Cultural Trends, 2013

Vol. 22, No. 2, 97 107, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2013.783175

Reframing models of arts attendance: Understanding the role of access to

a venue. The case of opera in London
Orian Brook
School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Arts attendance in England has, in recent decades, been the subject of several surveys focusing
on how individual factors such as socio-economic status, education, ethnicity and age inuence
attendance. These surveys have been used to create small area estimates of arts attendance. But
other studies of the use of public facilities suggest that access to a venue would be highly
predictive of attendance. This paper compares administrative data on opera attendance in
London with small area estimates of opera audiences, and nds a systematic geographic bias
in the errors of the predictions, related to a lack of information about the location of venues.
It demonstrates that a model using 2001 Census data and a simple accessibility index better
predicts attendance, and more accurately locates audiences. It concludes that, by focusing on
individual-level explanations in order to understand cultural engagement, funders have
failed to examine the effect of their own investment.
Keywords: accessibility index; opera; administrative data; segmentation; small area estimates

Introduction
The factors that inuence whether individuals attend the arts have been the subject of a considerable amount of policy research in the UK, particularly during the last decade. The focus has been
on how individual demographic and socio-economic characteristics inuence engagement in
cultural activities. But none of this research has looked at whether living close to an arts venue
inuences individuals attendance. As the subsidy of specic venues constitutes a substantial
part of the funding of culture by central government, this omission is paradoxical: policymakers have not considered the potentially important effect of their own policies on driving
arts attendance. Moreover, academic literatures about users of public and commercial facilities
have suggested that distance would be highly inuential on attendance.
A central plank of policy research has been the commissioning of large-scale surveys; the data
collected have been combined with geo-demographic segmentations to model the number of
attenders to each art form at a local level (ACE, 2008a) a type of spatial modelling known
as small area estimates. This spatial modelling of audiences is questionable, when the research
has failed to account for the spatial distribution of venues both theoretically and methodologically: theoretically in the content of the surveys, and methodologically when modelling the
spatial distribution of audiences but not to venues. A potential consequence of this approach is
that it risks confounding the effect of access to a venue with other variables. But, more critically,
it frames arts attendance as being exclusively a matter of an individuals taste and/or social position, and any decision to attend as independent of the policy context in terms of the supply of
cultural facilities.

Email: orian.brook@st-andrews.ac.uk

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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O. Brook

This paper explores the theoretical and methodological problems with the current aspatial
understanding of drivers of arts attendance by comparing Arts Council Englands (ACEs)
small area estimates for opera attenders to the observed location of opera attenders according
to administrative (box ofce) data. It shows that the predictions are compromised by not accounting for venue locations; that they overestimate audience levels in areas that are far from venues,
and underestimate them in areas that are close to venues. Furthermore, it shows that geo-demographic segmentations, such as Mosaic and ACORN, while useful for summarising and comparing audience characteristics, are not the most effective way of predicting audiences in small areas.

Background
Policy understanding of drivers of arts attendance has been based on a series of surveys developed
over the last 26 years, since ACE began to commission questions about attendance at key art
forms in the Target Group Index (TGI) omnibus survey.1 Rates of attendance at key art forms
are reported alongside demographic and lifestyle characteristics of each art form audience
(ACE, 2010). This analysis is then used (see box) to estimate the number of attenders to each
art form per postcode sector (ACE, 2011a), which have been used by venues to locate potential
audiences (Hildrew, 2008) and by funders to understand local demand for cultural services (Baker
Richards Consulting, 2007).

