A research body, founded in 2026.
The Institute for the Measurement of Things That Can’t Be Counted builds evidence about the value of cultural and community spaces that no balance sheet captures.
Our launch project, with research partner TJ Culture, looks across London at what happens to cultural organisations when the estates around them are professionally asset managed. It covers every deprivation decile, weighted towards the three most deprived, so the effect can be compared rather than asserted.
The Institute measures. It does not accuse. Where we publish a figure, we name its source beside it. Where something has not been counted yet, we say so.
We were founded by the Bureau of Silly Ideas, an arts organisation working since 2002 from the Brixton railway arches, where its founder had been making work since 1992.
Email the InstituteIt is about being able to measure the thing in a way that is of use. The thing that everybody knows in their gut is good, and how it creates cohesion and joy and well being.