Cheap studio space helps to foster growth in Sheffield and create a buzz throughout the region
In a building that has variously been a pub, a factory and offices in Sheffield's Devonshire quarter, 15 young artists have put on a group exhibition. As the rain hammers down on the corrugated iron roof, sculptures made of broken glass or parts from enormous metal film projectors wink through the gloom.
This is S1 Artspace, the hub of the burgeoning art scene in the Steel City, which now has the most artists' studios outside London according to statistics from visual arts advocacy group All Points North.
At S1, 22 artists show and make work, sharing the space with commercial clients such as the city's famous graphic design studio Designers Republic. Upstairs on a mezzanine are a collection of studios that can be hired for as little as £62 a month.
There are pots of paints on every surface, brightly coloured lumps of plaster, two cold lava lamps and even a disused organ. These items belong to Haroon Mirza, 34, who won this year's Northern Art Prize, participated in the touring British Art Show, and overcame being mocked on regional TV news programme Look North to scoop the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale. Next month, he stages a solo show at Spike Island in Bristol.
Born in London, Mirza has been based in the city for five years. "Somehow being in Sheffield made me more visible than being in London," he says. "There it's saturated in terms of how many artists there are. Here I can concentrate and actually make work."
Mirza says Sheffield's industrial past makes it ideal for artists. "It's cheap and easy to source materials," he says. "There are still a lot of places that produce and manufacture things like steel and glass."
At S1, few of the studios have doors. On Sundays, says 24-year-old artist Emily Musgrave many of the artists get together to critique each other's work. "There's a lot of communication and dialogue," says Mirza. "It's got a cross–over between an art school and a commercial art space."
Pre-credit crunch, the building would have been too expensive for the artists to take over. It was earmarked for demolition to make way for flats, but the developers pulled out. "The recession has been great for us," admits artistic director Louise Hutchinson, who says the building was almost entirely refurbished by the artists themselves for £10,000 from fundraisers and the Arts Council.
The buzz from Sheffield's art scene has echoed around the rest of the region. When the Hepworth Wakefield gallery opened in May, artist Antony Gormley predicted it would become "a place of pilgrimage for all lovers of sculpture." Seven months on, it has had more than 350,000 visitors, double the number predicted for one year.
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa's retrospective at the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park was its most successful exhibition ever, with a 40% increase in visitor numbers, up 100,000 from 2010.
Despite a backdrop of cuts, it's not just Yorkshire that's looking back at a landmark year for the arts, but the whole of the north of England. The Turner Prize, which moved from Tate Britain in London to Baltic in Gateshead, attracted more than 122,000 visitors, 40,000 more than the previous year (although free admission clearly helped). In July, the Manchester international festival (Mif) debuted new work by artists including Björk, Victoria Wood and performance art doyenne Marina Abramović to an audience of 230,000, while Durham's Lumiere light festival in November attracted 150,000 people to light sculptures which transformed the city centre.
Mif director Alex Poots says the seeds for northern England's arts boom were sown in the 1980s, when Tony Wilson's Factory records proved you could do "something outside London that was every bit as good as what was going on in that or any capital in the world".
Poots credits Gormley's Angel of the North, unveiled near Gateshead in 1998, the Baltic and the National Theatre of Scotland with paving the way for the Mif, together with the city's "can do" attitude: "If you asked for a live bull on stage because Matthew Barney needed one, they'd say 'We'll find a way of making that happen'."
Laura Sillars, director of Sheffield's Site gallery and founder of All Points North, says: "Tate Liverpool's only been there 20 years, Baltic 10, Nima [in Middlesborough] five. But there's this whole infrastructure that's developed that really supports the sector in difficult times."
Arts institutions faced particular funding challenges this year, as regional development agency funds fell away and many companies lost some or all of their Arts Council funding. Many projects that came to fruition this year were commissioned long before the credit crunch – Hepworth Wakefield took 10 years – and Arts Council England made it clear last month that its capital programme of lottery money for 2012-15 would be only spent on maintaining existing arts venues. Next year brings the danger that local councils might reduce their arts funding – even to the extremes of Somerset, whichcut its entire direct grants to the arts last November.
Yet Sillars says that with Arts Council funding set for the next three years, and the awareness that any other money will have to be raised themselves, arts institutions at least know where they stand. "You either forge ahead, rethink who you are and grow, or you just die."
Next year, the Cultural Olympiad will mean new works across the region, from Anthony McCall's column of mist rising from the Liverpool skyline to Flow, a floating building on the Tyne.
Work by Bradford-born David Hockney will be displayed across the north in a "Hockney trail" timed to coincide with the artist's retrospective at the Royal Academy in London.
According to Poots, reduced funds means that co-commissioning with partners around the world is crucial: in 2009, this brought Mif £700,000, rising to £2.3m in 2011. "People need to share more because there is less money going around – it's actually one of the positive outcomes of austerity. Rather than people being very insular about work they make, they're being much more generous-spirited in terms of working more collaboratively across different festivals and art houses and opera houses." He has now taken an additional job as artistic director of the Armory in New York.
Sillars says past investment in the north has left a network strong enough to withstand austerity. "There's a lot more career progression of artists and arts professionals. You could easily have started your career in Northumbria doing a fine art degree and then done a museums course in Manchester, an internship at the Manchester international festival, then worked at the Liverpool biennial, then the Baltic. The networks now are very robust, so people know each other and they can help each other. The scene is strong enough to weather the storm."
Hutchinson adds that as well as artists, theatremakers such as Tim Etchells's Forced Entertainment have figured out that they can pursue their work outside London while enjoying a lifestyle, and proximity to their studios, that they wouldn't be able to afford in the capital.
"Things have really changed in Sheffield," says Mirza. "Instead of moving to London, people study at Sheffield Hallam and then stay in the city. These days, artists are even moving here from London." And with rents of £62 a month, it's not surprising.NORTHERN ARTS SIDEBAR
The best of 2011
Turner prize at the Baltic
"This year, the show is being staged not at Tate Britain but the Baltic, and the improvement in the way the art is displayed is like the difference between night and day"
Hepworth Wakefield
"Chipperfield's building would surely have appealed to [Hepworth's] sensibilities. From a distance, its cast concrete facade is pristine and rectilinear, but up close, its painted surface echoes the plaster prototypes inside."
Bjork's Biophilia at Manchester international festival
"A a ritual dance between the head-scratchingly abstruse and the heart-warmingly simple."
What to watch out for in 2012
Part of the programme for the Cultural Olympiad, this will see a column of cloud rising from the water in Merseyside, visible on a clear day from 60 miles away
In April, a giant puppet show will take to the streets of Liverpool inspired by the story of the Titanic, in a show that promises to be on the scale of the Sultan's Elephant, which caused a sensation in London six years ago
The Sheffield Crucible hopes to continue its hot streak with this production of Congreve's dense restoration comedy starring Fiona Shaw