Regenerating the British seaside

This weekend I was invited to the seaside town of Hastings, where the Jerwood Foundation has recently established an art gallery. It joins the "string of pearls," cultural or art centres in South-East coastal towns including Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion (more of which later), Eastbourne's Towner (opened in 2009), the Turner Contemporary and others. The success or revamping of many owes something to a government initiative called Sea Change, whose mission was "to use culture to make a difference to seaside resorts, contributing to sustainable, social and economic regeneration".

Culture was the prescription for rundown seaside towns - but the locals often didn't like the medicine. In Jerwood, anti-art-gallery signs still dot the  black-painted tall fisherman's huts whose 19th-century architecture the gallery emulates. As a visitor, it seems strange that this investment in Hastings should have generated such opposition. I can only assume that while great care was obviously taken to ensure the building is in harmony with its surroundings, less care was taken with the people who live and work in the area. All too often in Britain, projects imposed for the good of the people are done without proper consultation, causing resentment. A shame really, as the gallery is fabulous, even if the cost of a cappuccino is exagerated (we opted for jellied eels in the stall outside the gallery as a better value snack). I'm sure it would not have taken much to get people on board.

We also visited neighbouring Bexhill, whose once-crumbling 1930s pavillion was given a facelift thanks to Sea Change. It is a fabulous place, blustery seafront and bracing winds. A wonderful exhibition by Cerith Wyn Evans, described as a 'love letter to the building,' used light, heat and sound to help visitors experience the pavillion and its views in new ways.

The centre, and its program of events, made me think Bexhill might be quite a nice place to live. Reflecting on this regeneration, I couldn't help thinking that while the Sea Change initiative is timely, if these towns are starting to perk up it is also because fashions are changing. Environmental and financial concerns means English people are weekending and holiday-ing closer to home and resdiscovering  the charms of the seaside, temporarily overlooked in favour of the Spanish costas.

 

 

Expert seminar

Today, we presented the draft findings of our Tech City report to an expert rountable of stakeholders and entrepreneurs at Google Campus. A very stimulating debate!

No Tie Zone

Despite the title "No-tie Zone," they came to the NLA conference on Tech City in ties. They were mostly estate agents after all.

From an anthropological perspective, it was interesting to see how the property industry is engaging with the Shoreditch community whose growing tech/ digital cluster is attacting so much attention. Creative tech-types might not naturally gel with the men-in-suits, but give them a bike rack, exposed brickwork and a flexible lease, and the two groups might find common ground. 

Elizabeth Varley, CEO of the successful coworking space TechHub - made famous after PM David Cameron chose to launch the government Tech City policy from here on its first birthday - spoke of the importance of flexible contracts in the start-up world where the office needs of fast-growing start-ups are difficult to predict. For TechHub, she said she managed to negotiate a good deal on rent with Derwent, who own the building. Incidentally I chatted to someone involved in the deal who said the ground floor, where TechHub is located, had proved difficult to lease and had been empty for some time before TechHub moved in. One priority for Andrew Sissons, Head of Regeneration Delivery at Hackney, is the provision of affordable workspaces such as TechHub: one way of managing the inflation in property prices caused as the cluster attracts attention.

Andrew Bridges, Managing Director of Stirling Ackroyd, predicted the ownership of the area will change. The tech and creative types may shift to Haggerston and Dalston, where costs are 30 perecnt cheaper. The challenge for Stirling Ackroyd is how to bring larger sites on board due to fragemented ownership: an argument that suits the government's rationale for allying the Olympic Park - where large spaces are plentiful - to the Old Street cluster.

Celine Thompson, Head of Leasing at Derwent London, spoke of the high ceilings and flexible, inspirational spaces her clients are looking for. They are calling this a White Collar Factory (terrible name) with 5 pinciples: 1. Tall ceiling; 2. Smart servicing; 3. Simple passive façade; 4. Deep plan and 5. Concerete structure. Basically it means flexible floor plate and being able to open the window.

Hammerson is the largest landowner in Tech City area. Andrew Hilston, Assistant Director of Development,  gave a very interesting presentation of the Goodyard site, now awaiting planning permission. Plans are inspired by New York's Highline and foresee an urban park on top of railway arches. In the meantime, there is room for temporary uses such as the pop-up retail centre BoxPark (a joint venture with Hammerson (retail, office expertise) and Ballymore (resi)).

For me, perhaps the most interesting presentation came from Peter Bennett of the City of London Corporation. I had not appreciated the City's role in spotting and nurturing this particular cluster of activity, but now I know the corporation is not entirely focussed on finance. Ten years ago, the City  invested in property that it thought might help grow the cluster, mainly just outside City boundary (Bonhill St, now home to Google Campus, Smithfield Innovation Warehouse, among others).

