The UK Needs A New Creative Director
In search of Albion's creative mojo
In fashion, everything changes the moment one house changes creative directors. Someone gets poached, a game of musical chairs ensues, and the result is a sort of creative reset of each house’s aesthetic and direction.
You see it when Demna - who shaped Balenciaga’s dark, ironic and modern industrial aesthetic - takes the reins at Gucci, or when an American outsider like Virgil Abloh gets hold of Louis Vuitton. It’s an interesting experiment in how fast one person’s vision can reshape an entire company that dreams in symbols, collections and shows.
It makes me wonder what this role would look like for countries as well as companies, and whether the UK might be a good place to start.
It’s been a matter of public record for some time that the UK is in the economic and spiritual doldrums. We’ve been in a deepening economic funk of generational proportions for a decade, and all that lost growth is starting to affect a population that treat whingeing as a national sport.
There are plenty of clear-eyed diagnoses of what’s going wrong from a structural and economic perspective, starting with this1 and the excellent Foundations paper2, but it’s as much a mental block as it is a financial or political one. Keynes’ animal spirits of economic optimism are dormant dormice right now: citizens of the UK seem unable even to appreciate the things that it is world-leading at.
Witness the fact that London, a city that is the world’s second-largest financial centre globally, the best start-up factory outside the US, has created more unicorns than any other European city, has 85 Michelin-starred restaurants, 32,000 theatre performances a year, more UNESCO World Heritage sites that any other city, twice as many parks as Paris and five times more than New York, amazing architecture and history everywhere you look, along with world-leading television, cinema, tech, fashion, design, publishing etc etc, has been characterised online of late by viral rants about high rents and phone theft.
The ludicrousness of this became clear when ex-pat British influencers in Dubai used the start of the Iran War to claim that living in a tax haven under drone bombardment by a hostile theocracy was still better than being in London, because of the higher risk of phone theft by a teenager on a Lime Bike. At a certain point self-consciousness about what’s not working is likely to become a self-perpetuating cycle, as Iain Leslie and James Kanagosooriam have suggested3.
The good news is that there are plenty of smart, dedicated people focused on addressing all this, and there’s a range of visible attempts to jump-start the moribund patient back into life. A new wave of energy and money has identified that the UK is an excellent place to invest in talented thinkers and build new companies. The UK, in tandem with Europe, is raising its own crop of new tech companies and AI labs at a rapid rate, and some of the bigger existing players are also investing in their presence here. The government has also set up a sovereign AI fund to reduce its dependency on the American tech stack and create its own national champions.
Most recently, this builder-centric, pro-European, pro-UK mindset has minted its own new handle for a particular strain of British optimism: Londonmaxxing.
It may be that Londonmaxxing is merely a group of smart people reminding the world that it is indeed possible to work hard and make things somewhere other than San Francisco, and that you can do so whilst also having a life, enjoying world-class culture, and quaffing a few pints whilst living in the best city in the world. But it’s both encouraging and telling that it seems novel to have a group of people devoted to boosting the UK rather than complaining about it.
However, whilst much of this dialogue centers around scaling the tech sector, blockers to growth and/or substantive policy proposals to unglue the gears of state and get the country on the up again, the conversation appears to be leaving one of the biggest levers available untouched.
When people from the UK are invited to explain what they love about their country, they’ll often talk about football. Music. Art. Fashion. Cinema. That nebulous stuff we refer to as culture is powerful jetfuel: the last time anyone clearly articulated a coherent vision of a productive, prosperous and proud UK was back in 2012, when Danny Boyle stage-managed the opening ceremony of The London Olympic Games.
It had Shakespeare. Elgar. The NHS. Dizzee Rascal. Brunel. The Sex Pistols. Mr Bean. Paddington. James Bond. The Clash. Tim Berners-Lee. It’s easy to carp about bread and circuses and wasted taxpayer’s money, but it was hard to watch it and not feel inspired by the richness of British culture - and buried beneath all the whingeing about the the UK’s decline is a population desperate to feel good about their nation again.
It might seem strange, when national renewal is discussed in terms of AI chip clusters, energy strategy, house-building, and systemic reform of the civil service, to talk about creativity. These are all hard atom-based things, and creativity is often seen as a fluffy luxury.
