‘An area lacking cultural activity’: researching cultural lives in urban space

Focussed on the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham, this chapter explores the specific ways in which individuals are situated by intermediation practices, policy imperatives, discourses and imaginaries as cultural consumers, participants and sometimes producers. In tandem with the attention afforded its demographic diversity, levels of deprivation Balsall Heath has been an object of cultural policy initiatives seeking to engage disadvantaged and ‘hard-to-reach’ communities. The chapter first outlines the particular socio-economic character of the area and discusses the method of walking interviews that was employed to engage with residents. The method does not offer am exhaustive picture of cultural engagement, conceived instead as a means of ‘thinking with’ participants within a local landscape of social, material and religious relations that shape individual agency.