A NEW CHAPTER FOR CULTURE AND CREATIVITY IN SWANSEA
Today, Swansea has launched a new five-year Culture Strategy – setting out a shared ambition to help the city’s culture, creativity and talent thrive.
Covering 2026 to 2031, the strategy brings together everything from arts, music and the creative industries to heritage, the Welsh language, events, tourism, sport, libraries and community life.
Its vision is for Swansea to become a place where culture helps people, communities and businesses flourish, with partners across the city working together to make that happen.
Or, as the strategy puts it: Culture with pride, creativity with purpose.
For Swansea’s artists, freelancers, venues, cultural organisations and creative businesses, this is an important moment. The strategy recognises the creative sector not only as something that makes Swansea a more exciting place to live – but as a vital part of its economy, identity and future.
Most importantly, it sets out how Swansea can move from shared ambition to coordinated action.
BUILDING ON SWANSEA’S CREATIVE STRENGTHS
Swansea is already home to a brilliantly varied creative community, from individual artists and early-stage businesses to grassroots venues, major cultural institutions and growing creative companies.
Around 3,200 people are employed across nearly 380 PAYE and VAT-registered creative businesses in Swansea, alongside a much wider network of freelancers and independent practitioners.
The city also benefits from two universities, a strong further education college, a varied mix of venues and a cultural identity shaped by its people, languages, history and coastal location.
But there is still plenty of untapped potential.
Through a consultation process, the strategy heard a clear desire for more opportunities for local talent, more live performances and affordable cultural experiences, better infrastructure and creative spaces, stronger funding opportunities and a more connected, sustainable cultural sector.
It also recognises the very real pressures facing creative people and organisations, from rising costs and changing audience habits to limited access to workspace, finance and clear career pathways.
The new strategy is intended to bring people together around those challenges and create a stronger foundation for Swansea’s creative future.
FIVE THEMES FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS
The Culture Strategy is shaped around five interconnected themes:
- Improving lives and communities
- Telling the Swansea Story
- Amplifying local voices, businesses and talent
- Enabling learning and aspiration
- Unlocking growth and renewal
Together, they reflect the many ways culture can make a difference – improving wellbeing, creating opportunities, strengthening local pride, bringing people together, attracting visitors and supporting regeneration and economic growth.
For the Creative Swansea community, some of the most exciting commitments sit within the strategy’s focus on arts, culture and the creative economy. So, what could it mean in practice?
CLEARER AND MORE CONNECTED CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES
One of the strategy’s central proposals is to develop a county-wide framework for commissioning and programming creative work.
The aim is to make opportunities clearer and more transparent, improve forward planning and encourage more organisations to work together on commissions and programmes.
This could include shared tools and principles, a forward calendar of opportunities and stronger links between commissioning, Creative Swansea and the city’s talent-development programmes.
For artists, freelancers and creative organisations, that could mean greater visibility of what is coming, clearer routes into opportunities and more chances to collaborate.
MORE SUPPORT FOR SWANSEA’S CREATIVE COMMUNITY
Creative Swansea has been identified as an important part of how the strategy will support and connect the sector.
The Action Plan includes ambitions to create more opportunities for networking, peer support and cross-sector collaboration, alongside practical business guidance, skills development and clearer signposting to relevant support.
It also proposes using Creative Swansea’s website, social channels, directories and showcases to raise the visibility of local artists, freelancers, venues and creative businesses.
The ambition is for Creative Swansea to become an even more useful point of connection: somewhere to discover opportunities, access resources, build relationships and celebrate the work happening across the city.
HELPING CREATIVE BUSINESSES AND ORGANISATIONS GROW
Swansea’s creative economy is dynamic and growing. While the sector is characterised by micro and small businesses, as it is across the UK, many of Swansea’s creative enterprises are at an early stage and require support to build resilience, sustain their activity, and grow.
There is a real opportunity to help those businesses become more resilient, grow their ambitions and increase the economic value of creativity within the city. Proposed actions include improving access to affordable workspaces, studios and digital-production facilities; strengthening creative business support; widening access to grants, finance and investment; and creating more opportunities for collaboration between creatives, venues, education providers and digital industries.
The strategy also proposes exploring new business models that could help freelancers, venues and cultural organisations diversify their income and become more financially sustainable.
Just as importantly, it makes the case for celebrating Swansea’s creative successes more confidently – by improving the visibility of local talent and positioning the city’s creative economy more strongly both within Wales and beyond.
CREATING CLEARER ROUTES INTO CREATIVE CAREERS
Swansea has no shortage of creative talent. The challenge is making sure people can see a future for themselves here.
The strategy proposes clearer pathways between education, skills development and employment, helping more people understand how they can turn creative interests and qualifications into real careers.
That includes ambitions to expand mentoring, residencies, placements, apprenticeships and paid development opportunities, while giving students and emerging creatives more experience of working on live projects.
It also means bringing education providers and employers closer together, identifying skills gaps and helping venues and creative organisations connect with a diverse pipeline of local talent.
The goal is not simply to inspire people to begin creative careers, but to make Swansea somewhere they can stay, develop and succeed.
A STRATEGY BUILT THROUGH PARTNERSHIP
Although the Culture Strategy has been developed by Swansea Council, it’s not intended to belong to the Council alone.
The success will depend on the people and organisations already shaping Swansea’s cultural life: artists, freelancers, creative businesses, venues, educators, cultural institutions, community groups, funders and audiences.
An Arts and Creative Industries Group will help lead this area of work, bringing together the expertise and relationships needed to turn the strategy’s ambitions into practical activity.
The finer details – including timelines, resources, milestones and measures of success – will now be developed through this partnership structure; progress will be monitored, with an annual report sharing achievements, challenges and learning.
The launch of the strategy is therefore just the beginning, rather than the finished product.
It creates a shared direction for the next five years and an opportunity to build a creative and cultural economy that is better connected, more visible and more ambitious, while making sure Swansea’s creative talent has the support and opportunities it needs to flourish.
Creative Swansea will continue to share updates, opportunities and ways for the creative community to get involved as the work develops.
Read Swansea’s Culture Strategy 2026–2031 and explore its full vision and Action Plan at www.swansea.gov.uk/swanseaculturestrategy
