Understanding creative health in London

Creative health is a way of thinking and working which recognises that culture, heritage and creativity – including art, craft, music, film, dance and drama – can improve our mental and physical health. These activities also enrich the environments in which we are born, grow, live, work and age, helping to reduce health inequalities. 

With cuts to health and local authority budgets and an overstretched workforce, it is vital that creative health fulfils its full potential in London and beyond. For this to be realised, we need to understand creative health in greater depth.

Evolution of creative health

Commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA), Understanding Creative Health in London scopes creative health in the capital. Working closely with London Arts and Health, I have looked at how creative health evolved, where and how activity is happening, who is funding it and where the challenges and opportunities lie. 

With roots in the 18th century, creative health in London really took off in the 1970s, partly through an explosion of community arts activity, much of which would be funded by the then Greater London Council’s Arts and Recreation Committee. At the same time, work in London hospitals was being spearheaded by Shape Arts, The King’s Fund and the Greater London Arts Association.

In the 1980s, creative health entered the cultural field, courtesy of organisations like LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) and individuals like seconded teacher Gillian Wolfe at Dulwich Picture Gallery, who worked with young and old alike to enhance wellbeing and social mobility. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, creativity made its presence felt in the curricula of the capital’s medical schools, with a Professor of Medicine and the Arts being appointed at King's College London and Clod Ensemble’s Performing Medicine programme beginning at Queen Mary University of London.

Fast-forward to the present day, and there is a wealth of creative health activity taking place across the city. 

Health settings

Work in London’s health settings is becoming increasingly robust, with arts coordinators embedded in more than a dozen hospitals and annual budgets of up to £1 million. The most established arts programmes in London’s hospitals are reaching up to 20,000 patients per year, which can be multiplied across 18 acute trusts and 16 community, specialist and mental health trusts in the capital.

There is also some excellent work happening in doctors’ surgeries and arts centres and via social prescribing. The country’s first healthy living centre, Bromley by Bow Centre in Tower Hamlets, continues to nurture and celebrate the culture of the surrounding ethnically diverse, working-class communities. 

Kentish Town Health Centre houses Creative Health Camden, which offers creative activities to practice patients and doctors. Also, in Tower Hamlets Spotlight operates across five sites, with a flagship co-designed centre offering industry-standard facilities in dance, drama, music, art and fashion to young people between the ages of 11 and 25. The centre houses Health Spot, a welcoming GP clinic run by Dr Helen Jones and colleagues, which refers young people to creative activities.

Work is progressing at different rates in each of the capital’s five integrated care systems (ICSs). In South East London, the GLA has collaborated with the ICS and local boroughs to support the employment of a creative health lead. In North East London, the National Centre for Creative Health has partnered with Arts Council England to employ a creative health associate. 

Creative health in the community

In social care, creative health activities are being widely offered in London’s residential homes and day centres. With start-up funding from the Mayor of London’s Cultural Impact Awards, a project called New Town Culture is pioneering creative social work in Barking and Dagenham, bringing social care workers and cultural practitioners together in a reciprocal exchange.

Work in the community is continuing apace, and creative health hubs have been set up in Havering, Hackney and Newham, convening local cultural and community organisations and health and care providers. Around half of London’s 33 local authorities are integrating creative health into their cultural strategies, sometimes in alignment with public health. 

Creative health is also increasingly playing a part in the Mayor’s London Borough of Culture initiative, which will be evident in Wandsworth in 2025.

Creative health practitioners

In a dedicated section of the report, the voices of creative health practitioners are amplified. We identified a workforce that is highly motivated and effective while also being underpaid, overstretched and on the brink of despondency. 

During the course of our research, creative health practitioners working in various locations told us of their successes and challenges, what would improve their working lives and what advice they would give to newcomers.

We also found a range of training and professional development opportunities, many of which are being taken up by artists at their own expense, and we heeded warnings about over-professionalising the sector, which runs the risk of imposing a cost barrier, negating life experience and reducing diversity.

Finally, in scoping the funding landscape for creative health work in London, we found Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and various trusts and foundations to be particularly active in this area. 

However, despite the number of potential funders involved, money coming into creative health is almost invariably short-term and piecemeal, and it lacks statutory support. As a result, organisations that are vital to the lifeblood of London’s creative health are being run on a shoestring, and the workforce is being denied stability and room to innovate.

Recommendations

Following reflections on the current state of play, Understanding Creative Health in London concludes with four recommendations:

1. Advocate for continued support from commissioners and funders to foreground their contribution to building a sustainable creative health sector;
2. Bridge the gap between health and the arts – by creating more opportunities for training that brings health and arts practitioners together, and continuing to embed creative health into the five NHS regions for London (GLA has supported one role in NHS South East London and Arts Council England has supported another in NHS North East London as pilots);
3. Support efforts to diversify the sector – spotlighting the work of London Arts and Health’s Diversity in Leadership in Creative Health and the Anti-Racist Action Group in Arts & Wellbeing, and encouraging more paid training opportunities for global majority artists;
4. Provide more support to practitioners – working with the Creative Health and Wellbeing Alliance’s Quality Framework.

It is exciting that the Mayor of London is commissioning work like ours as part of a wider conversation about London becoming a creative health city. The Mayor understands that culture can be a profound and transformative force in the health and wellbeing of Londoners and is committed to prioritising this. 

Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt is an independent creative health researcher and consultant.
 london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture
 @RGordon_Nesbitt | @LDN_Culture
 rebecca-gordon-nesbitt

*‘Understanding Creative Health in London: The Scale, Character and Maturity of the Sector’ was published on 24 September 2024 by the Mayor of London. The full report can be accessed here. 

We are immensely grateful to everyone who took part in this research and to the Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, Justine Simons OBE; Statutory Health Advisor to the Mayor of London, Professor Kevin Fenton CBE; and Former Chair of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board and Chief Executive of Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Moira Sinclair OBE, for contributing forewords to the report. We were fortunate to be able to work with artist Rae Goddard, who has illustrated two timelines representing creative health’s evolution, included in the report.