Developing small area estimates

There are various approaches to creating small area estimates; the method used for the TGI
estimates is not published. In principle, a model is built which the researchers believe best
explains membership of the population of interest (here, opera attenders) using the data
available (the Taking Part and TGI surveys, and other data held by CACI). The variables
used should be available both for the population of interest and at the small area level.
Those variables that are most signicant in predicting the population of interest nationally
are then chosen and the effect that they have on opera attendance nationally is applied at the
local level.
In the case of Arts audiences: insight, some information about the estimation method is
published (ACE, 2008c). The national model was a segmentation, which means that the
small area estimation had an extra step: membership of the segments was determined by
responses in Taking Part to questions about cultural attendance and reasons for attending
or not (ACE, 2011b). The prole of the membership of each segment was then analysed
using their demographic characteristics and consumer behaviour (according to TGI). Discriminant analysis was used to identify the most signicant characteristics, and the probability of belonging to each of the 13 segments was then calculated for residents of each
postcode in England.
An increasing emphasis on evidence-based policy and a broader denition of cultural activities motivated a new series of enquiries into cultural engagement, culminating in the Taking Part
survey. A continuous survey with an initial sample of c. 28,000 adults, it collects rich data on cultural and sporting attendance, participation and attitudes (Bunting et al., 2007). The data collected
have also been used in a statistically based fusion with TGI data to create Arts audiences:
insight, a segmentation of the population based on their consumption of and attitudes to
culture (ACE, 2008b), which has in turn been used to model estimates of attendance to each

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art form in Census Output Areas (OAs) (see box). However, none of this research has considered
the inuence on attendance of having access to an arts venue.
In the case of other public amenities, studies tend to nd that distance from the facility has a
strong impact on levels of usage and/or the prole of users, for example of open spaces
(Giles-Corti et al., 2005), museums (Boter, Rouwendal, & Wedel, 2005) and libraries (Park,
2011). Geographic distance from venues is of course a relatively crude proxy for a number of
factors, both physical and psychological,2 which might constitute access to them. Availability
of public transport, commuting patterns and other regular travel behaviours (shopping or
school runs) will inuence attitudes to routes and destinations, and population subgroups make
varying uses and conceptualisations of geographic areas. Some of these factors can be difcult
or impossible to account for3 but it is striking that the simple empirical distance measure is, nonetheless, often found to be highly signicant.
Only recently, with the culture and sport evidence (CASE) programme commissioned by the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has the issue of the supply of culture as well as demand
for it been raised. Part of the programme involved a scoping study for the creation of a cultural
assets database, which acknowledged that there has been
less of a culture of thinking spatially in terms of investment, as policy has hitherto concentrated on
issues of supply (e.g. producing work and exhibiting and conserving collections) rather than
demand (e.g. how to equitably and efciently serve demand across particular geographies). (BOP
Consulting, 2009)

Existing asset lists are problematic in that they are each incomplete. But, building a comprehensive
asset list is expensive and the demand for it is not high, given the cost of creation (BOP Consulting,
2009, p. 59). There is, of course, a circularity to this situation, in that the demand for cultural asset
data does not exist in part because policy-makers have not thought it relevant, and because the data
do not exist, it is not possible to demonstrate whether it is relevant. Indeed, the report notes that data
on sports and heritage assets exist because its use is embedded within the practice of Sport England
and English Heritage (BOP Consulting, 2009, p. 58). The resulting toolkit for people wishing to
build their own database of cultural assets (Evans & Foord, 2010) was identied in the report as
both the least cost option and the one which carried the least prospect of success.
When CASE came to create robust statistical models of drivers of cultural engagement (EPPI
Centre & Matrix Knowledge Group, 2010) in order to account for access to arts venues, multilevel
models were created with variables on arts provision based on ACEs Regularly Funded Organisations within the local authority (LA). They found no relationship between their measure of
supply and arts engagement, but acknowledge their measure of supply was weak (Marsh et al.,
2010, p. 76). It is indeed questionable that the level of funding by ACE within an LA is a
good measure of access to the arts, as it would not capture commercial and locally funded arts
facilities. Moreover, a multilevel structure requires that people only attend facilities within
their LA, which is not the case.

