Boroughs of Culture
Evaluation tracking the social, economic and community impacts of the Liverpool City Region's rolling Borough of Culture programme since 2019.
- Longitudinal evaluation of place-based cultural festivals across Merseyside boroughs, running continuously since 2019.
- Covers Wirral (2019), Sefton (2020), Halton (2021), Knowsley (2022) and beyond, building a borough-by-borough evidence base for cultural investment.
- Funded by LJMU QR; develops a replicable framework for measuring the social and cultural value of local festivals at scale.
The Liverpool City Region Boroughs of Culture is a rolling programme that celebrates and invests in the arts, culture and heritage of each of the Metropolitan Boroughs of Merseyside. Launched in 2019, the programme designates a different borough as Borough of Culture each year, funding a programme of cultural activity that reflects the identity, communities and creative strengths of that place.
LJMU's involvement began before the first Borough of Culture year. In 2019, Professor Rafaela Neiva Ganga worked with a dedicated steering group to develop a coherent and consistent evaluation framework for the programme — establishing the methodological foundations that have underpinned all subsequent evaluations. Drawing on mixed methods, combining survey data, economic analysis and community engagement, the framework was designed from the outset to enable meaningful comparison across borough years and to build cumulative evidence over time.
Four boroughs have been evaluated to date: Wirral (2019), Sefton (2020), Halton (2021) and Knowsley (2022). Across these studies the team has built a rich longitudinal dataset capturing how place-based cultural investment generates value for communities — evidence that now informs cultural policy discussions across the City Region and beyond.
