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Common ground
Fellows across the UK are using creativity to reclaim the built environment for the common good, turning overlooked and contested spaces into places to gather, make and to stay
Summary
The Royal Society of Arts’ Daisy Carter explores how RSA Fellows across the UK are reclaiming physical space through creativity, community ownership and civic imagination. From SAFE Regeneration in Bootle and Creative Wick in Hackney Wick to PrimeYarc in Great Yarmouth and Sparks in Bristol, these initiatives resist the hollowing out of high streets and shared places.
Main image: Manu Maunganidze, FRSA
The story of community in this country has become a story about loss.
But this is a story about making things – and making space for them. About what brings people together in physical space, and what it takes to protect that space over time.
Reclaiming space
Enclosure has a long history in Britain: between the 16th and 19th centuries, thousands of acts of Parliament converted common land – fields, woods and pastures shared and stewarded for generations – into private property. Today, enclosure pressures are intensifying on every front, including through the onslaught of digital and discount culture, the results of which can be seen on our hollowed-out high streets.
Creativity is how communities take it back – reclaiming shared space and holding it fast when power can feel remote. It is one of the few forces that still pulls us into the same room – and that is exactly what is being lost as more of our shared life is bought up, priced out, emptied out or moved onto screens. Creativity is a force for reclaiming physical space for human encounter and agency.
This piece visits four such acts of resistance – a community-owned pub in Bootle, a contested artist quarter in Hackney Wick, a reclaimed Debenhams in Great Yarmouth and a reimagined department store in Bristol – led by Fellows who insist we reclaim space, creatively, for the common good.
Images courtesy of Originalprojects, yamonics and Daisy Carter
SAFE Regeneration, Bootle, Merseyside: Brian Dawe, FRSA and Jane Dawe
“What would we build if we had to build it ourselves?” – Brian Dawe
SAFE Regeneration began 25 years ago, brought into being by a group of disgruntled artists with a shared conviction that public art could create genuine connection. After buying an old school building and, later, a pub, Brian and Jane built an organisation that operates a canal-side community pub, hosts 4,000-person festivals with world-class artists and is a hotbed for local creativity and enterprise in one of the country’s most economically deprived neighbourhoods.
They had watched the story play out in places across the country and knew it well. “Art goes to a place where nobody else wants to be, animates it, creates energy and character,” Brian says, “and then what typically happens is that developers come and say: ‘you can piss off now while we do the same thing for much more money’.” Their rejoinder to this was to create a toehold – a building they actually owned. “We started thinking about what our neighbourhood might look like. And it wasn’t just what we thought should be done – it was what the community felt was important.”
Though very different spaces, the hub and the pub are both about giving creativity in Bootle a home. A space to try things. Every activity, from sea shanties, a philosophy group, ukulele club and Cheesy Tuesdays has been asked for, and led by, the community.
At the heart of everything is an insistence on quality: the kind of cultural experience wealthier communities take for granted. “How do you go from opening a pub in an area with real social issues to Nile Rodgers, the Waterboys and Billy Ocean? It always comes back to quality,” Brian says. “The principle is people have to feel that the ownership is there for them.”
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Creativity is really about: how do we resist and rebel against systems that are handed down to us?
Manu Maunganidze, FRSA
Sparks and the Pickle Factory, Bristol: Manu Maunganidze, FRSA
Sparks is a sustainable “department store with a difference” housed in a former Marks & Spencer. It was built in partnership with Artspace Lifespace and Invisible Circus, its interior cobbled together from old film sets – flexible, beautiful and wild. Across the city, the Pickle Factory, a distressed Victorian building repurposed as a creative hub for young people and community organisations, offers the same spirit – vast, raw spaces for imagining and reinventing.
Manu came to both looking for a home for the communities his organisations, NYCE and the Global Goals Centre, were already working with: young people, and groups organising around nature and sustainability.
“Consumerism is handed to us, capitalism in its current form is handed to us,” he says. “And when you enter a space like Sparks, it allows people to reinvent, to reimagine: what can a retail space be?”
