Why Regional Work Isn’t “Smaller” — It’s Just Braver

Regional work is often described as “smaller”. Smaller budgets. Smaller teams. Smaller venues. Smaller reach.

It’s rarely said with outright belittlement, but it carries an implication that regional work is somehow a stepping stone, a proving ground or a consolation prize on the way to something bigger, louder and more important. As if the natural ambition of any artist or producer should be to leave, rather than to stay.

First of all, let’s just say it: ‘Regional’ means anything outside of London, and London shouldn’t be the epicentre of this industry. If anything, it’s the anomaly. The loud cousin that turns up at the wedding, gets pissed and tell everyone HE’S ‘BEEN ON A GAP YEAR DON’T YOU KNOW’.

Smaller isn’t the right word for our work. Regional work is braver.

It happens closer to the ground with fewer safety nets and more at stake. It asks artists, producers and organisations to be accountable, not just to funders, critics or institutions, but to the people who live alongside the work.

When people describe regional work as “small”, what they often mean is measurable. Fewer zeros in the budget. Shorter runs. Less press. Leaner teams where one person might be the producer, marketer, fundraiser and front-of-house manager all at once. But those same conditions are exactly what make the work courageous.

There’s less distance between decision and consequence. Less room to hide behind branding or infrastructure. If something doesn’t land, you feel it immediately in the room, in the street, in the conversations you have the next day. And if something does land, the impact is personal, not abstract.

In regional work, your audiences are often your neighbours. The people you’re making work with or for are the same people you see in Tesco, on the bus, at the school gates, or the local coffee shop. That proximity changes everything. It demands care. It demands listening. It demands a kind of integrity that doesn’t always come with scale.

There’s also a particular bravery in staying.

Staying when resources are stretched. Staying when opportunities elsewhere might look shinier. Staying long enough to build trust, to make mistakes, to repair them and to keep going anyway. Regional work often asks for long-term commitment in a sector that is obsessed with momentum and upward movement, and that commitment is risky.

Because when you commit to a place, you commit to its complexity. You can’t parachute in, extract a story and leave. You can’t simplify narratives for the sake of clarity or funding language. You are accountable to the lived reality of the people involved and that reality doesn’t always fit neatly into outcomes or headlines.

There is a quiet resilience in regional practice that often goes uncelebrated. The ability to keep making work in the face of uncertainty, to build something sustainable without the illusion of endless resource and to value process as much as product.

I often think about how much regional work relies on relationships rather than reputation. it needs trust rather than scale and depth rather than reach.

That doesn’t make it lesser. It makes it demanding.

And yet, the language we use doesn’t always reflect that reality. “Regional” is still too often framed as peripheral, when in truth it is central to audience development, to cultural relevance and to the future of the sector itself.

There is so much that larger institutions could learn from regional practice. Long-term thinking instead of short-term wins. Listening before leading. Allowing communities to shape the work rather than simply respond to it. Understanding that impact isn’t always immediate or quantifiable, but it is cumulative.

This isn’t about pitting regional work against national institutions. Both have value. Both have responsibilities. But the hierarchy we’ve built, the idea that bigger automatically means better, does real damage. It narrows ambition instead of expanding it.

Working regionally has taught me that ambition doesn’t always look like growth. Sometimes it looks like staying put and doing the work properly. Sometimes it looks like choosing depth over distance. Sometimes it looks like resisting the urge to move on too quickly, and instead asking: what would it mean to commit here?

Regional doesn’t mean small. It means rooted. It means relational. It means brave enough to work without a buffer, to be seen, to be accountable and to keep showing up.

And in a sector that often rewards visibility over value, that kind of bravery matters more than we’re willing to admit.