How arts and crafts convey the great life
Charlie Gladstone must get bored with people constantly referring to his fortune, but when he is, he carries it happily. He could live in a castle and descended from a legendary prime minister, but that doesn't mean he lives in an ivory tower. "Yes, we live in a big house and we have material wealth," he says. "We are rightly simple targets." All but one of the Gladstone kids work in the creative industry, and he himself worked at A&R, discovered the Charlatans, and ran They Might Be Giants.
It can be difficult to take your creativity seriously when you come from such a distinguished environment, but, according to Gladstone, he doesn't subscribe to the idea that creativity necessarily came from combat. "Look at Hockney and how innovative he was in later life," he points out. It's an evergreen topic, but it's still a topic to reconsider when the arts are in such a crisis.
In fact, Gladstone quietly made his own contribution to the arts during the lockdown. And that in the last few years. Together with the musician, presenter and poet Cerys Matthews and her husband Steve Abbott, he is the driving force behind the Good Life Experience (TGLE) festival, which the friends founded in 2014 on the Hawarden Estate in North Wales and which will take place again in the coming year April. He also founded the vintage brand Pedlars with his wife Caroline and continued to employ more than 100 people in various projects after the closure: “The festival, the farm shop, the café and the pub (Glynne Arms in Hawarden) are our way of being, ourselves to pay and make a contribution to society a little, ”he says.
Poster by Kieran Riddiough for the 50/50 project
The festival may have made a name for itself among creators as a good place to display merchandise, but perhaps less known is that during the lockdown, TGLE employed 50 creative freelancers and paid them what they wanted to pay for a range of creative projects. The team also sold thousands of charity posters over the same period and offered 100 tickets to the festival next year for a price you can afford. Artist Kieran Riddiough was hired to create a series of posters promoting TGLE contributors and guests, as well as a social media post to share the 50/50 project with fellow contributors. He says, "It was really great to see an organization ready to support creatives in an incredibly difficult time. Everything the Good Life Society creates and promotes feels real and community-minded, and that's why it wanted to I'll take part. "