and school-based networks of study, training and practice which gave a platform to Burton and his many local heirs. The former Richard Jenkins, a miner’s rather than a steelworker’s son, even adopted the surname of his inspirational teacher, Philip H Burton. He joined a drama group run by a Port Talbot steelworker, Leo Lloyd. Burton recalled that “there was anger and discontent in my life, and he channelled all that into making me do plays”.

Versions of post-war British history that tell the widgets-to-wizards story often do so to a soundtrack of polarised conflict. With all their sweetness and light, the arts break free from the philistine stranglehold of industry and commerce. As early as 1869, Matthew Arnold had written this script in his Culture and Anarchy. He deplored the “faith in machinery” that downgraded arts and learning, and mocked the sort of low-brow materialist who considered coal, not culture, as “the real basis of our national greatness”.

The pull of this model persists. Billy Elliot (one of Sandbrook’s chief exhibits) mutated as it grew into a worldwide smash. From writer Lee Hall’s balanced tribute to pit-village solidarity as well as individual aspiration, it slid into a cruder tale of the sensitive lad who flees his boorish background.

There is another way to imagine the relationship between manufacturing and the muses. Sandbrook begins his book with Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics. Scripted by the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, it took its inspiration from Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings: a visionary collage that imagines the magical, pastoral and fantastic elements of British culture – all those qualities that now sell around the world – as the fruit and gift of the Industrial Revolution, rather than merely its antithesis.

In Port Talbot and elsewhere, the “anger and discontent” seeded by industrial squalor, poverty and want of opportunity could blossom into high creative achievement. One should never sentimentalise the frustration, hurt and rage that pushed kids from the grime towards the stars. For every Burton and Hopkins, dozens more failed. Still, the steel town’s cluster of celebrity suggests that industry and culture have in Britain clung closely in a sort of dialectical embrace rather than separating like oil and water – or steel and slag.

As Sandbrook rightly insists, “we still live in the shadow of the Victorians”. Under that shadow, anti-industrial ideals of imagination, fantasy and creativity continue to flourish. As does nostalgia. Tales of moribund institutions still earn dollars – or renminbi – on, well, an industrial scale. Witness Downton Abbey, bought in 250 territories. The fabric of the past clothes and funds our present. When and if the final furnace cools, our job-spinning, wealth-creating foundry of fantasy may have to lay off hands as well.

In an age when the businesses of culture and knowledge promise more jobs and firmer prospects than any smokestack enterprise, what will become of the Port Talbot-style striver against the gloom of mill, mine and works? As often, Monty Python got there first. In an early sketch, “Working-class Playwright”, a gruff North London dramatist scoffs at his airy-fairy son, with his passion for deep mining and “tungsten-carbide drills”. “Aye, ’ampstead wasn’t good enough for you, was it? You had to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and yer coal-mining friends”. One day, pleads the exquisite Ken to his overbearing dad, “you’ll realise there’s more to life than culture. There’s dirt, and smoke, and good honest sweat!”

Hearken to his words, champions of the weightless, borderless “cultural economy”. At some level, you may need those smoky old trades – or their low-emissions successors – more than you know. A balanced society might treat Port Talbot as no less of a priority than Pinewood.