Watching Sir Captain Tom walk his garden during Covid, I recall thinking to myself – I know when we started fundraising for culture, but when did we start fundraising for the NHS?

As charities play an increasingly vital role in ensuring the functioning of our society our ideas as to what is and isn’t charitable have had to be reconsidered. These ideas are informed both by the Victorian concept of charity but also by the post-Second World War settlement which saw Nye Bevan and his wife, Jennie Lee, play founding roles in the NHS and Open University, with Jennie Lee also the first Minister for the Arts and writing the first (of only three to date) White Papers for the Arts.

The post war period saw culture established not only as a fundamental part of UK society but also as a human right with Article 27 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognising Access to Culture as a Human Right. However, the UK cultural sector has since struggled to make the case for the value it creates and as a result for investment from government and philanthropic sources, with cultural policy veering between the excellence agenda and the intrinsic value of culture in its own right, to a focus on the social benefit of culture, through to the pre-pandemic attempt to speak the language of power to power through a focus on the economic impact of the creative industries.

The Art House – Participants learn how to screen print in a Studio of Sanctuary workshop_Credit: Amy Charles Media