Weeknotes w/c 14 June 2021

This week had the pleasure of two face to face meetings in one day! On Tuesday I went to Beth Chatto Gardens to meet director Julia Boulton, Beth's granddaughter,  and talk all things Jaywick Sands. We are collaborating with BCG's designer Lucy Redman on the design of the community garden as part of the Jaywick Works project, and we really want to expand what we can do with the project to involve the community as far as possible - with designing, training, creating, building, planting and caring for the garden. Obviously there's no money in the project budget for all this, but Julia is brilliant - can-do, down to earth, up for anything...so we are cooking up a plan.

One of the benefits of the 'new' ways of working is that you can literally work from anywhere, so before my meeting with Julia, I sat in the shade of a tree in the garden, got out my laptop, and joined a teams call with Frances Brown of Nightingale and my colleague Paul Frainer to talk about local plan engagement. Frances has been doing brilliant work in this space with Connected Places Catapult and it was great to swap thoughts. Consultation reframed as evidence gathering is a really strong theme coming through. 

After BCG, I went on to Wivenhoe to sit on the sunny riverside with Tom Wilcox and friends from Counterculture. Tom is a Colchester boy and now coming back to develop a new cultural strategy,  commissioned by the Borough Council. We've worked with Counterculture in a number of places - Gasworks,  DACS, and others. We talked about how Colchester currently feels like less than the sum of its parts - there are so many brilliant people and organisations but it doesn't all project that bigger message. 

I was particularly wanting to catch up with Tom, because on Wednesday I was elected as the new Chair of the Creative Colchester board. This unpaid advisory board is a group representing different parts of the cultural, creative and digital sectors and I want to refresh how it works and who is on it to be much more impactful and diverse. I think there's huge potential for us to get Colchester singing proudly and advocating strongly for how culture is integrated into the policy and projects of both the Borough Council and the County Council. 

The rest of the week was a mad rush from zoom to teams and back again.