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.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.