Creativity resides in all of us. It is one of our superpowers. It helps us understand the world, express who we are, find answers to difficult questions, bring people together and build empathy.
Being creative – whether as a practitioner, as an artist, or simply as an audience member – is one of the most naturally human things we, as a species, do. It is fundamental, I think, to our DNA.
And therefore, the obligation to spread the opportunity of creativity is huge. It’s a bit of a truism, but creativity is everywhere. Opportunity is not. When I grew up and went to school, there were art subjects, there were trips to theatres and concert halls as part of the school curriculum. Now that’s, mostly, disappeared. We are living through times where access to culture and creativity is deeply uneven, and that is why a space like the Southbank Centre matters so much.
We were founded in 1951 – 75 years ago – by the Festival of Britain. It was this great, instrumental attempt by the post-war Labour government to use culture, really for the first time, in a non-elitist way. To use it as a way to bring the country together in the aftermath of World War Two. To look forward, together, with a sense of optimism and purpose, through the lens of art and creativity – but also science and technology – about what the future might hold, and about how we might live together. The festival transformed London’s Southbank and brought eight million people together across that summer, from all parts of society, from all over the country. That democratic, inclusive moment is our origin story. It is who we are.
In a world where public space is increasingly disappearing, increasingly privatised, that opportunity – to be that third space for genuine connectivity between people, through experiencing culture together – is super, super important right now.
However, I only have to walk a mile into Lambeth, the borough we’re based in, and meet communities who’ve never been here, who don’t know us. The barriers are real. Some are cultural – people feeling intimidated by the nature of the institution, uncertain of the rules, staying away because they don’t know what’s expected of them. Some are economic. We try to address that: half of what we do is free to access, and for me there is no hierarchy between buying a ticket for a Mahler symphony performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and experiencing something on our outdoor stage. Both matter equally.
We’ve also been very purposeful about going out rather than waiting for people to come in. We’ve hired people whose job is not to sit within the Southbank Centre, but to be out in the streets of Lambeth and Southwark – in the schools, the community centres, the parks – talking about culture, their culture, and how we might represent it here.
Classical music listenership is one of the most popular and fastest-growing areas among Gen Z on streaming services
When I arrived four and a half years ago, just after Covid, classical music audiences had been hit hard. They weren’t returning to the live space and audiences were decreasing. But when we dug into how people actually engage with classical music, we discovered something remarkable: classical music listenership is one of the most popular and fastest-growing areas among Gen Z on streaming services. People discovered it as a soundtrack to a film or a game. It gave them emotional sustenance. Millions of people on streaming services, on TikTok, were engaging with classical music. But they were not coming to our concert halls.
So a couple of years ago we created an entirely new festival called Multitudes, which was about breaking the rules of the classical concert. Making it much more informal. Mixing classical music with other art forms and other genres. Transforming the experience of a large-scale orchestral concert from something that feels intimidating – where you don’t know if you’re going to be told off for opening a bag of crisps or clapping between movements – into something that’s about a communal, joyful exploration of music, often alongside another art form or another genre you might already be familiar with.
What those Gen Z listeners told us, when we brought them to live orchestral events for the first time, was that the thing driving them back was seeing extraordinary musicianship from artists who had spent years mastering highly complex music, performed live. The shared experience of it. That is what they loved. And our first edition of Multitudes in 2025 attracted 59% of new bookers to classical music here, so it’s clearly connecting with a new audience.
The importance of the live event has never been greater
I think because so much culture has shifted into the digital space, the importance of the live event has never been greater, because the live does something the digital simply cannot. It gives you a shared experience. You are in a room together with people you don’t know. There is research that shows when you are in a concert together, your heartbeats begin to equalise. There is something innately human about convening together, often with strangers, and having that collective, shared experience. You cannot achieve that by watching something on TikTok or on a streaming service.
People talk about the live event being diminished in the digital age. I think paradoxically it is becoming more valuable, because people know it gives them something they cannot get anywhere else.
