Forget global summits, your town centre is a big symbol of the future – so what, or who, would make you jump on the bus, to go join in?

More and more of us are having our sense of place increasingly weirded out by our era of crisis and change. But experiences that help us either belong or feel alienated can all be encouraged intentionally where we live – if influencers have the culture for it. It can unlock principles for hopeful world building that any of us can feel a connection to, as I found out hosting a challenging first Bournemouth Town Centre Summit last week. 

“We’d invariably meet in town to go dancing,” said designer Wayne Hemingway to me, “and to go see the bands. We’d make it a date to meet up from all over.”

I was talking to him as a little pre-record to share at an event commissioned by BCP Council ’s leader, Vikki Slade . A bringing together of mostly property stakeholders to see what appetite there was between everyone for shaking up uses of spaces and buildings. The findings of a new public engagement were being shared at the event and its themes surprised no one.

“Somebody’s got to do something.”

It’s a phrase so common about Bournemouth town centre right now, it feels seeded into locals’ dreams.

Wayne was emphatic to me: 

“There’s no regeneration without culture”.

But who owns that problem?

Councillor Slade had asked me to host the event that Economic Development’s Rachel Doe and Liz Orme were being tasked with framing and delivering, and they were warmly gracious about me stress testing the parameters of it with them. Who was invited and why, what sort of evidence were we able to present, what process would this be committing to launching? But my main role as MC of the experience was to keep it as on track as possible, to try to steer towards a sense of possibilities.

Now, the role of a host is not usually to be anyone themselves. A role for which I am expertly qualified – I am gifted at eluding a bankable profile. 

This may be a political mercy, and it’s certainly useful for diplomacy. When I host, I know that I represent a spirit of creativity with a bit of environmental conscience, but I’m not there to present my own world view as a performer. I’m there to warmly welcome everyone invested to attend and bring together their views a bit from the front. All while trying valiantly to sound like an adult. Vikki’s own leadership instinct to work with anyone willing to co-operate positively, I have a similar sense for. My preachy Peach soapbox and political rants stay mostly in my shed, I’m more interested in what drives the real person standing in front of me.

But symbolism is significant. It is the first signal of story – of a place and of its people and of their values.

The day afterwards, I wondered about the symbolism of the photos slideshowing through on the big screens as everyone had been welcomed into the Summit, and what people would see in the photos of just another political event in the Echo.

Messy or masterplanning.

Tonight, I am hoping go see a mate of mine launch his new LP. Martin Roberts’ Powdered Cows may be my favourite local band, but I’m not going to see them in town. I’m going to see him perform in a space held for artists and creativity for so long it is beloved by a wide creative community – the Cellar Bar at Chaplins in Boscombe.

A couple of miles away from the town centre, the district of Boscombe is a bit messy. It refuses to be masterplanned. And it’s been home to many personal stories of crisis and hardship ever since I was a boy. It is no poster place for smart urban regeneration. But there are things about Boscombe that a lot of folk feel connected to. A strong one being an undercurrent of creativity.

Talk of Bournemouth at the moment all seems to circle back to antisocial behaviour and parking.

Which had me thinking about a particular phrase leading up to the event – the thing is not the thing.

As urban designer Richard Eastham said to me beforehand: “It’s pretty simple, we all want the same result – a thriving town centre. Things like ASB and litter become more obvious when the tide of interesting activity has gone out.”

Around the survey headlines, the pictures of Bournemouth town centre across our screens and display boards didn’t look like a place where the tide of love had gone out. They were all colourful, joyful and creatively active looking. The Bournemouth I see in my head. 

And every one of them was taken at Arts By The Sea Festival, mostly just from a few weeks earlier.

The event’s keynote speaker, Matt Colledge, had arrived the night before, just as the town centre BID’s twinkly, bustling Christmas Market was warming up, which I doubt had made the place seem abandoned to cats and climate floods either. When Liz and Rachel introduced me to him, I could see why they’d approached him to join us; we found ourselves naturally talking the same enthusiastic and creative language. 

But he’s no frilly bloke from art school like me. Like everyone I know facing place-making challenges professionally, he has a lot of experience and evidence of what turns around an unloved seeming town centre. And it’s not a secret mathematical formula.

A renaissance doesn’t begin with a masterplan. More like a crisis of faith.

