Author: 6970@jrs

Whoever is Hastings’ new leader, let’s go to Wigan!

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You and I and the other 95,000 Hastings inhabitants have no vote in the election that will happen tomorrow (17/2/20). Just 23 Labour councillors will choose the person who will lead our town for the next few years. Will we see puffs of white smoke coming from Muriel Matters House?! It bothers me that the character and loyalties of the individual chosen tomorrow will be so important. In reality the impact will be felt in structural terms: the balance of power between councillors and officers, what happens to the discredited ‘regeneration agency’ Seaspace and its progeny, how long the council… Read more…

The Lion & the Unicorn

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The Lion and the Unicorn 1991 The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the Crown. The Lion beat the Unicorn all around the Town. Some gave them White Bread and some gave them Brown, And some gave them Plum-cake and chased them Out of Town. The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the Crown The Lion beat the Unicorn all around the Town. The Unicorn said “Fuck this, it isn’t you I hate” So they put their heads together and turned against the State.   The Queen said “Oh, dearie me, we can’t be having this.” As the… Read more…

How the Money Works Part 2: Rock House

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(See also Part 1: Hastings Pier: How the Money Works) Until we as citizens understand ‘how the money works’ when it comes to developing land and buildings we will always be disadvantaged – land and buildings are where power is held. Without them the community sector will be forever undercapitalised. I am not an expert in property finance, not trained or qualified. But I have first-hand development experience, professional curiosity, and an insatiable desire to work out new ways to make things happen. As traditional regeneration approaches – which I would argue never really worked for communities in any case… Read more…

Hastings Pier – where our hearts are

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After 19 crazy weeks of community mobilisation, commercial negotiation, late night bid-writing, endless spreadsheets, obsessive Crowdfunder checking, and the hard, hard work of keeping hope alive… this is me trying to make sense of what has happened, what has been achieved and the impact of our failure to protect something so precious that it makes grown-ups cry. I didn’t want to do any of this. When I heard that Hastings Pier Charity had gone into Administration in November 2017 I felt physically sick. A phone call with the Administrator in December sent me into a furious depression I haven’t experienced… Read more…

Pride in Hastings Pier

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I was really pleased, honoured, and emotional to be at the celebration event on the Pier yesterday to mark the achievements of the Learning & Education Team which has been funded by Heritage Lottery Fund for the past 5 years. This is what I said: * * * I want to talk about three things: • The people • The achievement (specifically of the heritage & learning programme) • The future The people = so many people, so much love, so much uncertainty and dogged determination to win through regardless. Individuals should be recognised and valued but we must also… Read more…

Hastings Pier… 3 things you can do to help

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“There are battles you think you’ve won, only to discover you need to fight them all over again” – Jonathan Freedland, Guardian 28/4/18 At first, when the Hastings Pier Charity was put into administration in November 2017, it seemed terrible and tragic and tipped me over the edge. Strangely, it now feels like an opportunity. It’s a bit like the Fire in 2010 – the worst thing imaginable but still, in the smouldering, a chance of renewal.  Are we going round in circles or are we making progress towards some kind of destiny??! Maybe both! Friends of Hastings Pier was set up… Read more…

Water OMG!

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It was a fascinating day in Southampton at the Labour Party #NewEconomics conference on Saturday. What stuck with me the most was being presented with the evidence behind the complete and ongoing rip-off and harm done by the privatisation of water. The pictures below are all from the talk by Dr Kate Baylis (SOAS University of London). I really hope she doesn’t mind – I’m just so cross and worried about this – I need to get it out there! The amazing ‘denseness’ of the company structures. This web of companies is just one of the water conglomerates – Southern… Read more…

Friends Again!

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The Friends of Hastings Pier (FOHP) has been re-established a decade after it handed the baton of the People’s Pier to the Hastings Pier & White Rock Trust which later set up the Hastings Pier Charity. The Friends are shareholders and supporters who want to be active and constructive in this second crisis for our pier. There are currently 150 signed-up members and 400 members of the facebook group, with many more joining all the time. We want to look forwards not backwards. Just as in the horrible days and weeks after the Fire of 2010 we refused to be drawn into blame… Read more…

I am losing my heart to Ore Valley

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I feel like a love-struck teenager. I’ve always been in love with places, and always attracted to the underdogs – my towns Deptford and Hastings and all the other-people’s-places that I fall in love with: Blackpool, Scarborough, Bradford, Greater Manchester, Liverpool 8. If I had more time I’d like to get to know Maryport, Jaywick, and the scruffy bit of Swindon! But I don’t need to leave town to find the most perfect example of a place that has been continuously stamped on by an outside elite for 200 years. A place with both acute and chronic poverty, but where that is only one of the… Read more…

Precious Buildings

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In this country we would never let someone drive a car that was uninsured or dangerous. That’s why we have the MOT system and DVLA to keep records of car ownership.  Yet we allow hundreds of owners to keep buildings and land irresponsibly, the Land Registry role is limited and non-regulatory, and the only fallback mechanism (Compulsory Purchase) is torturous, expensive and fraught with risk. It’s time to do something about it. First we need to know more about the scale of the problem. If you know about a building that matters to the local community but is disused or… Read more…

