Meeting outdoors became second nature for most of us over this long, hot summer, but Amanprit Arnold doesn’t get the luxury of choice. She’s sitting at a terrace table when we meet at a cafe because she’s a member of the Deaf community (Deaf with a capital D denotes membership of a unique cultural and linguistic minority). It’s much easier for me to hear out here.” Despite there being 18 million people with hearing issues in the UK, deaf people can often be made to feel like outsiders (even when they’re not sitting outside).
Mainstream representation has grown thanks to actor Rose Ayling-Ellis lifting the glitterball trophy on Strictly Come Dancing in 2021 and Fury on the Gladiators reboot. Critically acclaimed films such as Sound of Metal and Coda – which won the best picture Oscar in 2022 – showcased the talents of deaf actors and writers, and the mesmerising skills of sign language interpreters at rap performances regularly go viral. But this has not led to a dedicated centre for the Deaf arts anywhere in the UK.
Arnold wants to change that. She has started the DeafCity Hub campaign to create or adapt a building using deaf-friendly architectural guidelines called DeafSpace principles to provide, at last, a co-working and cultural space for her community. While there are cafes and clubs that bring deaf people together socially around the UK, Arnold sees the DeafCity Hub as a national centre as well as a meeting place.
This month, the project has landed a year-long “meanwhile” space (a building awaiting redevelopment) through a partnership with Westminster city council and the Oxford Street Development Corporation, which gives her the chance to prove a place like this is needed. We have a really strong cultural identity element and we need somewhere to celebrate that, somewhere made for us.” Arnold’s career is in urban planning and strategy, but there’s activism in her background, too. (“In my family, that’s what we do,” she says with a smile.) Her father was race relations director for Birmingham city council in the 1990s and her grandfather was a trade unionist and antiracism campaigner. Arnold’s design agency, Disability Urbanism, specialises in accessibility, helping city planners and real estate developers create welcoming environments for people with disabilities.
She sees DeafCity Hub as a revival of a 1986 plan for an International Deaf Cultural Centre in London that fizzled out. The 1980s were a heady time for activists, especially in the US, where there were Deaf civil rights protests, the first Oscar for a deaf actor (Marlee Matlin for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God) and the establishment of Gallaudet University, specifically for deaf people, and the appointment of the university’s first deaf president. In the UK, the BBC launched See Hear, a current affairs programme for deaf people, and TV subtitle provision improved.
The British Sign Language Act only received royal assent in 2022, legally recognising BSL as a British language of England, Scotland and Wales, and you still can’t take a GCSE in it (the expected launch date for this qualification is 2028). I think creating DeafCity Hub as a deaf-owned and deaf-led arts space would assert that our culture is also rich.” Being able to access spoken language culture would also be on the DeafCity Hub agenda, as signers often find this difficult. Looking through them, she recalls a quote that’s connected to the formation of Gallaudet University and has become a mantra for many activists: “We travel the world to learn about cultures and people.
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