Last month Fun Palaces Producer and craft artist Rachel Attfield ran an online workshop as part of the Fun Palaces Summer School, exploring cultural democracy and everyday culture. Here she reflects on the workshop and explores the meaning of the word culture. With just over a month to go until the Fun Palaces weekend, there’s still plenty of time for you to join in 2nd – 4th October and make a stand for cultural democracy. (There’s a blog here on how to join in.)
As part of Fun Palaces’ recent series of online workshops, Laboratory of Fun, I held a workshop exploring an idea that sits at the heart of Fun Palaces: everyday culture. We started with a deceptively simple and personal question: What do we mean when we talk about culture? It’s a question that has always interested me, partly because I have always found it difficult to describe my own culture in a way that feels meaningful.
The word culture has many different meanings that have changed over time. Today we often use the same word to describe quite different things. While these different meanings are all valid, there’s a risk of assuming we have a shared understanding of culture when we may actually be using the word in quite different ways. Some meanings have also become more prominent than others. And those differences matter, because the meaning we give to culture can affect what gets recognised and valued.
Culture has its roots in cultivation: tending, nurturing and caring for the land. Think of the word agriculture. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the meaning of culture had expanded to include the cultivation of people. To be ‘cultured’ didn’t simply mean having culture; everyone has culture. It meant appreciating particular forms of art, literature and learning and adopting particular ideas about behaviour, taste and self-improvement that were seen as cultured and respectable. This understanding still shapes how we use the word today. We talk about cultural events and cultural organisations, meaning things like theatres, galleries, museums, music and the arts.
During the 19th century, industrialisation was also changing people’s way of life. Time became increasingly structured around work and leisure, separating activities that had previously been woven through everyday life. Sharing stories, eating together and singing while working would have been part of the way people lived together. As work and leisure became more separated, people continued to drink together, play football and even write ballads about their working lives. These everyday cultural activities continued, but the way leisure was understood and valued was changing.
Culture’s association with improvement meant that museums, libraries and galleries were seen as places that could educate and ‘civilise’, while reading or country walks were promoted as healthy ways to spend leisure time. As industrialisation brought growing numbers of working-class people into towns and cities, leisure time became increasingly regulated, with social reform focusing on how working-class people spent their time outside work. Middle-class reformers, employers and public authorities promoted particular forms of leisure as healthy, respectable and improving, while other activities were discouraged or restricted.
Raymond Williams described culture as one of the most complicated words in the English language. He recognised that culture could mean intellectual artistic activity, and also ‘a whole way of life’. His famous phrase ‘culture is ordinary’ may sound simple, but it was a radical statement. He was challenging the assumption that culture belonged primarily to the educated, the arts or cultural institutions, and instead arguing that culture is something we all make through our everyday lives. It is an idea that beautifully describes what we now call everyday culture.
Everyday culture describes the way we live: food, stories, the words we use and the things we pass between generations. For a long time I struggled to understand what my culture was, because it didn’t fit into the idea of English culture. The idea of nations as ‘imagined communities’ helped me think about this differently. I realised that I didn’t have to fit into a fixed idea of culture. Instead, I could find my culture in the way I live, the words I use, the recipes that were passed down and my heritage.
The brilliant thing about everyday culture is that it is fluid, constantly changing and evolving, influenced by where we are, who we meet and the experiences we have. Food is a brilliant example: a dish associated with one culture can travel, change and become part of another family’s traditions.
In the 1960s and 1970s, community artists began challenging the idea that people should be passive receivers of culture. They argued that people had the right to create and express their own culture, helping to develop ideas around cultural democracy. Cultural democracy asks who gets to shape the culture that is publicly funded, programmed and curated. Whose culture is recognised, valued and funded?
Everyday culture and cultural democracy are closely connected, but they are not the same thing.
Cultural democracy challenges who gets to decide and shape what is recognised as culture. Everyday culture shifts our focus towards the cultural life people are already creating. Fun Palaces brings these two ideas together.
Joan Littlewood’s original idea for a Fun Palace, developed with architect Cedric Price, continues to inspire our work today. It was imagined as a flexible, constantly changing structure where people could walk in and decide for themselves what they wanted to do. Joan described it as a ‘laboratory of fun’ and a ‘university of the streets’. A university is normally associated with recognised knowledge and expertise, but Joan’s phrase suggested that knowledge also existed in streets, neighbourhoods, workplaces, families and everyday experience.
The original Fun Palace imagined a place where anyone could make, perform, experiment, debate, share and exchange, where people were free to follow their interests and see where this might lead. Joan believed that everyone has the capacity to create, contribute and share what they know and love. It was an idea rooted in cultural democracy: who gets to decide what counts as culture or art, whose knowledge and creativity are valued, and who gets to shape our cultural life.
Fun Palaces continues to campaign for cultural democracy, raising awareness that culture belongs to all of us, as creators as well as consumers, and for people to have a greater say in shaping our wider cultural life.
Tiny Fun Palaces encourage us to notice what we’re already doing and what’s happening around us, whether that’s playing a game, swapping a recipe, sharing a song or story, or showing someone how to make something. Noticing these things helps us recognise the value of the knowledge, skills, humour, memories and passions that are part of everyday cultural life.
For one weekend in October, Fun Palace Makers across the UK come together with others to create and share the things they already know, make, love and care about. A Fun Palace doesn’t need to be grand. It can begin with one small thing you already do.
Culture is happening everywhere. Understanding what we mean by culture can help us notice and value it in all the corners of our everyday lives.
Sign up to celebrate your culture – whatever that means to you – on this Fun Palaces Weekend of Action 2nd – 4th October 2026.