Theatre by the Lake is easy to admire from the outside. Its Keswick setting places a producing theatre beside one of the country’s most celebrated landscapes. For audiences, an evening there can become part of a much larger affection for the Lakes: a place to return to, a performance remembered alongside the journey.
Yet some of the most revealing evidence of its importance lies beyond that familiar setting, in the community venues to which it takes its work.
In the new Cumbria Cultural Impact & Advocacy Report, the theatre’s touring of Every Brilliant Thing becomes an example of what culture can make possible across a dispersed rural county. A play about mental health and suicide travels into smaller communities, creating space for difficult conversations close to home. The accompanying technical annex describes partnerships with rural touring networks and wellbeing charities, including Every Life Matters and Andy’s Man Club. Audience members told the company that the work prompted them to think differently about their mental health and make changes in their lives.
These are reported experiences, rather than proof of a clinical outcome. They nevertheless describe something that a ticket-sales figure can't: the possibility of an artistic encounter continuing to matter long after the performance ends.
For Cumbria’s leaders, that's a useful place to begin reading a report whose central argument reaches well beyond the arts budget. Cultural organisations already connect people, places, employment and public services. The question is whether regional policy will invest in the capacity that allows them to keep doing so. It must.
Produced by Genecon, the study was commissioned on behalf of a steering group comprising Brewery Arts, Cumbria Museum Consortium - Tullie, Lakeland Arts and Wordsworth Grasmere - and Theatre by the Lake. It was supported by Cumbria Arts & Culture Network and funded by Arts Council England.
Its headline figures are substantial. Using Office for National Statistics data, the report puts the gross value added by Cumbria’s arts, entertainment and recreation industries at £153 million in 2024, with around 5,250 jobs in that category. GVA measures economic output; the category also includes recreational activity beyond arts and heritage, so it's a broad statistical proxy rather than an exact valuation of cultural organisations.
Separately, Genecon estimates more than £500 million in annual visitor spending associated with arts, culture and heritage. Its modelling applies national evidence about culturally motivated visits to Cumbria’s visitor economy, tracing spending through accommodation, food, retail, transport and supply chains.
These figures describe overlapping activity and can't be added together. Their significance is that culture helps generate business beyond the organisation presenting it. The value of a performance extends to the places where visitors eat, sleep and spend time.
The report identifies approximately £113 million in external cultural investment attracted since 2022 through Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and national grant-makers recorded through 360Giving. Cultural organisations are part of the machinery through which money, expertise and opportunity reach the county.
That strengthens the argument for investment in the people who develop partnerships and funding applications. It also raises a practical question: how much opportunity is lost when those people have no time left to pursue it?
The research includes responses from 42 cultural organisations and 35 independent creatives and micro-businesses, alongside roundtables, published data and economic modelling. It is an evidence base with limits, rather than a census of every cultural activity in Cumbria.
Within the organisational survey, 86 per cent reported infrastructure limitations and 55 per cent workforce or recruitment challenges. Respondents reported roughly 417 full-time-equivalent paid staff, alongside substantial engagement of freelancers and volunteers. Those totals have different response bases and should not be read as a simple staffing ratio. They do, however, reveal how much delivery depends on people working across different kinds of employment and commitment.
The policy danger is to mistake resourcefulness for spare capacity.
Producing a performance, maintaining a collection, coordinating volunteers or reaching a new audience requires paid time. So do safeguarding, fundraising and sustaining relationships with schools or health partners. A grant for a new project might create activity while leaving the organisation responsible for it with another layer of work to absorb.
The accompanying advocacy toolkit makes investment in coordination and organisational capacity a priority. Regional leaders have to take that seriously. A cultural strategy needs a credible account of who'll deliver it, with what resources and over what period.
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For people who love Theatre by the Lake, the touring example expands the meaning of supporting a theatre. The Keswick building is a base for professional work, employment and creative relationships that can travel.
The report places that relationship between established institutions and local provision at the centre of Cumbria’s cultural strength. Larger organisations connect the county to artists, collections, investment and national networks. Smaller organisations, independent practitioners and community venues extend its reach.
