Free Access to London Arts and Health’s Creative Health Library in Tower Hamlets

London Arts and Health is a leading sector support organisation, advocate and expert for Creative Health in London.

Through our activities, we work to promote, develop and support the understanding of what the arts can do to contribute to a healthy society, in London and nationally, and by so doing to encourage the use of the arts in settings beyond the mainstream.

To support creative health practitioners, we have a library at our office in Tower Hamlets with resources spreading across the categories of Arts and Health, Healthcare, Evaluation in Creative Health, Criminal Justice, and Social Justice. You can view the entire collection online.

To mark Great Mental Health Day, we are offering free access to our creative health library from 31st January to 7th February.

You can sign up here to become a member with us and write to us at info@londonartsandhealth.org.uk to book a free library slot.

Here are some gems that you will find in our creative health library:

1. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Your Brain on Art is an authoritative guide to how neuroaesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities and mend an aching planet. Magsamen and Ross weave through a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives.

2. Phakama: Making Participatory Performance
Phakama is an international arts organisation and network engaging with music, dance, theatre, and visual art with a focus on collaborative, non-hierarchical performance-making.

As well as engaging with political and critical concerns about contemporary theatre and performance, the book offers unique approaches to devising theatre, applied and social theatre, intercultural performance practices and pedagogic models of collaboration and cultural leadership.

3. Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions
Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions provides a complete overview of how to go about undertaking research and practice in the field of arts in health. Daisy Fancourt explores the context for arts in health interventions, examines how to design an arts in health intervention, develop partnerships, and find funding, and considers the sensitivities around working in health care.

The book also provides a fact file of arts in health research and practice, showing how the arts can be applied and the benefits they can bring across a range of medical disciplines.

4. An Equal Future: Inspiring Social Innovations from Finland, Ireland, and the UK
The comic book An Equal Future – Inspiring Social Innovations from Finland, the UK and Ireland features social innovations that have been selected following interviews with experts from the three regions.

5. Arts, Health and Wellbeing: A Theoretical Inquiry for Practice
This book brings together leading UK researchers in the field of arts and health, including creative arts therapies. The chapters are based on presentations originally given at a UK seminar series on scholarship and research on connections between the creative arts, health and wellbeing, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

6. Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact in Theatre, Music and Art
Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact in Theatre, Music and Art engages with a diversity of contexts, locations and arts forms including theatre, music and fine art and brings together theoretical, political and practice-based perspectives on the question of evidence in relation to participatory arts practice in social context.

This collection is a unique contribution to the field, focusing on one of the vital concerns for a growing and developing set of arts and research practices. It asks us to consider evidence not only in terms of methodology but also in the light of the ideological, political and pragmatic implications of that methodology.

The reference library is hosted at LAH office at St. Margaret’s House, Bethnal Green and an added bonus is you can use our office space when you book time for accessing the library.

You can sign up to become a member with us and write to us at info@londonartsandhealth.org.uk to book a free library slot.

Big thanks to Arts Council England for supporting the Creative Health Reference Library. Thank you to Thrive LDN for the opportunity to promote creative health through the Great Mental Health Day and amplifying pathways to support work in mental health and wellbeing in London.