Finally, Steve Edge, who bills himself as a Prophet, Madman, Wanderer, spoke of the colour that first brough artists to the area. “My big problem is when lawyers and accountants come in and then it will be time for us the artists to move out,” he said.

Tech City Ambassador

Queen Mary university invited me to listen to Ben Hammersley, the government's ambassador to Tech City, talk on the cluster's past, present and future. I'm hoping he was having an off day. His presentation was a slightly wooly, leftist manifesto against making money. Bizarre.http://www.kernelmag.com/yiannopoulos/2077/this-aint-a-relationship-its-a-sinking-ship/

Three visions for Brussels

An interesting exhibition at Brussels' BOZAR presenting three competing visions for the city in 2040. I had forgotten just how scruffy and neglected parts of the city are.... despite the seemingly ever present building works.

One disappointment is the area around my old appartment, the Place du jardin aux fleurs, not far from the canal. During the three years I lived there, the local authorities turned the square beneath my window into a real garden of flowers, a welcome change from the parking lot it had once been. The social housing behind us was also in for an uplift, with tree planting and sports facilities. The area, where I was mugged three times including once on my doorstep, seemed ripe for change - and it did for a while. It hasn't quite taken off however, and a night out in the area had me instinctively keeping a much beadier eye on my purse than I feel the need to in London. Despite some trendy loft-style canal side housing, efforts to improve the area have not yet been enough and the area risks sinking back unless there is a sustained and amplified approach.

Sharing Digital Experiences in Brussels

I was delighted to be invited by The Lisbon Council to share lessons from Tech City at a high-level roundtable on SMEs and technology in Brussels.

It was great to share experiences in my old stomping ground. One lesson I'll be immediately taking home with me, thanks to an inspiring presentation by SonicAngel's Bart Becks, is the growing importance of crowd funding for financing innovation. Legislation protecting consumers from parting with their cash is still murky, and operators seem to be working in a grey legal limbo. But the success of Kickstarter and similar ventures combined by the difficulties for European entrepreneurs of raising cash means this is an area to watch.



The event coincided with the publication of Wired for Growth and Innovation: How Digital Technologies are Reshaping Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses and Empowering Entrepreneurs, by Anthony D. Williams and Ann Mettler Wired.

Just Boris

In time for the mayoral elections, I have now finished this illuminating biography of the second main candidate (I read Ken's auto-biography earlier). Sonia Purnell shows the other side of endearing, bumbling Boris, which I first caught sight of at People's Question Time in March. A one-time colleague of Boris (they worked together in Brussels), Purnell portrays an ambition, calculating character who uses comedy and buffonery to avoid difficult questions and who wings his way on wit and fortune. Even the scruffy hair is an act, she says.

When a Brussels-based correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, Boris invented a "new mode of journalism," which Purnell calls the "'straight-banana' school of Eurosceptic reporting:" using humour to ridicule expense and waste purportedly caused by the European Commission. She quotes her sources as saying: "What he would say would never be simply untrue, but would be on the edge of what might happen." 

Boris fed British prejudices of loony EU at a time when Europe was big news - Thatcher fell from power 17 months after Boris arrived in Brussels as a direct result of a 1990 EU summit - and became a powerful figure, so much so that the foreign ofice set up a Boris unit to rebutt negative Boris stories, Purnell says. It caused chaos in the Tory party - as Boris recalled in 2005 he was "sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazng, explosive effect on the Tory party. And it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power." Interestingly, Purnell suggests that Boris' natural sentiments are pro-EU - a result of growing up in Brussels with a eurocrat father.

His subsequent career was characterised by friends in high places, high-jinks, wit - and a degree of luck. Witty perfomances on Have I Got News for You gave him a national platform and soon he was running for mayor. But a disorganised campaign initially saw him lagging Ken - until Consevative Party HQ imposed Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist known as the 'Wizard of Oz'. Boris HQ was transformed to become "more boot camp than bohemian hangout," as the Spectator regime had been - and Ken sented defeat.

The big question - where does Boris go from here? Purnell is convinced that even if noone else does, Boris' self-belief means he believes one day he could be prime minister.

Data geeks

If studying the East London tech scene has taught me anything, it is the growing importance of data. As this Economist article shows "the infrmation revolution is changing the way businesses operate."

Having studied economics at university level and spent 15 years in journalism trawling through official statistics (EU, national, OCED etc), I thought my quant skills were reasonably healthy. But it is the ability to exploit, not interpret, data that is ever more freely available.