Bluecoat, Liverpool: The UK's First Arts Centre offers different insights for the range of reader that its editors, Bryan Biggs and John Belchem, envisaged in their conception of this book. Biggs, who held directorial and curatorial roles at the center since the mid-1970s, and Belchem, a regional historian and connected to the institution through his work at Liverpool University over many years, organized the diverse contents and multiple narratives of this collection, which slots quite neatly into a set of interconnected academic and cultural policy niches. The book reflects and embodies the history and fortunes of public arts organization funding in the United Kingdom since the later twentieth century, though some of its authors spend a good amount of time and are, perhaps, in some ways more interesting when discussing the much longer history of the building, which originated in its establishment in Liverpool in 1717, and its changing and accumulating roles over the next three centuries.

Indeed, the collection marks both the tercentenary of the Bluecoat—its founding dedication then as a charity school—and the ninety years since the building was formally repurposed as an arts center in 1927, to be run by the then newly created Bluecoat Society of Arts. Of the book's nine essays, Biggs has written five, including the introduction co-authored with Belchem, while Belchem supplies a broad history of the institution, building on Gavin Davenport's detailed account of its early years. Three other essays deal with specialist topics: the center's support especially for socially radical artists and art practices since the later 1960s (by Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Julie Sheldon); Bluecoat's sponsorship of music performance and development (by Roger Hill); and its more recent program of having academic philosophers and sociologists in residence (by Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Paul Jones).

All the essays are readable, interesting, engaging, and free of jargon. Together they constitute a complex history and account of the Bluecoat, its changing physical structure, and the sociohistorical context in Liverpool, the northwest region, the country, and its now global role. The book is copiously illustrated, with almost ninety photographs, and it includes a useful timeline pinpointing key dates and events across the three hundred years of the institution's existence. These views of the mutating role, character, and significance of the Bluecoat—including the recent use of that single name to designate the organization—interestingly reveal the sometimes confused (if not antagonistic) purposes, contexts, and objectives of arts subvention in the United Kingdom, especially since the founding of the Arts Council of Great Britain at the end of the Second World War. Since the 1990s, urban regeneration has been the shorthand and rallying cry of the professionals who run arts organizations—necessarily mimicking government policy rhetoric while hoping to expand and deepen the recalcitrant meanings of an intrinsically woolly and analytically intractable term. Reducible neither to quantitative calculation nor ineffable “quality of life” claims, it seems to the authors here, too, that we are stuck with the leitmotif of “regeneration,” which, whatever it actually may mean, is a good thing, and that the Bluecoat, notwithstanding its earlier charitable and patronal roles in very different English social orders, delivers “it” and would deliver more of “it” if the institution received more resources.

The fashion to drop constitutive titular terms such as gallery or museum, and to undermine these perceived archaic and excluding institutional appellations one way or another (in the late 1980s, under its then Thatcher-sanctioned director Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the Victoria and Albert Museum started publicizing itself as “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”), has helped lead to the favoring of the apparently vacuously neutral moniker centre. Biggs and others, however, do infer that this term had meaningful, perhaps even dissident uses in earlier decades. Their propounding of this claim occasionally includes limited but well-aimed sideswipes at what is now called Tate Liverpool, the national gallery of British and modern art founded in this economically depressed city on its Albert Dock in 1988. It was easily characterized then, though not so easily now, as a conservative institution, and was mired, like the Bluecoat's own origins, in slavery history—an insistent theme, malignant yet apparently treatable, in several of the essays here.

As the leaden ideological weight of these additional and often combined terms—national and gallery—sinks in, another of the abiding narrative drives of the book is revealed: This is avowedly partisan local and regional history, and essay after essay shows that the nation, as well as other British regions, actually has much to learn about what the Bluecoat has been able to achieve in terms of the development of its range of inclusions of artists, practices, cultures and forms of social intervention. This achievement underscores the radically changing context of cultural funding in the United Kingdom since the later 1990s, when processes of political devolution began to promote regional identities and commitments to multiple kinds of social diversity. In this development, London's national visual arts institutions began to lose something of their hegemonic centrality—though the increasingly fragmented arts councils became evermore preoccupied with performance metrics. Within and as part of this story, the book offers several interconnected histories of modern and contemporary art (local, national, and international; mainstream and dissident popular and high), which are intellectually separable from and yet socially and politically part of the long history of the institution's changing funding arrangements and objectives.

Bluecoat, Liverpool: The UK's First Arts Centre offers a variety of discerning and often entertaining ways into this convolution of narratives, motives, activities, and outcomes. Perhaps the edited collection format most accurately represents the actual collision and non-totality of intentions and interests that have been manifest over the long history of this building and the specific people—individually and collectively—who have sought to direct its work and purpose, not least Bryan Biggs himself. As a frequenter of the building myself since the mid-1990s, in a variety of roles, I must acknowledge a fondness for its happy informality and lack of stuffiness. The Bluecoat has never seemed to me to reek of the security consciousness of so-called major arts institutions—security worries; definitions of what art is or should be; how it should be looked at or looked after; who it is made by; who it is made for; what it is or about; or even about where, on arrival through the doors, you might have to leave your bag.