The first thing he noticed after moving to the UK in 2003, he says, was the high street: “You don’t need a degree in political economy to realise that the power in this space is not in the hands of the people who live here.” DIY spaces, though, point to “a different possibility. An empowered group of people raising something different out of the ground.”
The alternative, he warns, is bleak. “The endgame of constant scaling is infinite reduction of inputs and price, and then you move to virtual spaces… and the result is less interaction between people.”
Originalprojects and PrimeYarc, Great Yarmouth: Julia Devonshire, FRSA and Kaavous Clayton
“I used to come when I was at art school and drive the loop: along the quayside, up to the port, through the industrial zone, past a roller coaster opposite council housing, and along the seafront. All these completely different areas in close proximity. It felt electric.” – Kaavous Clayton
On the Norfolk coast, the artists Julia Devonshire and Kaavous Clayton – working together as Originalprojects – have spent years treating Great Yarmouth itself as their workplace. “Not a White Cube gallery model,” as Kaavous puts it, “but working with people, in a place we lived and felt committed to.” Their work is now anchored in PrimeYarc, a reimagined former Debenhams where artists’ studios sit alongside community workshops and exhibitions.
“Physical space gives you the opportunity to respond to the place you live in,” Julia says, “rather than digital space, which we inhabit in a very different way. Here, you can meet your neighbours, make change together, have an impact on the place.”
The insistence on doing things well and doing things yourself is its own form of resistance. “With high levels of deprivation, where everything operates on a discount culture, there’s a constant temptation to leap into things that are cheap…” Julia says. “What we’re trying to resist is capitalism done in a discount way. Spaces that let you make art, but also let you question.”
For Kaavous, it comes back to agency. “Great Yarmouth is an independently spirited place. That sense of agency – the ability to have some effect on the world that is your own – feels increasingly important in a time when we’re told that external forces are affecting our lives and someone else will sort it out.”
Creative Wick, Hackney Wick & Fish Island, London: William Chamberlain, FRSA
“Hackney Wick was the wild west, or the wild east. All this magical stuff happens in liminal spaces, between the cracks, in the places where there isn’t that much attention.” – William Chamberlain
Hackney Wick is home to one of the largest concentrations of artists and creative businesses in Europe. The Cultural Interest Group (CIG) began 16 years ago, inspired by an arts festival and a shared interest in the neighbourhood’s creative future. When the financial slump stalled development, it gave the grassroots time to get organised and to open a dialogue between the creative community and the development world.
“Artists are often the first wave of gentrification,” William says. “They are the natural placemakers – the people who activate a disused building with a gallery, create a café, which becomes a bar, which becomes a nightclub. As the vanguards of that process, why shouldn’t they be real stakeholders? Why shouldn’t they benefit from what they’ve helped create?”
“It all started in quite a confrontational way,” William admits, in response to the feeling: “I’m losing my home.” The CIG’s purpose, he says, is to solve the problem of displacement by connecting stakeholders who wouldn’t normally meet – and has helped generate policies, born in Hackney Wick, now preventing the displacement of creative communities elsewhere.
Alongside it, the HWFI Community Development Trust secures buildings and spaces for the long term, while The Wick – a free weekly newsletter and quarterly print title – communicates to the creative, business and residential communities locally. Together, the three form a model built on connection, communication and community ownership. William calls it “inside-out regeneration”, working with the assets already present in a place.
Just the beginning
Holding the ground, though, is only the start. What unites these Fellows – in Bootle, Bristol, Great Yarmouth and Hackney Wick – is a refusal to treat creativity as a placeholder until spaces become worth more to someone else. These Fellows work tirelessly to build the opposite of what hollows a high street out: real places made and run by the people who use them. Places where care, not cost, is what matters. Where neighbours can bump into ideas, and each other.
In the end, creativity is not just about making things, but about making space: for ordinary people to decide what their corner of the world is for. When public space comes back to life, so does agency. And that may be the most lasting work of all.
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Daisy Carter is Head of Strategic Programming at the RSA’s Social Impact Team.
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