But the point of economic growth is human flourishing, and one of the best expressions of a prosperous UK is our culture of art and invention, which has often moved in dialogue with (and sometimes resistance to) the commercial life of the nation. A thriving society might be built off material foundations and the growth needed for people to prosper, but it attains great heights through the artistic and creative outputs that those generate.
The age of Brunel, Stephenson and The Industrial Revolution also produced Dickens, Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Turner and many others. When we talk of the achievements of past eras, we reach for the things that they were able to create as an expression of all that growth. If you walk through the different rooms of the Tate Britain, each era of the country had its own artistic flourishing, and if we’re going to haul ourselves out of the doldrums this new era needs its own aesthetics and art too.
In far more prosaic marketing terms, in my day job I’ve seen, plenty of times, where a better and more inspiring creative vision of what an organisation is about can suddenly dramatically realign its systems, resources and collective will in a new direction. Imagination can break the path that pragmatism follows.
And it raises the question: who’s responsible for directing the broader vision of what the UK looks, feels, sounds like and stands for? If we want to get into UKMaxxing, whose taste dictates how we do it?
In search of the UK’s creative vision
Of the many strange and striking images in Adam Curtis’ excellent BBC documentary series Shifty, one of the most anachronistic is the strange sight of the now-toxic Baron Mandelson acting as the prophetic visionary for Millennial Britain.
When building the Millennium Dome, The New Labour Government wanted to turn it into a vision of modern Britain - a totemic end-of-the-century statement about national values and life. The result failed spectacularly, and the rest, of course, is history. But whilst we might laugh at the grand folly of a national exhibition featuring art about Toad in the Hole, but at least it represented a government who saw their job as not just guiding the infrastructure of national life, but also harnessing culture as part of that.
The New Labour/Cool Brittannia nexus is an example of a savvy political visionary harnessing the power of creativity rather than directing it, but Tony Blair clearly understood the value of image-making and culture when he tapped into Britpop during his rise to power. He used it to offer a new and upbeat version of the UK at home and abroad.
By contrast, the Starmer Administration is not only failing to deliver on its stated mission of delivering a high-functioning government, but providing a total void of any vision or storytelling about what the UK is and can be. The difficulty of articulating a clear direction for national renewal is tied up with the fact that the UK has been unable to identify a role for itself since the Empire, an issue that the colossal masochistic idiocy of Brexit has only complicated further.
But one thing that everyone in the UK can justifiably be proud of is not only our cultural footprint and reach, but our enduring status as a sort of knowledge and ideas foundry for the wider world.
The neglect of this is especially criminal when you consider how good we are at it. Internationally, the UK is strong at advanced manufacturing, life sciences and technology4. We are one of the world’s scientific knowledge and idea factories: Britain’s academics account for more than a tenth of global citations in medical science, surpassed only by America and China5, and the scientific output of just the Oxford/Cambridge knowledge cluster dwarfs almost everywhere else.
It’s this that’s attracting fresh waves of VC investment and capital being poured into deep tech and frontier AI in London. The big money chases fine minds.
As well as being spectacularly good at science, the UK produces world-class cinema, fashion, music, gaming and architecture, and a list of examples would take up an article in and of itself (more on this later). The UK’s creative industries are worth £145.8 billion to the economy6 which is about the same as the education or construction sectors.
British ingenuity, originality and creativity are intangible assets of international proportions: they’re an integral aspect of our national identity that every citizen can be justifiably proud of, and a tool that might help us drag ourselves out of the current slump. The values this culture embodies are inherently rooted in intellectual and creative freedom, and as I’ve written before7, those things are under assault elsewhere. Not for nothing are record waves of Americans (especially knowledge workers, creatives and scientists) moving here post-Trump.
The UK’s cultural output is also something that travels remarkably well - it’s about 14% of our exports - but the problem is that often money and scaffolding from abroad are needed for British ideas to go truly global. Knowledge and talent are originated here and scaled elsewhere: the gap between the quality of our science base and the businesses that are built off was christened ‘The Valley of Death’8 by a Parliamentary enquiry, and between 2012 and 2021, 80% of companies spun out from UK universities made their IPOs abroad, mostly in the US9. There’s a similar reason that some of the biggest household names in our creative industries go to America to make it big (Christopher Nolan, Jony Ive, Charlie XCX, Harry Styles etc etc). We should be funding, scaling and selling these outputs of our national culture with great pride and purpose, at home and abroad. And for a playbook on how a country can reap the benefits of doing this more deliberately, look at South Korea.
