Vaughan Williams lived through times of rapid social change, unprecedented violence – two world wars – and political determination in the aftermath of those wars to build a better world for their survivors. His hopes for the democratization of ‘high culture’, and especially for wider popular participation in music-making, were shared by other influential figures in Britain’s overlapping cultural and educational establishments, though not by everyone: there was an elite backlash, with ‘standards’ maintenance the declared point of contention. (Simple snobbery probably did have something to do with it.)

This chapter explores Vaughan Williams’s work for the cause of cultural democracy, places it in social and political context, and names his most determined opponents. It focusses particularly on his roles as a member of Britain’s Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, set up soon after the start of the Second World War to help maintain civilian morale, and as a founding member of CEMA’s peacetime successor body the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

The most lasting testament to W. G. Sebald’s profound interest in literary translation is the British Centre for Literary Translation, which he founded at the University of East Anglia in 1989 on the model of translator houses in Germany and France. His aims with BCLT were to provide material support for literary translators and to raise the profile of literary translation as a profession in the UK. Sebald established a small team around him and quickly secured stable, recurrent funding for BCLT from the Arts Council of Great Britain and other sources. He established the pattern of BCLT activity that largely still persists: the Centre became a base for dozens of visiting translators, hosted events (conferences, workshops and seminars, the St Jerome Lecture) and pursued other projects, in particular compiling a Directory of Literary Translators. Sebald served as Director for the first five years of BCLT’s existence: he stepped down in 1994 as his literary career began to blossom, but retained an attachment till his death. Now into its fourth decade, BCLT continues its vigorous promotion of literary translation at the interface between academia and the profession.

Throughout much of his career, Benjamin Britten was acclaimed both as the most significant English composer in centuries and as an artist whose music embodied an innate Englishness.  Notwithstanding the subject matter and sources of many of his works, Britten himself resisted association with what were often vague – and frequently contradictory – assumptions about the very definition of that Englishness. While Britten accepted commissions from major national institutions throughout his career, he was also openly suspicious of prevailing attempts to align contemporary creative expression with a proudly English or British identity. This essay explores the origins of those attempts in the nineteenth century and traces some of their most prominent, influential manifestations in the institutions and artistic practices of the twentieth century.

In England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, festivals expansively run the gamut from celebrations of flowers, seasonal harvests, and food and drink to the fine arts, music, theatre, and religion, in locations ranging from metropolitan centres, cathedrals, public and private parks and gardens, to locales rural in the extreme. Festivals could be unpredictable, and their organisers doubtless had to navigate uncertainties and last-minute cancellations, not to mention audience reception to programming; perhaps it is that element of unpredictability that gives festivals a general air of anticipation and excitement. This chapter explores post-Second World War festival culture with examples emerging from the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival (subsequently renamed the Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary British Music), the Three Choirs Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, and the Festival of Britain. The chapter also considers the intersections of the postwar socialised Arts Council funding for music and the arts in the British Isles, and the disparity between funding for metropolitan and rural centres.