A birdseye view of a crowd dancing on the Riverside Terrace

Equity, diversity and inclusion

Our workplace culture

We’re the UK’s largest centre for the arts and one of the nation’s top five visitor attractions, showcasing the world’s most exciting artists at our venues in the heart of London. As a charity, we bring millions of people together by opening up the unique art spaces that we care for.

Every day, our colleagues work together to make a difference to the lives of artists, audiences and communities through the variety of our programming and spaces. We are proud of the work we do, and we have an intentional approach to organisational culture to ensure that we create welcoming and respectful environments for each other when working together.

‘We’re determined to build and nurture a Southbank Centre team which reflects the vibrant diversity amongst the artists, audiences and communities we serve, in London and beyond’.

Katy Dent, Director of People and Culture

In 2024, we came together to rearticulate our organisational values and supporting behaviours. Our new values are unique, distinctive and sound like the Southbank Centre at our best. They have been co-curated by over 300 members of staff, who all contributed passionate feedback on how we should be talking about our culture. As a result, we know that we have a set of values that speak to truly authentic experiences and are relevant to the incredible variety of roles we have across the organisation. Together, we believe in:

Creating welcoming spaces

Because upholding respect, safety and belonging is at the heart of vibrant teams and communities.
This means us all taking responsibility for shaping and protecting a kind, compassionate and inclusive environment for others.

Making wonderful experiences together

Because we all contribute to amazing artistic moments at the Southbank Centre.
This means us all understanding and valuing the different parts we play in creating enjoyment and success.

Sparking new thinking

Because different views and thought-provoking conversations inspire innovation, learning and growth.
This means everyone having a desire to learn and being open to evaluating how they think and work.

Our staff: diversity & representation

We believe diversity relates to a range of lived experience which can be shaped by, but is not limited to, age, caring responsibilities, disability, gender identity, neurodivergence, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation and socio-economic background. We’re working hard to ensure our colleagues, artists and audiences reflect the diversity of the UK.

Understanding the demographics of our workforce enables us to make informed decisions to address where we’re less representative in comparison to the diversity of London. But we can only report statistics if our colleagues share their data with us, and we do not take the sharing of this data for granted.

Our information gathering is an ongoing process and when we assessed the data in December 2024, of those who had opted to share their data.

25%of our colleagues identified as being part of the Global Ethnic Majority (GEM)

8%of our colleagues declared a disability

20%of our colleagues identified as LGBTQIA+

We’ve also expanded our data collection to start including caring responsibilities, class/social mobility indicators and neurodivergence.

In 2022, we started publishing our voluntary Ethnicity Pay Gap Report alongside our Annual Gender Pay Gap Report. It’s important that we are transparent about our progress over time. We do this by providing data updates throughout the year to our colleagues and Board of Governors, and report annually to Arts Council England.

Our staff: inclusion

We believe it’s important that Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) is embedded in our approach to learning, developing and communicating as an organisation. To ensure this is focused on and driven within our workforce, we created a Culture team in 2023 whose remit is to bring together Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Learning & Development (L&D), and Internal Communications for our staff.

Whether it be via all-staff internal communications, cross-departmental working groups, or our in-person and online learning offerings, we encourage everyone to embed inclusive practices into our ways of working with each other.

Two of our employee networks – GEM Network and Proud Network – are led and attended by staff members who wish to create a community based on a common identity or lived experience while at work. Alongside 21 Mental Health First Aiders and 26 Sustainability Champions, these groups share insights with teams across the organisation, in addition to promoting awareness and inclusion among their colleagues.

We welcome experts to join our Learning Lunch series for colleagues, and discussion topics have included Accent Bias, Class in the Creative Sector, Disability in the Workplace, Discussing Neurodiversity, Managing Anxiety, Menopause in the Workplace, Social Mobility and Trans Awareness Top Tips to name but a few.

This page reflects just some of the ways in which we are nurturing our working culture at the Southbank Centre. Our approach remains open, curious and collaborative as we work towards a place that best reflects our organisational values.