Methodology
In order to explore the impact of this omission, this paper makes use of administrative data collected
by The Audience Agency (TAA). Administrative data are increasingly being used for social science
and policy research, due to the scale and detail which it is often not possible to match through traditional survey methodologies (Savage & Burrows, 2007). Moreover, it avoids issues such as the
non-response bias and telescoping which are known to affect survey response, including surveys
into arts attendance behaviour (Roose, Lievens, & Waege, 2007). Venue box ofces of necessity

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O. Brook

collect data which are both detailed and accurate, and cultural economists have started to use this
data to understand markets and the attractiveness of venues (Boter et al., 2005; Willis, Snowball,
Wymer, & Grisola, 2012). TAA has collated box ofce data from 38 arts venues in London,
and a subset of this data (transactions for opera performances) is used to provide an observation
of the number of households attending opera in small areas, for comparison with modelled estimates. The location of each venue presenting opera and the number of opera tickets they sold
are also used to create an accessibility index, which combined in a model with data from the
2001 Census will be compared with other segmentations commonly in use.4
Audiences for opera were chosen for analysis for two reasons. First, funding for opera is
mostly concentrated on performances in a few large venues that are expected to have broad geographical reach, so one might expect distance to be a relatively less signicant barrier to attendance; moreover, it is a genre with a reputation for audiences which are socially stratied (Chan,
Goldthorpe, Keaney, & Oskala, 2008), which would again suggest that the majority of the variation in attendance should be explained by socio-economic and demographic factors rather than
distance. Second, data collected by box ofces for opera are relatively complete as attendances are
usually booked in advance;5 and TAAs data are comprehensive, as there are no major venues presenting opera whose data are not held. Therefore, there should be agreement between the modelled attendance according to surveys and observed attendances at opera.
London itself is not of course representative of the rest of the country, particularly in its access
to cultural facilities: all parts of London might be said to have good access to opera. Rather than
arguing that opera and London are typical examples generalisable to other art forms and regions,
we contend that this is a case where one might expect to nd accessibility having relatively little
impact on attendance: if an effect is found here, then even more one might expect to nd one in
other art forms and locations.
Attendances between July 2004 and June 2006 were selected at the Almeida, Artsdepot, the
Barbican, Cadogan Hall, English National Opera, Greenwich Theatre, Hackney Empire, Peacock
Theatre, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Opera House, Sadlers Wells and the Southbank Centre. As the
administrative data set was to be compared with the Taking Part survey, it was edited so that denitions matched as far as possible. Corporate, press and group bookings were removed, as Taking
Part asks people about attendances which were not undertaken as part of their job. Data were
limited to attendances from within London so that we could be more condent that residents
were not attending venues whose box ofce data we did not have. This left attendances from
almost 100,000 unique households (matched across venues, so that if a household attended
more than one venue they were counted only once).
For modelling purposes, the booking records were aggregated via their postcodes to Census
OAs, each of which contains approximately 125 households. This created a count of households
per OA that attended opera. There are 24,141 observations (one per OA). Other variables about
the OAs were then appended, including variables from the 2001 Census,6 chosen because of the literature on drivers of cultural attendance (Bunting et al., 2007): the proportion of residents in each
socio-economic classication, age, ethnic and religious group; the proportion of households with
access to a car; the proportion of adults that are full-time students, and that have each of four
levels of qualications, from General Certicate of Secondary Education (GCSE) to degree or above.
From the Mosaic and ACORN geo-demographic segmentations, the proportion of households
(Mosaic) or adults (ACORN) belonging to each of their most detailed type segments7 in the
OA was appended, as was the median income from Experian. From the ACE modelling, the
proportion of adults belonging to each of the Arts audiences: insight segments was added. In
order to compare the original TGI-based predictions of attendance, a further le was created,
aggregating the box ofce data at the postcode sector level and appending the predicted
number of opera attenders according to the TGI modelling (Table 1).

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Table 1. Segmentations/estimates used for analysis.

