Widening access to the arts through free, community-focused music

At Arts Trust, our ambition is simple: to make high-quality live music accessible to more people, especially those who may face barriers to engaging with the arts.

That means creating a festival, like King’s Cross Summer Sounds (KCSS), which is free, welcoming and rooted in the community around it. It also means listening carefully to the people we want to reach and co-designing cultural experiences that feel relevant, open and inclusive.

Our latest audience postcode analysis gives us an encouraging picture of how that ambition is showing up in practice.

The strongest story in the data is that KCSS is genuinely local. The audience is heavily London-based, with a particularly strong presence from north and inner London. The biggest concentrations came from areas close to the festival, especially Islington and Camden, with postcode districts such as N1, NW1 and N7 standing out.

That matters because it suggests Summer Sounds is not simply attracting people who already travel widely for culture. It is reaching people in the neighbourhoods around King’s Cross and across London, helping to make live music part of everyday city life rather than something that is financially or geographically out of reach.

The distance data reinforces that picture. More than half of the audience (53%) in the exact-postcode sample (2024 & 2025) came from within 10 km (6.2 miles) of the venue, and around three quarters (76%) came from within 20 km (12.4 miles). In other words, this is a festival with a strong local and regional catchment, embedded in the communities around it.

Just as importantly, the socioeconomic picture suggests that the audience is socially mixed. Using borough-level deprivation data (Index of Multiple Deprivation) as a broad proxy, we found that 45.5% of the London audience comes from boroughs in the more deprived third of London (lowest 10% IMD). While postcode data cannot tell us everything about an individual’s circumstances, it does suggest that KCSS is reaching beyond the most affluent audiences and connecting with communities across a wider social spectrum.

That is important to us. Too often, access to the arts is shaped by cost, confidence, geography and a sense of whether cultural spaces are “for you”. Free community-focused festivals can help challenge those barriers. They create low-pressure, welcoming ways for people to encounter music and performance in familiar, public spaces. They can become a first step into broader cultural participation.

Our analysis also showed a small international audience, but the real strength of KCSS is its UK audience, and especially its London audience. This is not primarily a tourist event. It is a festival with a local heart.

Taken together, the findings point to an event that is broadening access in meaningful ways: drawing audiences from nearby neighbourhoods, reaching a socially mixed public and creating opportunities for people to engage with live music without the cost barriers that often come with arts and entertainment.

That does not happen by accident. It comes from thinking carefully about programming, atmosphere, accessibility and relevance, working with local partners to represent local voices. It comes from treating community engagement not as an add-on, but as central to how the festival is shaped.

For us, that is the bigger story behind the postcode data. KCSS is not only bringing people together for great live music. It is helping to widen access to the arts by creating free, community-rooted cultural experiences that are designed with people, not just for them.

And that is exactly the kind of audience we want to keep building.