The Hallyu Korean Wave of culture that I’ve written about before10 did not happen by accident. BTS, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Korean Beauty products and cinema might be everywhere now, but it started back in 1998, when South Korean President Kim Dae-jung launched the “Hallyu Industry Support Development Plan,” with the goal of increasing the value of South Korea’s cultural industry11.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism partnered with public relations firms and technology companies to tap into overseas markets for Korean dramas, movies, and music. Subsequent administrations have sustained this focus, adding initiatives like tax subsidies and incentives for startups in the space.
“In 2019, South Korea exported $12.3 billion in pop culture (up from a mere $189 million in 1998)… According to the Hyundai Research Institute, [BTS alone] generates an estimated $3.5 billion per year in economic activity. In 2017, around 800,000 tourists—about seven percent of all arrivals in South Korea—visited because of their interest in the group.”
The results are visible in their increasing cultural footprint across film, television, beauty, fashion, pop music and beyond12. In 2023, Korea committed to investing $622 million in cultural exports, Korea’s exports of IP tripled from 2014-2024 to about $9.85 billion a year13. It’s a form of industrial strategy applied to creativity as a tool of soft power and statecraft.
It’s worth stating that some of these cultural works might benefit from government help and funding, but that doesn’t make them jingoistic or just glorified propaganda: the likes of Squid Game, Parasite and No Other Choice are all poisonously bleak satires of the rigged game of faux-meritocracy in Korean society. An open, creative and confident nation can turn even its capitalist dysfunction into spectacular entertainment that sells abroad: the results, particularly in the films of Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan Wook, are cinematic artistry of the highest order.
Being more deliberate about tapping into the power of British thinking and ideas would mean treating them as both a means of defining who we are, and an exportable service.
If you’ve got this far, then this is either a hate read or you’re at the point where you’re nodding along and asking: what exactly does that look like? How might our creative director for the UK shape that?
What version of the UK are we selling?
The first job of a new UK creative director might be to take stock of the artistic and creative visions that the UK offers the world.
Which ones need killing or updating? Which versions of our cultural output show promise, deserve funding, or should be amplified? Which are winning hearts and minds and audiences at home and abroad? Which are putting out an inspiring flavour of the country at its best? Where might a particular version have positive spillover effects that benefit adjacent industries - period dramas driving tourism, grime music leading to upticks in sales of UK-born streetwear, or a positive vision of British ingenuity buoying the recruitment of our tech companies and universities? At the moment, there are a few flavours of Britain that we sell abroad, and a few that could be scaled in popular culture.
Nostalgic - You already know this one, because it’s one of our most popular exports. This is the UK as a set for period drama, with all of the trappings of imperial power and preoccupation with class that have been such a national obsession for so long. We are astonishingly good at it, but it’s inherently backward-looking, white and characterised by a yearning for a bygone age that will not and cannot come back. I love a beautiful country house as much as the next person, but the desire to return to glory days has been a sort of corrupting undercurrent in our national life that has led to some monumentally stupid decisions.
British Chaos - As coined by Clive Martin, this is the flavour of extremely online anarchy that dominates certain corners of the web. It has taken too many drugs, and is the UK’s love of individual freedom, scabrous humour, and getting absolutely twatted brewed together to provide the kind of cheap high that plays well on the internet. It’s also the internet’s evolution of the music-hall routines and bawdy seaside postcards that George Orwell used to write about
It’s a great place to spend a night out, but as anyone who’s lingered too long at the party knows, you probably don’t want to get stuck there forever. British chaos is the kind of output you expect from a culture that sees itself as being in a state of terminal and irreversible decline. I would be extremely sad to see this disappear, but I would prefer that it doesn’t become the dominant strain in how we present ourselves abroad.
One of these positions our country as a museum, the other as a theatre of the absurd. So let’s turn our attention to three versions of the UK that go in a different direction.
