Counted amongst one of the most deprived areas in England is Nelson, a town in East Lancashire. It is a casualty of the decades of neglect that have characterised our post-industrial North. In 2021 Nelson was awarded a £25 million New Town Deal grant as part of the Government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda. In Nelson’s investment plan, the town is described as suffering from ‘a weak… identity which is detrimental to community cohesion and town footfall’. The plan goes on to position culture as the force that will galvanise the make-over of the town by making a feature of the area’s heritage and renewing local pride.
Culture as a stimulus for social and economic change is no new concept, and its instrumentalisation has been widely critiqued over the past fifteen years. In this context, my day-job as an arts producer often working in areas similar to Nelson on publicly-funded projects means I constantly question and regularly feel uncomfortable with the mammoth sized, neo-liberal flavoured task of amelioration handed to The Arts. It was with this head on that I was invited to In-Situ by Anna Taylor to write about This Is Nelson, the cultural strand of Nelson’s New Town deal.
This Is Nelson is an exciting programme led by In-Situ in partnership with Building Bridges and Super Slow Way. It has commissioned a number of artists to work with Nelson’s communities to reimagine the town. Dana Olărescu has worked with residents of all ages to explore sustainable, regenerative food systems, and Sam Jones has walked groups through the processes required to establish community land trusts. During my visit to Nelson last month I was lucky enough to catch the public unveiling of the fruits born from a five month-long collaboration between a group of young people and the London-based interdisciplinary design collective RESOLVE.
Just outside Nelson’s town centre is an old Methodist church. In the noughties the upstairs of the building served as an adult education centre, which closed well over a decade ago. The building is now owned by 3B-Systems, a technology shop operating out of the ground floor. Working alongside this local business, In-Situ agreed a long-term lease to develop the upstairs for community use as part of the This is Nelson programme. The space was re-opened in October 2023 with Eva Sajovic’s #endofempire co-commission for British Textiles Biennial. Following this, the youth group developed around This is Nelson was invited to re-imagine the space through a project with RESOLVE Collective to create a temporary architectural structure inside the space. The young people are now programming the space and considering its use to meet the needs of the community, continuing the relationship with RESOLVE as their mentors.
RESOLVE’s practice combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They work collaboratively with a set of methodologies underpinned by a commitment to sustainability and equity, and often put their skills in the service of young people to empower them to take ownership of spaces. RESOLVE work with an understanding of place as a relational process rather than something that is defined by administrative borders.
Speaking with In-Situ producer Zoya Bhatti about the project, she described a slow and careful engagement process with a group of young people who were interested in participating in civic life, but didn’t quite know what participation meant for them. Perhaps these young people required a little help in finding the confidence to articulate their imagination in a way that would connect with the wider community, or perhaps they hadn’t yet had the chance to represent themselves in a way that felt authentic, or perhaps it was something else, or a collection of reasons. Whichever way, these young people didn’t feel like they had much agency to affect Nelson.
The process of coaxing creativity was something that had to be nurtured in the young people. At first, Zoya tells me, they lacked faith in their ability to invent, and the trust to be vulnerable or silly in front of others. Working with RESOLVE over a period of five months, the group learnt how to build temporary structures from scrap materials and explored processes of community organising and collective action. The young people grew in confidence as a result of these exercises and were able to make their vision for 3B-Systems a reality.
As I entered the top floor of the old Methodist church I was greeted with an experiment in motion. Colourful fabric hung from the ceiling, loosely dividing the cavernous space into smaller sections which evoked a warm and welcoming atmosphere. A teepee-like den dominated the centre and a facsimile of a playground slide made from cardboard wrapped in soft material was suspended from above, dangling just low enough to touch. At the far end of the room, a stage covered with fun-looking, undefinable objects formed out of wooden pallets and old machine parts made reference to Nelson’s industrial heritage. The room was full of people.
The group will continue to work with RESOLVE until June, with the project culminating in a community event organised by the young people. The shape of this is yet to be decided, but current ideas include an evening of cinema and a Chand Raat event to celebrate Eid. Moving forward, the aim is for 3B-Systems to be run by the young people and they plan to sustain the space through hosting regular events that will require attendees to pay a small fee.
Artistic interventions are regularly employed to animate vacant corners of struggling towns. Empty shops are ‘loaned’ for free or leased at subsidised rates by their out-of-ideas proprietors. Creatives and small businesses are invited in to add colour and kick start a much hoped-for process of gentrification. These initiatives are often short-term and careless in both their aesthetic and concept as they lack the wrap-around support required for long-term success. They do little other than emphasise the sense of hopelessness that has taken hold of highstreets up and down the country and the reality of divestment through austerity. It’s insulting and people deserve better.
By contrast, RESOLVE’s project at 3B-Systems is an example of an action that has turned on the imaginations of a local population to what is possible when you organise together. Through collaborating with artists, the young people have been enabled to design a bespoke solution to revitalise a derelict space into a community asset. It is something very much for and by Nelson, with long term aspirations. The 3B space is leased to This Is Nelson for another year, after which new terms will need to be drawn. Perhaps the young people will lead this negotiation themselves.
