Hampshire Arts Service

Hampshire Arts Service is part of the Recreation and Heritage department within Hampshire County Council. We work in partnership with Hampshire County Council departments, local authorities in Hampshire and Arts Council England, South East to support the arts in Hampshire through a variety of projects.

The arts service runs arts centres in Aldershot, Fareham and New Milton and we are the coordinators for Hog the Limelight, a fantastic scheme enabling professional arts events to run in our rural communities.

The Arts Service is also responsible for developing arts activities with a variety of Hampshire residents, including projects with young people, building developments and literature development projects. We coordinate the Activehearts programme, a scheme taking art including music therapy and arts and crafts into residential and nursing homes across Hampshire.

We also manage Creative Hampshire Partnerships, which aims to give school children and young people the opportunity to develop creativity in learning across the school curriculum and participate in cultural activities, through the setting up of creative projects around the county.

The Arts Service also provides support to a variety of Hampshire’s professional, voluntary, amateur and community arts organisations by providing advice, guidance and financial assistance, including the Arts Activity grant and Business Partnership grant schemes for local arts activities.

The Arts Office is also the home of amh, a team of specialists in marketing, data analysis, research and evaluation. amh provides strategic advice to cultural organisations to help increase the numbers of people engaging with them. amh works predominantly in the South East region, with clients from the traditional arts sector as well as with museums, libraries, archives and country parks.