Disrupting Work and Leisure in Lockdown: the Case of the Soho Poly

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure the impact of Covid 19 on leisure and work and uses the London arts venue the Soho Poly as a lens through which to explore the profound disruption the pandemic represented. Beginning with a survey of the Soho Poly’s origins in the early 1970s, the authors demonstrate how these laid the groundwork for the venue’s current artistic policy of ‘disrupting the everyday’ with arts and culture. The authors then examine the Soho Poly’s output during 2020 and 2021 and suggest that key philosophies of temporal and spatial disruption in some senses found their moment in the particular circumstances of lockdown. Drawing on this observation, the authors consider how some of the discoveries prompted by the pandemic might be used by arts providers to rethink the ways in which arts and culture can continue to deconstruct, and disrupt, outmoded divisions between work and leisure.