Segmentation
TGI: opera index
Arts audiences: insight
ACORN type
Mosaic type
Census variables plus accessibility

Scale

No. variables

Postcode sector
OA
OA
OA
OA

1
13
55
51
20

A nal model was developed, which used the Census variables already mentioned, the log of
the median income score from Experian and an accessibility index for the venues presenting
opera. Accessibility indices have been used to understand the relative access to transport and
other public and commercial facilities. As such, these can be used to evaluate policy alternatives
(Handy & Niemeier, 1997). While there are a range of methods used, they have in common that
they calculate, from a given point (normally a residential area), the number of opportunities
(stations, shops) available within a given distance, the attractiveness of each opportunity (the
frequency of the trains, or size of the shop) and the cost of reaching it which might be distance, travel time, or nancial cost of the journey.
For this paper, a simple, common approach to the calculation of access to opera was adopted
(Plane & Rogerson, 1994). The straight line distance between the postcode of the venue and the
centre of the OA was calculated, and the log of the distance was taken because a small change in
distance has a greater effect when the starting point is a short distance. (For the same reason, the
log of the median income score was used: small changes in income make more of a difference
where incomes are low than where they are high.) The log of the distance between each OA
and venue was multiplied by the number of tickets sold by the venue. This recognises that, for
opera, distance from the Royal Opera House affects ones access to opera more than distance
from Greenwich Theatre. The accessibility index for opera,8 and the location and size of the
venues presenting opera in London are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Opera venues and accessibility index, London.

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O. Brook

The data sets were then used in a series of grouped logistic regression models. A logistic
regression models a binary outcome variable (i.e. a positive or negative result), and reports the
effect of each independent variable on the probability of the outcome. A grouped logistic regression
models a count of the number of positive outcomes (households attending opera within an area)
compared with the number of possible outcomes (all residential households in that area) (Baum,
2008). The standard approach to comparing such models uses the deviance statistic, the equivalent
of the residual sum of squares in a linear regression model (Hosmer & Lemeshow, 1989, p. 14). This
is a measure of how closely the modelled rate of attendance corresponds to the observed rate: if the
deviance of a model with some explanatory variables is compared with that of a model with none,
reduction in deviance can be used as a pseudo-R2 to compare the models.

Results
Table 2 summarises the results for each model.9 Note that all of the existing, aspatial data used to
predict arts attendance explain a similar amount of deviance, between 55 per cent and 60 per cent.
The model that contains Census variables plus the accessibility index explains considerably more
at 70 per cent. There are two important possible explanations for this: one is that the other predictions are made using segmentations, which are essentially data reduction methods, and simplify the extensive data that they are built with in order to identify patterns within the data.
While useful for proling and comparing audiences, this also removes detail and therefore accuracy. It might have been better to use the key variables that predicted the segment membership to
directly predict audiences at a local level, rather than use them to predict segment membership and
then use segment membership to predict audiences.
The other advantage that the best performing model has is that it includes the accessibility
index. On its own, this variable does not perform strongly: a model including just the accessibility
index explains only 20.9 per cent of deviance (a model which includes only the percentage of
adults with degree-level qualications predicts 57.8 per cent of deviance). But, once accessibility
is added to a model with Census variables, it becomes more signicant than the other variables in
the model, as can be seen in Table 3, which shows the detailed model parameters.10
The strong signicance and effect of both having access to a venue and having a degree in
predicting opera attendance are notable: in both cases, a 10 per cent increase in these values is
associated with a c. 50 per cent increase in attendance. The other variables listed, although signicant, had nothing like the same strength of predictive value for attendance. As might be
expected for opera audiences, the percentage population aged over 50 is strongly positively predictive of attendance, whereas the percentage aged 16 29 is negatively predictive. However, the
percentage of full-time students is positive, again (with the percentage with A levels) suggesting
the strong inuence of education on opera attendance. By comparison, socio-economic status and
median income, although signicant, have more modest effects.
Table 2. Comparison of models predicting attendance to opera.
Model used for prediction
TGI (opera index)
ACORN type
Arts audiences: insight
Mosaic type
Census variables with accessibility

