Benchmarking and understanding London’s Cultural and Creative Industries

This paper describes the Greater London Authority’s evidence base for its work on the creative and cultural industries. Its main purpose is to show that th9is evidence base is viable, robust, and useful. The second and most important purpose is to encourage others in city management to invest in such evidence bases, and to compile them on a comparable basis. It will be some while before this is done by international agencies, and that national agencies are only at the start of a long journey in recognising the importance of city data. Hence, I argue in this paper, a responsibility devolves onto the cities themselves. This paper is about those responsibilities. The paper was originally presented to the Conference Board of Canada at its March 2008 international conference on the creative industries, and, along with the conference proceedings, can be obtained from the conference board via www.e-library.ca. or www.conferenceboard.c