Weird - This is the version of the UK most clearly in evidence in the latest 28 Years Later films, with its plethora of gleefully esoteric references to The Teletubbies, cricket, Jimmy Saville, and Iron Maiden. It is sinister, located far from the major urban centres, listens to metal and weird folk, and is likely high on mushrooms of questionable provenance. It’s embodied by Mark Rylance’s barnstorming performance as lord of misrule Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jerusalem. Previous chroniclers include the likes of J.G. Ballard, and its high priests are William Blake and Alan Moore. This version of the UK may struggle to make a lot of money at the box office in America, but it also produces highly distinctive cultural output that it’s hard to imagine coming from anywhere else.
Gritty - The UK embodied in the music, culture and fashion of the big cities, with its spearhead being grime as the UK’s most internationally significant musical export since punk. It comes from the street, is unafraid of pointing out how shit life can be, and is determined to do something great anyway. It dresses in Corteiz, its cultural flag-carriers include Top Boy and music from the likes of Skepta, and its iconic image is Stormzy performing at Glastonbury in a stab-proof vest designed by Banksy. It has American hip-hop culture’s edge but an outsider perspective, less money and worse teeth. This is the UK’s equivalent of blockbuster Korean movies and shows about how broken Korean meritocracy is.
It is telling that this isn’t just a version of the UK that the nation projects abroad, it’s one that people from other countries wrap themselves in: think of Kendrick Lamar dressed head-to-toe in streetwear from British designer Martine Rose at The Superbowl, or the recent Yung Lean/Gener8ion music video that blew up the internet trading off the dress codes, behaviour and setting of a British state school despite its director, band and actor being French and Swedish.
Inventive - This version of the UK invented the computer and wrote the code for the internet, designs the Arm Chips that are in millions of devices worldwide, makes Rolls Royce and Aston Martin’s beautiful luxury machines, engineers the $135-million-dollar F1 vehicles that compete in the world’s most popular motorsport, is building increasingly cutting-edge renewable energy and Quantum Computing industries, and its totemic institution is ARIA operating at the frontier of scientific discovery. It’s also the version of the UK being channelled into the Sovereign AI fund.
The American military-industrial complex has long had its own cultural symbols and stories - think of The Right Stuff, NASA, the marketing mammoth of the American motor industry, and the way that Silicon Valley talks about itself - but British inventiveness hasn’t been given the same treatment since The Industrial Revolution. What would happen if we combined the UK’s historical engineering and invention pedigree with our proud history of creative craft and thinking? Imagine what Christopher Nolan, a British director whose interest in physics, science and technology is clear from movies like Oppenheimer and Interstellar, might do if he tackled one of these industries.
We’re less practised at wrapping the UK’s ingenuity in the creativity it deserves and needs to scale - and there is the lingering sense, particularly when it comes to AI, that right now the relationship between the tech and creative sectors is a rather suspicious and hostile one.
There are no doubt many more, and it’s not necessary that any of these ‘wins’ - even as contested as the American national ideal is right now, it’s big enough to accommodate Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Bad Bunny on its biggest national stages as a statement to the rest of the world, all of whom represent different values, communities and aesthetics.
The creative fabric and output of any country is always an exercise in pluralism, and the idea of one singular vision of what the UK can be would be limiting and rather dull. Some of the most novel expressions of all of these are in the places where they collide. Perhaps we won’t ever have one singular national creative director, but thinking about the UK’s creative agenda and vision raises a number of concrete questions that it’s fun to entertain.
The Creative Agenda for the UK
Who’s responsible for the UK’s creative vision? Taking inspiration from Nan Ransohoff’s idea about the world’s biggest problems needing general managers14, having someone think not just about allocation of resources or the machinery of culture, but what it all adds up to on a national and international stage, is vital. In the remarkable ARIA, the UK created a government-funded institution for the pursuit of scientific moonshots, and their scope and scale of their research areas are remarkably inspiring. Why not aim for a creative counterpart or council?
Who deserves a seat on the UK’s creative council? The UK might not need a singular creative director, but some form of leadership panel of our biggest and best creative talents would be a useful sounding board, and thinking about the casting of the UK’s creative council is a fun exercise in and of itself. Who carries the flag for British culture, invention and creativity at home and abroad?