This project and the wider This Is Nelson programme has been the product of sustained commitment to community engagement and relationship building. Building trust and creating spaces where fora for critical inquiry can flourish takes time and, for these actions to be truly effective, they require the emotional investment of a whole community. The delivery of This Is Nelson may have officially begun 2023, but it has been made possible by the foundations In-Situ and Building Bridges laid through their years of work in the area. The artists engaged as part of the programme may only be commissioned for a short period of a few months, but what enables these collaborations to take effect is the complex work of remaining present, and continuing to hold space for the ideas that may spark in response to these instances of cross-pollination. For me personally, this is what I find so jarring about the programme: the short-termism imposed by the contexts of public funding versus the long-term requisite. Sam Jones makes reference to this problem in her essay ‘Re-Imagine Nelson: Re-Radicalizing, Re-Learning and Re-Connecting the Real’ when she compares a previous project – ‘Homebaked’ (2010 – ) – which developed a Community Land Trust with residents over a focused period of eight years to the three-year time frame provided through Nelson’s New Town Deal. Jones goes on to say that these problems can be overcome through investing in cultures of mutualism and solidarity. Or, in other words, for organisations such as In-Situ and Building Bridges to keep on keeping on at what they’re already doing.
Nelson is rich in socialist history and this point is referred to throughout the programme by many of the commissioned artists. The fact that these histories, and the theories which underpin them, are repeatedly made an example of should come as no surprise when the methodologies and lexicon of socially engaged art making is so indebted to the anarchist practices of community organising. Indeed, when speculating on the longevity of This Is Nelson, Jones cites the godfather of anarchism himself, Kropotkin, and refers to his ideas on mutual aid. Elsewhere in the field of collaborative arts practice, the theories of Permaculture – a system for regenerative crop cultivation – are being widely discussed and applied as a way to enmesh caring methodologies into organisational structures that may otherwise fall prey to cycles of burnout. However, strip away the plants from artspeak’s version of Permaculture and its ethics of reciprocity and equity begin to sound like anarchism minus the politics. What then does this mean for a sector that is so reliant on state funding, whose good news stories of community revitalisation have become the thrust of Arts Council England’s ‘Let’s Create’ strategy, and the glue that holds together many capital and regeneration projects? More specifically, what does it mean for This Is Nelson; has the language from anarchism been co-opted and defanged?
Returning to somewhere near the beginning of In-Situ’s story when Kerry Morrison, one of the organisation’s founding members, gained access to the then-derelict site of Brierfield Mill. Here, she cultivated a series of creative projects that would eventually lead to Suzanne Lacy developing ‘Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope’ (2016) – a project made with the communities of Brierfield exploring their history and culture. At the time, Morrison’s thinking was influenced by anarchist writer Hakim Bey’s concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ): establishing temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. Through an application of TAZ, Morrison opened the building as a site for speculation in which the threads of the complex global histories that weave in and out of the area were able to represent themselves as a galvanising force. The legacies of industrial decline – division, deprivation and isolation – forced on the area were usurped by stories of a multicultural community that had rooted itself in East Lancashire to form its own unique cultur that deserved to be celebrated. Brierfield Mill is now Northlight Mill, an entertainment centre and luxury apartment complex; it was always going to be this way and Morrison’s TAZ was in no way a gentrifying agent. Rather, the TAZ just moved elsewhere, taking the form of another project. This agile game of finding new paths through cracks became, in a round-about-way, This Is Nelson.
It’s as if the practice of doing this work is both enabled and hindered by capitalism itself; publicly funded art projects spring up in ‘deprived’ areas like weeds in rubble. If they are allowed to take root, these projects and their organisations have to sell themselves with the language of amelioration – ‘improving health and wellbeing outcomes’ or ‘raising aspirations’ – as if they are agents of the state doing the work of maintaining the status quo. Of course, this all sits at odds with the aims of anarchism, which seeks to do away with the state believing that communities should run themselves independently, as they are best placed to serve their own needs. This is where it gets tricky and an organisation like In-Situ has a vital role to play in acting as a buffer between the state and TAZ. Navigating the neoliberal contexts of funding, these organisations carefully manage a complex tangle of relationships, and by doing so enable the conditions needed for experimentation. TAZ form in the dialogue between artists and communities. It’s here that the speculative work of mapping out routes to equitable futures is done. In its role as mediator, In-Situ has opened up channels of communication between those responsible for The New Town Deal’s capital grant (money for infrastructure) and the Nelson’s residents. The balance of power is beginning to shift. Through collaborating with artists in TAZ, communities are empowered to make decisions for themselves.
This Is Nelson is funded through the New Town Deal until 2026. Plans to continue this programme will rely on securing further funding, a frustrating reality that could leave many in the lurch, and the work of reimaging barely beyond a dream. As discussed, projects such as these need years and require sustained commitment in order for their visions to be fully embedded and realised. It’s a necessary endeavour as we must find sustainable ways of living that account for the particulars of place – there will be no one-size fits all model. This Is Nelson is a bold and ambitious experiment that seeks a better future and should be paid close attention to.
Natalie Hughes is a writer and producer based in Liverpool.
This article is supported by In-Situ.
Published 05.06.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
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