By Jennifer Wallace, Head of Policy, Carnegie UK Trust
IT’S simple, towns matter.
Two out of five people in the UK live in a town. A town that flourishes improves quality of life, the health, the work opportunities and the general wellbeing of its residents. Ultimately a town’s people are better able to benefit from the wider social and economic opportunities around it.
The Brexit vote demonstrated what can happen when a lack of investment and voice for towns at spatial planning and policy levels is felt by those communities. Leaving people and places behind comes at a cost to us all – not just those living in those towns.
In this context it is even more important that the Shared Prosperity Fund and post-Brexit policy making is geared towards the real needs of towns.
This was a key motivator behind the initiative from Carnegie UK Trust to embark on a small-town domestic twinning programme across the UK. The resulting Twin Towns UK programme was kicked off 18 months ago, in September 2017. It aimed to reinvigorate local towns through a process of learning and collaboration. Towns across the UK were paired with others that had similar characteristics and socio-economic challenges. They were then encouraged to think differently about what they could do to improve their local places with a fresh perspective.
The towns involved in the project faced a range of challenges. Challenges experienced in different towns up and down the country. Some pairs shared the fact that they’d seen a loss of employment due to the decline or closure of major industries either recently or more historically. Others faced the increasing landscape of seeing empty shops on the high street and low energy and motivation of community.
Inspired by each other, the towns involved all began to turn around their prospects. Some of the highlights from the Twin Towns UK programme include improved footfall to the town centre, the introduction of new cycle paths to boost wellbeing and a better understanding of the town’s unique selling point for further development.
Whitburn in West Lothian, one of the six partner towns, took inspiration from its twin, Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire. Through involvement in the programme it repurposed community spaces, including a former small council building which became a community resource for small enterprises and community groups. Additionally, a derelict phone box was transformed into a community defibrillator station.
Importantly, the programme demonstrated the benefits of learning directly from other people engaged in community regeneration. It took a fresh, inspiring approach rather than producing yet another toolkit for regeneration or dropping in external experts. The result was that local communities were energised with untapped resources being activated. This included from some within towns who would admit that delivering ‘place based’ projects was a relatively new experience.
The encouraging results demonstrates the power of pioneering projects, with arguably modest funding, to make a real difference by helping to energise communities and generate practical outputs to develop social capital.
We’re not saying that domestic twinning is the answer to solving the existing towns challenge, nor are we in any way making commentary about the state of the UK state. However, we have found that by starting with “where the community is” rather than where planners and policy makers think it should be, can help towns to develop new community leaders to help shape the future of their towns. It is about a positive approach to empowering towns around the UK through collaboration and being inspired by each other.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here