As an initial proposal, a creative council featuring Danny Boyle, Martine Rose, Christopher Nolan, Grace Wales Bonner, Riz Ahmed, Tracey Emin, Thomas Heatherwick, Stormzy, FKA Twigs, Steven Knight, Daniel Lee, Norman Foster, Jony Ive, Steve McQueen, Demis Hassabis, Charlie XCX and Young Fathers feels like it might be quite hard to ignore, either at home or abroad, even if such a collection of talents would be near-impossible to assemble and just as hard to manage.
Where does this new UK come to life? Where are some places and moments where we might confidently state what the UK believes itself to be? At the moment, every now and then you arrive at Heathrow Airport and are confronted by a series of British Airways ads and some Burberry posters in the arrival hall, but we can dream a lot bigger.
One of the problems for national cohesion is a lack of communal experience. America has the Fourth of July, China has Lunar New Year, Brazil has Carnival - a national party so bacchanalian that the country experiences a fairly predictable baby boom nine months afterwards. The UK occasionally has coronations and royal weddings, and half the country hates them.
London 2012 was a decade-and-a-half ago, and it’s time we found something else to talk about. There have been plenty of times when the UK has created physical platforms for its ingenuity and creativity. The first, The Great Exhibition of 1851 at The Crystal Palace was wrapped in imperialism and clearly intended to signal British industrial leadership at home and abroad, but was so impressive that it initiated the series of World’s Fairs that followed.
But perhaps the one that we might look to for inspiration now is The Festival of Britain, where a fractured Britain denuded by two wars still gathered the political and creative will to stage a showcase of the nation’s best thinkers, doers and artists on an international stage.
The Festival of Britain offered a ‘tonic for the nation’ still recovering from the horrors of the war and in the grip of rationing. It channelled the best of British design, creativity and manufacturing to create a new vision for British life - and in doing so attracted millions of visitors just to its main sight on the South Bank.
Whenever we, or any of the Londonmaxxers, walk along the South Bank, we walk through a vision of the UK built by people able to imagine a very concrete vision of the good life for the nation, and using creativity as an essential part of it. If a nation on its knees after two of the worst conflicts in human history was able to do this, why can’t we do it now?
There will be, as always, the counter-argument that creativity is a luxury good, and we cannot bother with it until ‘more serious’ quality of life and infrastructure issues are fixed, but that logic is both flawed and circular. Much of our greatest art came out of periods of uncertainty, volatility and historical discontinuity.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the wake of a civil war that led to the beheading of King Charles The First and the over-turning of an entire monarchical order.
Jane Austen wrote all of her novels against the backdrop of The Napoleonic Wars in which members of her family saw active service.
Some of the most indelible artistic images of an industrialising Britain, like Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, are also elegies for a vanishing world, in this case the end of the age of sail and the beginning of the age of steam.
Alan Turing’s breakthroughs in computing and code-breaking were made in the face of the tumult of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a film a year from 1939 to 1951 during the privations and horrors of The Second World War, and the results are still some of the most striking and original pieces of cinema this country and the world has ever seen.
The 1970s and 80s were roiled by strikes, power cuts and Thatcherism’s hollowing out of Britain’s industrial heartland, but still gave birth to punk and music from The Specials, The Jam, Joy Division, The Smiths and New Order.
You can argue the toss about whether these outpourings were conceived due to the struggles of the time or in spite of them. But people, and particularly people in the UK, will go on making great art and building things in the face of uncertainty. Now should be no different.
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun - C.S. Lewis, Learning During Wartime
If the UK doesn’t start building a positive narrative and vision about itself at home and abroad, someone will do it for us.
The best time to start was about ten years ago. The next best time is today.
https://getting-out-of-the-hole.uk/
https://ukfoundations.co/
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/08/07/whats-britain-good-at
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/08/03/astrazenecas-falling-out-with-britain
https://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/site-content/creative-industries-growing-more-than-four-times-faster-than-rest-of-uk-economy
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Bridging the valley of death: improving the commercialisation of research, 2013
https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/04/09/a-new-report-questions-britains-innovation-prowess
https://www.ypfp.org/south-koreas-soft-power-playbook/
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/culture-as-national-power/
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/south-korea-turns-culture-search-next-fillip-growth-2025-08-21/
Enjoyed this! Reggie James @HipCityReg has written before, I think, about how the US needs a creative director -I think you two are orbiting around the same need for aesthetic coherence