We live in an age where people coalesce around quite tightly formed identities, magnified by the echo chamber of social media. And one of the great things about arts and culture is that it is diverse and inclusive, and for some people that feels uncomfortable. It takes you out of the bubble of your peer group or your social media feed. Artists have always been proponents of radical ideas. They make us think differently about the world. They give us different perspectives. Art is an empathy machine – it helps us understand other people’s experiences. And sometimes there is a cynicism in our politics that wants to stop that: that stepping-into-someone-else’s-shoes experience, that understanding of life through another lens, because it doesn’t fulfil a particular political agenda or narrative.
That is why culture can feel dangerous to some. Because it is about ideas. But that’s why it’s so important, especially now. It can explore how we can all live together in the future.
The Southbank Centre’s role is to platform artists with ideas who have things to say. We have an obligation to be a space for the free expression of a diversity of ideas and culture. I don’t think we, as an institution, necessarily have an obligation to take a side. The debate belongs to the artists, and to the ideas they generate.
Cultural institutions are, I think, one of the only spaces left where our commonality can be genuinely explored. Where the things that bind us together can be expressed. God, we need that. Where politics and the media are making us face off against each other all the time, we need spaces that express common interest – and frankly, that express joy. That is one of the most important and radical things we can do right now.
In 1951, within the context of post-war austerity, of rationing and blackouts, the Festival of Britain was an explosion of colour and creativity. It was joyful. I think we need to inculcate and promote that joy again now.
One of the things that preoccupies me about the future of culture is that we are moving into a more hybrid, more interdisciplinary space. We live in a world where technology – and I hesitate to use the words, but the immersive experience economy – is creating a hybridity of form, where different art forms are bumping up against each other, mixing together, and where creativityis increasingly not bound up within a single art form, but found in creating experiences that are result of multiple art forms coming together.
The Southbank Centre is uniquely placed for this. We have classical music, contemporary music, literature, spoken word, theatre, dance, visual arts, poetry – with the National Poetry Library.
When I arrived, those departments were largely siloed, sometimes working against each other. We are now thinking much more about that hybrid, interdisciplinary space, creating dialogue between classical music and choreography, fashion, literature, performance. That new festival, Multitudes, was all about that. And I think it is where younger audiences, in particular, are heading. They experience culture through their phones, but they also experience it through event-based culture, and they want more of that sense of experience, of immersion, of multiple art forms coming together, in the live space.
The single art form concert will not disappear. But it will sit alongside something more expansive, more innovative, more experiential. And I think that is a gloriously messy and exciting place to be.
Harry Styles the pop star is also someone with a deep passion for exactly what we stand for
The centrepiece of our year, as always, is Meltdown, now in its 31st year, and we think it’s the UK’s longest-running artist-curated festival. A leading artist curates three venues across ten or 11 days, with 40 or 50 events. It has had some of the great names of pop culture – David Bowie, Nick Cave, Robert Smith, Chaka Khan, Grace Jones. When I arrived four years ago, I was also really interested in opening the opportunity to younger artists. So in the years since, we’ve selected Christine and the Queens, Little Simz, and this year – and there is no accident to this – Harry Styles.
It has been extraordinary to work with Harry and his team, because what the process of curating Meltdown reveals is that he is a much more multidimensional artist than the world perhaps knows. He is informed by a really rich and deep knowledge of music – jazz, electronic, disco – and all of that is being expressed in the festival he’s curating. The hit, Aperture, from his current album has the chorus We Belong Together, and you see in his concerts what he is trying to do: build community in the room. That is no accident. We selected him because we are an expression of building community in a space, and we wanted to amplify that in our seventy-fifth anniversary year. Harry Styles the pop star is also someone with a deep passion for exactly what we stand for: an inclusive, joyful space, built together.
This conversation took place on 3 June and had been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Harry Styles curates Meltdown, 11-21 June 2026 at the Southbank Centre, London – tickets and full programme at southbankcentre.co.uk.
