Before 2008, every town and city had an annual arts or children's festival. After the crash, we found ourselves in the service of marketeers, deployed by shopping centres fighting the bricks-and-mortar death spiral. Today, even that middle ground has been hollowed out. More often than not, we work at the extremes of poverty and wealth — for affluent enclaves or forgotten towns, rarely anywhere in between.
We always expected the UK economy to return to the growth rates that preceded the crash. It never has. For a long time now, it has felt like starting again — forced through the eye of the needle, stripped of everything we built.