The UK government just longlisted nine towns for City of Culture 2029, and almost every single one is a post-industrial place that has been structurally neglected for decades.

A £10 million prize where the real cost is much higher

We call this cultural investment. I call it a very cheap substitute for actual policy. Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Swindon, Ipswich — these are not cities that lost their way because they lacked a Turner Prize or a contemporary dance festival. They lost their way because manufacturing collapsed, wages stagnated, and Westminster looked the other way for thirty years.

I believe this programme, however well-intentioned, has become a status game dressed up as solidarity. The prize money is real. But the framing is dishonest. When Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy says "for far too long, opportunity has not been shared equally across the country," she is describing a structural failure of governance — and then offering a year of art events as the remedy.

Bradford just finished its year as City of Culture 2025. The numbers were genuinely impressive: three million attendees, over 5,000 events, 75% of which were free. Eight in ten residents said it made them proud of where they live. I do not want to dismiss that. Pride matters. Community cohesion matters.

But Bradford Council had also asked the government for £220 million in emergency financial help in the years leading up to 2025. The City of Culture budget was £42 million total. You do not need a science degree to see the mismatch. Culture is being used to paper over a structural wound.

“Bradford's year has been less about spectacle and more about whether culture can be embedded into everyday civic life — rather than concentrated in flagship moments or city-centre venues.”

— Institute of Place Management, January 2026

The status trick hiding inside the celebration

Here is the part everyone skips. The City of Culture competition does not just give money to struggling places. It asks them to perform their identity for a national audience — to package their poverty, their grit, their working-class heritage into something legible and palatable for visitors, journalists, and arts administrators from London.

I remember watching coverage of Bradford's opening ceremony and thinking: this is beautiful, and also deeply strange. A city that needed emergency funding was being asked to dazzle. The spectacle was real. The underlying conditions were unchanged.

Researchers at LSE have argued that working-class culture has become an elite game — that cultural taste is now deployed as a political weapon, not a mirror of lived experience. The City of Culture competition is a perfect example. It takes the authentic culture of a place and runs it through a government competition framework, complete with bid documents, expert panels, and a cash prize that tripled from £3 million to £10 million this cycle.

What the competition actually rewards and what it ignores

The good edge here is real and I will name it plainly: Bradford's programme genuinely reached people who are usually invisible to national cultural institutions. Over 87,000 residents took part in key projects. More than 110 grassroots groups received grants. The Peace Museum relocated and went from 3,000 annual visitors to over 50,000. That is not nothing.

But the bad edge is just as real. ONS figures show 13 million people in the UK were living in relative poverty in the year up to March 2025 — half a million more than the year before. The City of Culture competition does not touch that number. It cannot. It was never designed to.

The strongest counterargument is this: culture-led regeneration has a track record. Hull in 2017 attracted more than five million people and £220 million of investment. That is not symbolic. That is economic. I accept the evidence. But I reject the conclusion that a four-year cycle of competitive bidding is a substitute for sustained regional investment. It is a highlight reel, not a policy.

Blackpool and Middlesbrough deserve more than a competition

Look at who is on the 2029 longlist. Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Swindon, Ipswich, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Wrexham. Every single one of these places has a story of deindustrialisation, coastal decline, or post-manufacturing stagnation. The government is not choosing them because they are culturally rich. It is choosing them because they are the places that need the most help.

That is not a cultural policy. That is triage with a press release attached.

Middlesbrough's Mayor Chris Cooke says the bid takes the town's motto "Erimus" — We Shall Be — literally. I find that genuinely moving. But Middlesbrough should not have to win a national competition to be taken seriously. It should not have to perform its ambition for a panel of judges in order to access the investment it needs.

The class politics here are not subtle. The places that never have to bid for cultural legitimacy are the places that already have it. London boroughs are excluded from the competition entirely. Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh — they do not need a government prize to be seen as culturally significant. The competition exists precisely because the rest of the country has been systematically undervalued.

Would you trust a healthcare system that made hospitals compete for the right to treat patients? Tell me that is fair.

The UK City of Culture programme is genuinely the best version of a bad idea. It does real good in the places it touches. But it also normalises the idea that struggling communities must earn their investment through spectacle, through bidding, through the approval of a national panel. That is not levelling up. That is a status hierarchy with better branding.