Per cent deviance explained

54.9
55.6
60.1
60.5
70.0

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Table 3. Parameters, grouped logistic regression model with Census and accessibility.
Variable
Accessibility index
Log median income
Per cent households without access to a car
Per cent students
Per cent aged 515
Per cent aged 1629
Per cent aged 5065
Per cent aged 6574
Per cent White Irish
Per cent White other
Per cent Asian Indian
Per cent Asian other
Per cent Black Caribbean
Per cent Black African
Per cent Jewish Religion
Per cent religion none
Per cent NS-SeC 7
Per cent NS-SeC 8
Per cent qualications level 3 (A level)
Per cent qualications level 45 (degree or above)
Constant

Coefcient

Standard error

OR (%)

3.77
0.32
20.75
1.42
1.18
20.9
2.03
2.18
1.57
20.45
21.73
23.46
0.78
21.9
0.97
1.29
21.87
1.62
2.79
4.15
29.45

0.09
0.03
0.05
0.1
0.13
0.08
0.13
0.16
0.2
0.08
0.1
0.28
0.12
0.14
0.06
0.08
0.23
0.17
0.14
0.06
0.28

43.86
12.25
215.29
13.77
8.77
210.85
15.83
14.01
7.78
25.83
217.57
212.4
6.26
214.03
15.07
15.45
28.02
9.31
19.65
72.83
233.72

146
103
93
115
113
91
123
124
117
96
84
71
108
83
110
114
83
118
132
151

We can see that including the accessibility index removes a specic bias from the errors, illustrated in Figures 2 and 3. The predictions from the insight model were compared with the
observed number of households attending according to the administrative data, and the results
aggregated to the larger Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) area, to aid visualisation,
and mapped using a cartogram11 in Figure 2. In the dark areas, the insight model predicted
only half the number of attenders found in the administrative data; in the white areas the

Figure 2. Arts audiences: insight prediction compared to observed attendance.

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O. Brook

Figure 3. Census & accessibility prediction compared to observed attendance.

insight model predicted twice as many attenders. Dark areas are concentrated close to central
London, where venues are mostly located, whereas most white areas are further away. It is
clear that, even within London, there is a systematic geographic bias in the errors of the predictions from the ACE segmentation model, which is related to a lack of information about where
venues are located.
By contrast, in Figure 3, the predictions were made using the Census model with accessibility
index, and compared with the administrative data in the same way. While there is still some geographic bias to the errors in the predictions, it can be seen that a considerable amount has been
removed. In fact, the number of LSOAs where the predictions are out by a factor of two is
reduced in the second model by 41 per cent, from 1144 to 673.

Conclusion
This paper began by arguing that the failure to consider access to venues in understanding drivers
of arts attendance was an important omission both theoretically and methodologically, in the
creation of small area estimates. By comparing administrative data to existing estimates, and
using it to calculate an accessibility index, this paper has demonstrated that, in the case of
opera audiences in London, this omission is indeed signicant. A simple model using secondary
and administrative data explained more attendance than the extensive modelling of the primary data
involved in creating the Arts audiences: insight predictions. Moreover, the location of audiences is
mis-specied by not accounting for the effect of distance from a venue on levels of attendance.
And if distance has a signicant effect for opera attenders, where audiences are notoriously
socially stratied, and in London, where all areas have good access to opera venues, how
much more impact might it have for other artforms and regions? The analysis of audiences for
childrens events in urban and rural Scotland, for example, could show an even stronger effect
of distance from the venue on attendance. Using administrative data enables a detailed dissection
of arts attendance that is not always possible with a survey, for example, comparing audiences for
pantomime and new writing, or those that buy cheaper and more expensive tickets. This would
enable a more nuanced approach that might usefully inform both funding and marketing decisions

