Can the Guardian survive?

By Tim de Lisle

It was a bright warm day in March, and one of the world’s leading newspapers was doing something radical: meeting its readers. The Guardian was holding the first festival in its 191-year history, billed as the Guardian Open Weekend. It opened the doors of its offices, at the King’s Place arts centre behind King’s Cross station in London, and offered passes for £30 or £40 a day or £60 for the weekend (one child free with every adult). Around 5,000 readers poured in. Among them was a Baptist minister in his mid-80s who had taken the paper, religiously, for 66 years.

The speakers included painters, politicians, physicists, rock stars, novelists, explorers, actors, footballers and philosophers. There were 188 events, and still the queues were long. You could take a boat trip on the canal, commission a T-shirt from a graffiti artist, eat mackerel and chips “curated” by a local chef, or browse second-hand books on a barge. You could observe the Guardian reader, and see how this semi-mythical figure now comes in two broad types—the over-60s, in linen jackets or sensible cardies, looking like retired teachers or psychotherapists, and the under-35s, in denim or leather, harder to pin a profession on. You could see the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, chatting to readers, tall and mop-haired with a satchel over his shoulder, simultaneously boyish and avuncular. You could listen to folk bands playing and poets reading from their work, and watch a blank white wall slowly turn into a giant mural, a Bayeux tapestry of vivid vignettes from the weekend captured by a team of illustrators. Among them was a cuddly, felt-tipped version of the artist Grayson Perry, in his transvestite mode, with a speech bubble. “Bite the hand that feeds,” it said, “but not too hard.”