General Public Agency
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Founding Director Clare Cumberlidge was previously one of Britain’s leading independent curators and is an expert in inter-disciplinary creative practice. She specialized in emerging areas of artistic practice (pioneering the relationship between art and science and between contemporary artists and museology). As a curator and cultural planner she has wide-ranging experience on ground-breaking projects within regeneration and the public realm, including her role as Artistic Director Of Holly Street Public Art in which she developed innovative approaches to collaborative and cross-disciplinary work involving creative practitioners in the built environment and engaging the public with processes of renewal and change. She has devised and delivered a number of national case studies in cultural practice and is a leading commentator on the future of cultural policy and practice. Clare was an Arts Panel member of the RSA, a member of the RSA Art and Architecture Panel and an advisory group member of Play and Risk, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation research project. She is a panel member of the CABE/DfL 2012 Design Advisory Panel, a Board member of the Autonomous Organization and a member of the Stanley Picker Gallery Advisory Board.


Founding Director Lucy Musgrave was previously Director of the campaigning charity and cultural organisation The Architecture Foundation where she developed programmes of action research in the field of social inclusion and the built environment. Lucy was responsible for pioneering new thinking, methodologies, and evaluation for community planning and creative regeneration strategies. She staged a series of public forums on the future of London which attracted over 15,000 people. She produced the publication “Creative Spaces: a toolkit for participatory urban design” and 2 acclaimed directories of the best young architects in Britain, both publications supported by the Government. She was a member of the Government’s Urban Sounding Board, DEFRA Sustainable Development Unit Land Use and Major Land Owners group and the GLA’s Public Realm Advisory Group. She was also a trustee of The Photographers’ Gallery, jury member of the Mies van der Rohe European Prize for Urban Public Space, an external examiner at London Metropolitan University. She is a founding trustee of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, a jury member of the Holcim Sustainability Awards, Switzerland 2008, a school governor, and an honorary fellow of the RIBA.

Executive Director Stephen Escritt studied History at Cambridge University and has an MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art (1993-5). He was a fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme 2004-5 and has worked at the British Museum and the Whitechapel Gallery, where he was Director of Strategic Development from 2006-2009. At the Whitechapel Gallery Stephen was responsible, among other things, for the gallery's strategic relations with all its public and private sector stakeholders in the fields of art, planning and regeneration - including local and national government, regional development agencies and other strategic public bodies. His work at the gallery delivered a successful model partnership between a cultural organisation, its local authority planning and regeneration team, and private sector partners. It included a year-long programme of artists' projects in the public realm, during the Gallery's recent construction period, in which the Whitechapel collaborated with a local Housing Association. Stephen's academic interest is in the historic relationship between design and society and he is the author of two books on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century architecture and design published by Phaidon Press (Art & Ideas: Art Nouveau, 2000 and Art Deco, 1997).