If leaders and influencers want to have an aim, it should be to do things that help change the story in everyone’s heads.

Which seems to have been Bournemouth’s problem my whole life living here.

Community or concrete.

The first chief exec of Bournemouth council I met was Pam Donnellan. At a meeting exploring a possible film festival I didn’t successfully help make happen, she extended her hand to me with a warm smile said immediately: “We know we have a brand problem.”

Former leader of Trafford Council, Vice Chair of Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Chair of Transport for Greater Manchester, Matt understands the reality of local authority leadership and their brand problems. And of the supposed “death of the high street”. 

Altrincham was at one point the number one “ghost town” of vacant properties. He described it as having angry residents, community groups and businesses, an outdated and disjointed strategic approach to regeneration and no investor confidence.

Uh, go onnn…

Helping to form the group Altrincham Forward (not a band) he and the team sought to encourage stock takers, challengers and testers in turn. 

“We first had to define ourselves” Matt said. 

For a place losing its identity, they had to ask who they were, and what assets in the town pointed to it.

But this moved quickly into forming some “pioneering projects” as he put it. Projects that they had a hunch would open up ways for different people to form test beds of experimentation, to encourage those with passion and ideas for a piece of the Altrincham puzzle. To enable some shared figuring out that wasn’t top-down.

Today Matt is also chief exec of the High Streets Taskforce working with councils around the country facing the same issues.

“You’ve got to create a catalyst for change,” he said, “then act on the evidence. You have to engage and involve the people who are affected and you have to challenge the status quo. To do all this, you have to be visionary.”

Town centres are rich intersections of experiences. People living, moving, shopping, playing and wanting to find wellbeing in the place they live. It’s clear from countless case studies that places come alive through multiple types of ownership – not just legal freeholds.

Without exception, two themes emerging as fundamental in all successfully revitalising towns, like Altrincham, Morecombe, Margate, Weston Super Mare, Manchester, are community and culture. 

Finding diplomatic ways to hold space for people to try things, make events and experiences, innovate, include and listen, create some cultural richness in exploring. 

Help people feel invited to play a bit. And so learn. And so demonstrate intent. Along with an understanding that everyone’s different reasons to jump on the bus into town fit together into the mosaic of a place’s reputation.

Starting to sound like the M2 to some thriving colour and vibrancy, isn’t it?

If you can just steer round any massive black holes.

Mythology or money.

The challenge that BCP council leaders feel most keenly, it seems, is a black hole in their budget. One created by the effects of a particular set of economic cultures coinciding. From evacuating big retail to national ideology about small government. How, in such circumstances, would they be able to commit to anything playful or serious publicly and be able to justify it – and stick to it?

Working with this team and other local authority pros a bit over the years, I observe that something a council could do in particular is help make some experimenting easier – by finding ways to minimise red tape, open up buildings, negotiate agreements, unlock heritages, bring different parties together. In theory. 

Local authorities sit in the middle of everything, connected to all life and resources of a place, with public responsibility for so many vital things that no other organisations have remit to do, run by a lot of people working there who care about a place and know it deeply.

When the process of redefining that place brings into focus clear regular themes about it, leaders should take note – you’ll be onto something. In fact, you’ll be striking into a seam of energy utterly essential to making any change. Emotional truth. 

A narrative people can believe in.

I think it’s the only energy you’re working with, in the end – people’s motivation to make choices. This is partly why I preach art’s central place in tackling crisis. Listening well to the story your voters and council tax payers think they’re in is a sense-check politically to any strategy.

“It is said that in the climate crisis years, every job is a sustainability job now, “ I found myself saying at the front, “but in place-making, every job is also a storytelling role.”

Who are we? And why do we want to be here? And how does my job reflect that story?

..It sounds like so much fluff at the first meeting, doesn’t it?

Especially when many people in the room have not only been around the block, they own it.

I could tell Matt wasn’t phased by this.

“You have to make a start, but then follow up by trying something” he said.

Trying what we did that morning, I confess I had the uplifting music cued for the end but didn’t feel I could press play. It was a crowd weary of talking shops. Literally.

Yet, if spirits didn’t soar, here’s why I think the event did land.

Blue skies or clouds.