Across Cumbria and the wider North, the study describes Highlights and Arts Out West taking professional work into more than 65 village halls and community spaces. These networks depend on local knowledge as well as artistic quality: people who understand a venue, know an audience and can help make an event happen.
Geography shapes the possibility of taking part. Forty-eight per cent of surveyed organisations cited transport as a barrier to audience participation; 69 per cent of surveyed independent creatives said transport or geography affected their ability to work across Cumbria.
This gives our transport planners a cultural question to answer. Can a resident get to a performance and then home afterwards? Can a young person reach a placement? Can a freelancer accept work elsewhere in the county without the journey consuming the fee?
A programme can be publicly available while remaining practically inaccessible. Planning for culture therefore requires attention to transport, affordability, confidence and the places where people already feel welcome.
The report’s evidence about young people should command particular attention from leaders concerned with skills and retention.
Cumbria Careers Hub data show creative and media careers accounting for 24 per cent of Year 7 pupils’ preferred routes, falling to 11 per cent by Year 11. These are preferences recorded at different school stages, rather than proof that individual pupils abandoned an ambition. They nevertheless raise a question about which careers become visible, credible and attainable as young people approach decisions about their futures.
The study describes gaps between creative education and employment, limited entry opportunities and difficulty accessing commissions. It also cites See It To Be It research finding that almost half of young creatives would prefer to stay and work in Cumbria.
There's an ambition here for policy to meet. Paid placements, apprenticeships, commissions and entry-level jobs would give that ambition somewhere to go. Unpaid opportunities will remain inaccessible to many of the people whose talent the county hopes to retain.
The report highlights See It To Be It, led by Cumbria Arts & Culture Network, as an existing model connecting education, employers and freelancers. Sustaining and evaluating work already under way deserves at least as much attention as launching another pilot.
Among the report’s most striking estimates is £243 million in annual health and wellbeing value associated with regular cultural participation in Cumbria, calculated using national valuation methods applied to local evidence.
That's a social-value estimate. It's not £243 million of cash available to the NHS, nor demonstrated savings attributable to individual Cumbrian organisations. Its purpose is to make benefits such as wellbeing visible within decisions that might otherwise overlook them.
The more immediate evidence lies in the relationships described throughout the study. Eighty-one per cent of responding organisations identified health and wellbeing as an outcome of their work, while 31 per cent reported partnerships with health or NHS organisations.
Theatre by the Lake’s touring offers one example. Everyone Here’s involvement in the Hope Haven neighbourhood mental-health pilot in Whitehaven offers another. Both suggest opportunities for properly resourced collaboration, with clear responsibilities and appropriate evaluation. Cultural organisations bring artistic practice and trusted connections; those contributions need support if partnerships are to endure.
With Cumbria’s first mayoral election due in May 2027, this report arrives at a moment when the county can decide how culture will sit within its wider ambitions.
Its recommendations provide a practical starting point: commission a countywide Cultural Strategy and Cultural Infrastructure Framework; invest in organisational and partnership capacity; build paid pathways into creative work; and incorporate culture into decisions about growth, health, transport, tourism and place.
Delivery must include smaller organisations and freelancers from the beginning. An investment framework should examine who can participate, where provision is thin, which buildings and networks need support, and whether opportunities offer fair pay. It should also set out responsibilities, resources and measures by which progress can be judged.
For audiences, culture retains its immediate pleasures: a performance that surprises, a collection that changes how a place is understood, an evening spent in company. Those experiences matter - and can be life-changing - in themselves.
For regional leaders, this report supplies evidence of how much else depends on making them possible. Theatre by the Lake and its partners belong within that discussion because of the work it makes, the people it employs and the communities it reaches.
Cumbria’s next chapter will be shaped partly by whether a young creative can find paid work close to home, a rural audience can encounter ambitious theatre, and the organisations connecting them have the time and resources to continue. Those are decisions its leaders can make.