Delinquent ownership – a PS about the council role

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When it comes to dealing with derelict and disused buildings and land, Councils are in a practically impossible position (but that’s quite normal for local government!). They have a set of ‘powers’ that are theoretically available but technically complex. In my experience, councillors quickly learn a default position to say they won’t use them – too difficult, too expensive, too risky (the DER response). It’s important to remember that this is a cultural and political position and it can be changed. But once you get the ‘DER’ response, it can take years for a local community to campaign to get… Read more…

The People’s Piers

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I was taken aback by the level of interest in the Bank Holiday launch of my Coops UK Fresh Ideas pamphlet ‘The People’s Piers’. Given the coverage – Guardian, Times, Mirror, Daily Mail, BBC News, ITN, etc – I should have put more care into clarifying the argument and also made sure I was in the country to explain it better. The pamphlet tells the story of Hastings Pier – which opened 141 years earlier, on Britain’s first ever Bank Holiday in 1872 – and of the long community campaign leading at last to its transfer from the shadowy Panamanian-registered… Read more…

Tackling irresponsible ownership

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I have been frustrated for many years by the impacts of irresponsible private ownership in the two places I’ve known best (Deptford and Hastings) and the many communities I have been privileged to work with all over the country. There are all kinds of examples, from rogue HMO landlords to dodgy scrapyards in residential areas. But the thing that makes my blood boil is when beautiful historic buildings of huge community interest are left to rot, abandoned by delinquent owners, or passed from one to the next, each making their packet out of speculative planning permissions and none taking the… Read more…

No resting place but a challenge constantly renewed

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“The Great Society is not a resting place… a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us towards a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvellous products of our labor.” – Lindon Johnson Not a ‘finished work’ – no, certainly it isn’t. I have been telling the story of the Battle for Hastings Pier for many years. Since November 2012 when the Heritage Lottery Fund said YES! I have been telling it as a fairy-tale come true, a success against the odds. Two things occur to me now: 1.    It’s not over. Not even to the extent that… Read more…

Stories as Community Action

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Pier Campaign – story version Last week a couple of trustees of the Hastings Pier & White Rock Trust were filmed for a BBC piece to be shown in the autumn which may turn into a longer documentary. It felt like we were auditioning to see if the story, and our telling of it, was up to scratch. There’s no doubt it’s a great story but is it a fable, a thriller or a soap opera? If you live inside it then it feels more like a soap – an endless series of multi-perspective tales. When you’re presenting to the… Read more…

Feeling weird about the media

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What a strange 7 days… I feel like I’ve been through a shrapnel whirlwind and there are a dozen fragments lodged in my brain, any of which could either strike gold or explode any time. One thread runs through it all – the medja. But even that has four faces. Three great positives: And then there’s…

Hosting Community Organisers

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We’re at a very exciting point in the Community Organisers programme. In a few days time I’ll be joining the first 47 organisers at Trafford Hall for their intensive introductory training. They have been recruited by the 11 Kickstarter hosts around the country. This is a ‘rolling’ programme (at a ‘Rawhide’ rather than steam-roller pace) so we’re already heading into the next tranches of hosts and that’s what I wanted to write about. We opened up to future host recruitment on 19th July. A month later we took the first of our 3-monthly ‘snapshots’ of the applications received – an astounding 220 in all…. Read more…

Civil service lessons

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Various prompts have got me remembering my conclusions after five months on secondment to the civil service in 2009. @Puffles2010 at http://adragonsbestfriend.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/a-challenge-for-the-civil-service-and-large-institutions-alike/ is one of the sparks to make me trawl my archive for the memories. The experience of trying to run the Community Organisers programme in a febrile environment is another. So… Looking back on my reflections as the secondment came to an end, it felt to me that: Other conclusions from my write-up on 15/06/09 included:

CoCollaborative

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It feels strange to be writing anything at all that is not directly about #riots, but while we can all pontificate easily enough, at Locality we always try to reflect what our members are experiencing so we’ve put out a call today for stories and issues and will report back later about how development trusts, settlements and other neighbourhood organisations across England are responding. See http://locality.org.uk/comment/civil-unrest-community-response/ for the initial call-out. In the meantime, the Community Organisers programme moves forwards, with more of our pioneer ‘Kickstarter’ hosts completing their recruitment ready for the first cohort of community organisers to start their training at the end… Read more…

Seaside Tour Blog

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Starting next Thursday I’m off on a mad seaside tour. In this tiny country you’d think a circuit of Southend, Southwold, Great Yarmouth, Cromer, Scarborough, Blackpool and Southport wouldn’t be so difficult, but some of the train journeys make me wince. If you love the sea, why do you have to go to Peterborough and York to get up the east coast? Why to Manchester on the nip across from Bradford to Blackpool? Other irritations are purely geographical – I never knew Blackpool and Southport were divided by an impassable river… I know it sounds like a stupid question but:… Read more…