Reflections from Creative Place Shaping Together
Last week Creative Estuary, the cultural development agency for the Thames Estuary that I have the pleasure to co-chair, brought together stakeholders from South Essex, North Kent and beyond to think about trends, opportunities and challenges for the area’s communities at its Creative Place Shaping Together symposium, hosted by the British Council at its East Bank office in London.
Personal reflections on the Estuary
Throughout my career I’ve worked with many museums and I think this is why I am drawn to understanding the past when thinking about the present and future. This is probably why I’m still reflecting on the histories of places in the Estuary in the days since the symposium.
Indeed when I think about my own relationship with the Thames Estuary, the history of my family and many others like us comes to mind. And this was how I opened the concluding plenary discussion I chaired at the end of the day. To cut a long story short, around 100 years ago my family arrived in Tilbury by boat from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They then settled in East London, a hub for Jewish immigrants like themselves. Like many East Londoners, they later relocated to Southend-on-Sea for a better life after the war. This is part of the Cockneyfication of Essex that’s well documented in my friend Tim Burrow’s excellent book the Invention of Essex.
Jump forward a few generations and today I live in Bethnal Green, a stone’s throw from where three of my four grandparents grew up. Again this boomerang effect is a familiar story for many Southenders my age who made their way to London to enjoy everything the bright lights of the city would offer, settling in places their grandparents had left behind.
I share this potted family history as one of many personal Thames Estuary narratives.
International inspiration: Nantes and Rotterdam
Taking inspiration from beyond the Thames, at the symposium we heard from Lucie Renou, International Project Manager, from Samoa. Samoa is the organisation responsible for regeneration of great swathes of Nantes in France. Nantes is a much lauded case study in the world of European place making and place shaping for its culture-led regeneration. In various ways regeneration in Nantes provides a useful counter example to what is happening in towns and cities in the Estuary.
This recent Instagram post shows one part of Nantes that Samoa is focusing on.
Samoa and Nantes have a pioneering approach to including arts and culture in the regeneration of a post-industrial community. While some of the Thames Estuary is what you might call post-industrial, Chatham or Tilbury being prime examples, lots of it isn’t. Take for example the “seaside resorts” of Southend or Margate that are today less desirable holiday destinations now British people travel for leisure much more frequently than in the past. My point being that regeneration, especially culture-led regeneration, must be responsive to a place’s history, culture and unique conditions. This is something the authorities in Nantes are clearly mindful of. For more on this idea, see my blog on the essence of place from a few weeks ago.
Nantes also has a confidence about its culture-led regeneration that you just don’t hear from similar initiatives in the UK. I thought hard about whether there’s a similarly confident example of culture-leg regeneration here and struggled to think of an example. The confidence of the Nantes project is of course a consequence of its success, this is very clear to see. Perhaps it also comes from the two decades of political support for culture-led regeneration that Nantes has enjoyed. There are local and regional authorities in the UK that support culture, but perhaps not to the same extent over many years as the Nantes government.
We also heard from Najel Monteiro and Liam Noordji both Cultuur Directors from Cultuur Concreet in Rotterdam. Cultuur Concreet’s hyper-local, personal and human approach to community based arts and culture is incredibly compelling. You can get a sense of it in this video.
Najel and Liam know the communities they work with personally. They know people’s names, talk to them over coffee and most importantly know how to facilitate their creative dreams. Plus they know that what people want in one part of Rotterdam is entirely different from what people want in another neighbourhood, and they are responsive to this. There is no doubt that Cultuur Concreet is enhancing people’s communities on their own terms.
The Rotterdam example got me thinking about why projects like this don’t happen in the UK. Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme is sort of an attempt to emulate this model in England. There are others too. None of these projects have the same personal touch, oomph or impact at city-wide scale as Cultuur Concreet. In reality the reason for this is likely to be funding. Cultuur Concreet is well resourced with an enviably large team. It’s a reminder that with all the best will in the world, supporting communities on their terms to have more opportunities for culture and creativity requires investment.
Place-specific stories: Basildon and Chatham
Returning to communities in the Thames Estuary, it was such a joy to hear about the histories of these places and how these very place-specific narratives shape towns today. It’s important to say that this history is more than just mere nostalgia or reminiscing.
Take Basildon, for example. Built after the Second World War and heralded as a state-of-the-art “new town”, Basildon was a desirable place to live in part because of its cultural infrastructure. Much of this has now vanished or been relocated out-of-town, yet residents and the local authority would love to bring a wealth of arts and culture back to this community. And of course, no conversation about culture in Basildon would be complete without reference to the town’s most famous musical exports Depeche Mode and Alison Moyet. These icons are still very much part of Basildon’s collective cultural consciousness. Depeche Mode, Alison Moyet and others were born from a creative energy in the town. And to honour that, here’s a link to the best of Depeche Mode on Spotify.
Over in Kent, Chatham has a very different and equally fascinating history. Once home to a Royal Navy barracks and dockyard, ship building ended in the town in the 1980s. This story is not dissimilar to that of Nantes in fact. Shortly after closure, Historic Dockyard Chatham, as it is now called, opened as a heritage and tourist attraction. Deeply rooted in maritime heritage, Historic Dockyard Chatham is now home to historical exhibits, university classrooms and arts organisations, including being the location of Creative Estuary’s office itself. Not to mention being a filming location for Call the Midwife, and therefore a popular film tourism destination.
These were just two of many fascinating examples I could have included. As well as Basildon and Chatham, more broadly Medway, we heard about what’s going on in Swale, Castle Point, Thurrock, Gravesham, Ebbsfleet and Southend too over the course of the symposium.
Opportunities for the future
Gatherings like the Creative Place Shaping Together symposium are absolutely vital for the exchange of ideas between people working to develop more cultural infrastructure and opportunities in different towns, cities and communities. I like to think that at a time when the government is prioritising housebuilding in Great Britain, the developers of burgeoning communities in places like Ebbsfleet Garden City might learn lots from listening to the experience of local authority workers in somewhere like Basildon that was itself a new development not too long ago.
Looking to the future, local government in England is changing. It seems likely Essex will soon have a democratically elected Metro Mayor, like the West Yorkshire or East Midlands combined authorities.
We heard from Rehana Mughal, Director of the Creative Economy Programme at the British Council from the British Council about a young Indonesian man named Mochamad Ridwan Kamil. Ridwan had won the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur Award in Design in 2006 and been able to participate in a coveted cultural exchange programme. According to Rehana, Ridwan attributes this formative experience to one of the reasons he then went on to become Mayor of Bandung then Governor of West Java.
What if, like Mochamad Ridwan Kamil, a young person from the Thames Estuary is one day elected Metro Mayor of Essex or Kent thanks to opportunities sparked by participation in a local creative or cultural project? Isn’t that, in the end, what this is all about?