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at the venue level. Furthermore, there is no doubt that London is not a typical region in either its
arts provision or its population: analysis of data from one of the other administrative data pooling
schemes would be highly desirable.
This analysis also needs to be expanded methodologically. The intention here was to show that
even a simple accessibility index could improve models of attendance. A more sophisticated approach
would be desirable, with the inclusion, for example, of commuting behaviour or access to public
transport. A disadvantage of this analysis is that it is an ecological model: households attending
may not be representative of the areas that they live in, so that relationships at the area level may
not exist at the individual-level. Including an accessibility index in an analysis of survey data
would allow a model to be created using respondents individual characteristics, which could also
examine their motivations and attitudes to culture, not simply whether or not they attended. It
could also include types of activities and art forms for which no acceptable administrative data exist.
The analysis also brings into question the sectors reliance on segmentations for predicting
audience levels. It is easy to understand why segmentations are popular: they identify patterns
in complex data; offer a user-friendly means to communicate audience proles; and make proling accessible to non-specialists, as it requires only a list of postcodes. However, the summarising
of data involved in creating the segmentation implies that it was relatively easy to build a simple
disaggregated model, which provides better discrimination for predicting attendance levels. It is
not that segmentations should no longer be used, but how and when they are best used might
require careful consideration.
In addition to the question of accuracy, there is one of accountability. The framing of arts
attendance as an individual choice, or one informed by social processes, ignores the role of the
funders of such services in enabling attendance. If arts provision is thought to be a public
good, and there is a considerable though contested body of literature on the impacts of culture
(Belore & Bennett, 2008; Ruiz, 2004), then the role of policy-makers in providing cultural
opportunities needs to be acknowledged and examined. By focusing on individual-level explanation to understand cultural engagement, funders have failed to examine the effect of their
own investments (and indeed disinvestments). A natural experiment, looking at the effect on
arts attendance when a venue opened or closed, would be highly informative, and could potentially use existing administrative or survey data, or ideally, the new longitudinal data on cultural
engagement, which is becoming available.

Acknowledgements
Census boundary data 2001 were supplied by The Ofce for National Statistics. The author is a PhD student
supported by the ESRC Capacity Building Cluster: Creative Industries Scotland RES-187-24-0014. Thanks
to Dr Chris Dibben for comments and suggestions.

Notes
1.

2.
3.
4.

There is a substantial sociological literature on cultural consumption and taste, and their contribution to
the development and perpetuation of social structures, using both primary data (Bennett et al., 2009;
Bourdieu, 1984) and policy surveys (Chan & Goldthorpe, 2005), some of which has informed policy
research. But it also fails to address proximity to arts venues.
Gould and White (1974) have explored psychological aspects of distance.
For an example of analysis incorporating workplace access to culture, see Brook, Boyle, and Flowerdew (2010).
ACORN and Mosaic are both used to prole attenders or areas where they may live (Hillman, 2002).
Full details of their construction are not published, but they are both based on modelling of Census,
Electoral Roll and Land Registry data along with consumer surveys.

106
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

10.
11.

O. Brook
Neill and Orme (2006) found that arts attenders who did not buy their own tickets (and have their data
captured) were similar demographically to those who bought tickets, and were likely to have been captured on another occasion.
The Census data only offers a snapshot of the population on the day of collection, and residential populations will have changed somewhat between 2001 and 20042006: however, it is the only source for
the detailed level required.
Four segments for ACORN and eight for Mosaic were excluded as they represent no or very few postcodes within London.
For other cultural accessibility indices, see Brook et al. (2010).
The percentage deviance explained by the TGI model is not strictly comparable to the other models as
it uses a different geographic scale. However, larger geographic scales usually give a better model t
(Openshaw, 1983): as the TGI model uses a larger geographical scale, but explains less deviance, than
the other models, we can be condent that it explains opera attendance less well.
This model was developed by rst using all of the explanatory variables suggested by the literature plus
the accessibility index, and removing the least signicant variables until collinearity was acceptable.
A cartogram is a map where geographic areas are displayed resized according to some other variables
(Dorling, 2011). In this case, the number of residential households was used, so that the more densely
and sparsely populated areas are given equal visual prominence.

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