Where is next?

A name cut into stone can outlive a sentence, a prison, even an empire.

Thirty years ago, I was a young curator at the National Justice Museum, in Nottingham, England. In its prison yard, the walls carried marks left by people awaiting transportation. Among them, one name stopped me: VALENTINE MARSHALL. He was 17 when he was convicted for his alleged role in the Reform Bill riots of 1831. Sentenced to death, reprieved and transported to Tasmania for life, he carved his name into the wall before he left, a quiet act of defiance: ‘I was here. I existed.’

One day, an Australian family arrived asking about him. They were his descendants, crossing continents and generations to find the trace he had left behind. In that moment, a few letters cut into stone collapsed time. The past was no longer being explained. It had become present.

That encounter has stayed with me ever since. It taught me that culture matters most when it closes the distance between an object and a person, between then and now, and makes something live again.

Years later, when we searched for a line to guide Barker Langham, we chose a question rather than a conventional mission statement: Where will culture take us next? It is a line full of movement, looking towards a destination and a future yet to be shaped.. But I increasingly wonder whether next is a place at all. The future is not only somewhere ahead of us. It can begin within us: in the moment culture makes the familiar appear strange, the distant feel close, or something previously invisible suddenly impossible to ignore. The difficulty, of course, is that transformations of this kind are much easier to feel than to measure.

Cultural organisations are increasingly asked to prove their impact through visitor numbers, learning outcomes, wellbeing, economic contribution, regeneration and social value. These measures matter. They help us understand reach, make the case for investment and hold institutions accountable. But they inevitably favour what is immediate, positive and countable. Culture’s deepest effects are not always comfortable or predictable. Antigone, Guernica or a Holocaust memorial do not exist to make us feel better. Great art and compelling cultural experiences exceed the logic of audience numbers and commercial success. Their value can lie precisely in what cannot be neatly resolved into a metric: the thought that follows us home, the discomfort that remains, the memory that resurfaces years later, the question we cannot quite put down. Culture can console us, but it can also help us grieve. It can expose injustice and force us to confront what we would rather avoid. It can bring hidden lives into view and open conversations that might otherwise remain impossible.

So perhaps the deeper question is not simply whether culture makes us happier or delivers an approved outcome, but whether it makes us more alive – more able to feel deeply, question freely, connect across difference and imagine beyond the world as it is.

Resonance offers another way of thinking about this.. Something in the world reaches us and, in that encounter, something within us changes. Grief can resonate. So can anger, wonder, awe and recognition. The opposite of resonance is not sadness, but indifference. To feel more alive is to become more aware - of ourselves, of other people, of the living world and of the long human story of which we belong.

Standing before Lucy, the fossilised remains of an early human ancestor, we find ourselves inside a story millions of years old. In a beautifully designed sensory garden: plants move, release scent, hold water, attract life and reveal hidden processes that can be heard and felt. On battlefields such as Culloden, Normandy or Prekaz, landscape becomes witness, carrying loss and contested memory. In The Odyssey, Argos recognises the master he has waited twenty years to see, making loyalty, ageing and loss immediate once more. A fossil can collapse deep time. A garden can teach us to listen. A battlefield can make absence visible. A story carried across millennia can awaken something intimate within us.

So where is next?

Perhaps it begins when culture changes what we notice, what we feel and what we believe matters. A name cut into a prison wall. A garden heard differently. A landscape carrying memory. A story passed down generations. Culture’s deepest impact may be that it makes more of the world matter to us. It makes us more alive to the world we inhabit and more able to imagine the world we might yet shape.

Image: a commissioned sketch articulating the idea of next: being a state of mind rather than a destination.