The story of Bournemouth is far from unloved, everyone seems to know why they live here and its problems are partly macro trends sweeping through all our worldviews. But I’ve come to think it’s a town snookered by two things I seem to relate to very much: 

It hasn’t had to try very hard, and so it hasn’t. And it’s secretly a bit embarrassed at not feeling cool enough.

By that reckoning, I could be poster boy for Bournemouth. Which no one should have on their wall.

Now, there are many hardy souls at BCP Council who feel they are trying really very hard in deed. But what I mean here is that Bournemouth has yet to face a deeply redefining crisis. Not like post industrial cities have, with the images of regeneration we all have in our minds about trendy dockland districts and warehouse makers markets.

It’s a town that’s not been sure of its Victorian health resort heritage and so hasn’t promoted and protected its historic assets all that well. The result is a bit of a patchwork of styles in the built environment, with no obvious proud story of what amazing things are here and a distinct lack of open cultural spaces to muck about in.

But one of the key successes of the event for me was the clear symbolism of the display boards at the back. They showed a timeline of all the consultations done over the last ten or so years, and all the covers of their reports and findings. 

Bringing this data together in a more visible single spectrum of research represents a lot of work and a wealth of understanding – including why those individual moments in time failed to take off. If we’re prepared to take note.

We even have examples of where it’s already working. 

I had in mind to present a segment illustrating some key principles shown in the research. To share practices – and specific people – already doing it now. Here, in the town. Crucially putting them all next to each other like a gameshow, one by one. Like living jigsaw pieces.

Creative funding, innovative community engagement, arts and culture, place-making planning, environmental wellbeing, positive urban development. I can name you a brilliant person leading on each one of these things instructively right now. And every one of them would be energised by working with all the others.

And makers markets, trendy work spaces, creative property uses and landlords with some vision are all represented in Bournemouth already. We have our own great examples of what to do.

If this moment is Bournemouth’s real crisis, unfolding slowly, I think thousands of us have been waiting for it for years. The culture-changing opportunity of it.

But, in a weary, gradually defunded, crisis-creaking public sector, defined by risk aversion and public responsibility, entrepreneurial spirit seems rare and short lived. Micro-managing the problems in your own silo is an easy obsession to fall into under the immovable seeming weight of accountability.

The real challenge to a local authority is not money. It’s administration. 

Councils are usually seen as in the way, not leading it.

“Getting out of the way” as it was put on the morning, doesn’t mean doing less and hoping businesses will stop moaning about the council and step in. Many of them want to step in. One or two of them might even have a longer term and more place-minded vision of return on investment – the climate crisis is changing the game. 

And some still want to tear up planning and be allowed to build what they want where they want, sure. Everyone in the room cared about the future of Bournemouth.

What’s needed from council officers, political influencers and property chiefs alike is a spirit of creativity.

“Most councillors haven’t got a bloody clue” said Wayne to me flatly.

But if you want a simple image to snap back to about what to do, he had it.

“It’s young people who bring culture into towns” he said.

Young people don’t own empty department stores. And they’re not used to being asked to try things out in them, or take part in figuring out what to do with them.

It showed in the photographs of who we were in the room that day. Serious adults, carrying some heavy responsibilities and big expectations. Plus me.

The official photographer, snapping the packshot for the front page of the local paper was very polite to me: “If you could just step out of the frame, you’re not needed in this, Timo.”

I stepped back. “Of course,” I said, not thinking about it at the time.

Thinking about it as I looked at the front page of the paper the next day with a silly artist-shaped hole in the photo, I felt a twang of weariness myself. And then thought of Matt. It’s fine. I know it’s Day One.

I also know that trusting staff with some creative freedom pays dividends. And I know that if we can find ways to successfully engender the trust of artists and young people and those of us who don’t represent the status quo to sit alongside current leaders and gatekeepers at working group tables, with a spirit of creativity… more of us might feel like we own the challenges of where we live. More of us might see ourselves in it. And want to join others trying to make it.

We might grow new leaders who believe things are possible. 

We might unlock futures we’d not dared imagine.

While waiting for someone to do something, all any of us can do to face the future is ask ourselves:

What part will you play?

And is Day Two in the diary?

You can watch the full interview between me and Wayne Hemingway, from which we shared a clip on the day, right here >

Crisis and change: how to get more effectively excited.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ME AND MY CLIMATE & FUTURES CREATIVE WORK AT MOMOZO.CO >