bottom drawer

On Wednesday I went, with a HAT colleague, to Essex County Council's High Streets Business Summit at the decidedly un-High Street venue if Hoyland House,  as an opportunity to get back to in-person networking and hear some perspectives on where next for the High Street. Great to reconnect with some good people from across the area, and a few insights from the panel - pr should I say, disappointingly, the manel - they really could have done better on that, although it was great to have Holly Lewis from We Made That and other female speakers given short slots. Among some fairly predictable perspectives, it was good to hear Ojay Macdonald unpick the role of tax structures in shaping our town centres. With a good historical perspective on how we ended up where we are on tax, and the major issues regarding taxing immobile rather than mobile capital - bricks and mortar via business rates rather than the fluid money of online trading - he cut through a lot of guff effectively. He touched ...

Yesterday we went to see Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother Unplugged - a reworking of his work Political Mother from over 10 years ago, for nine young dancers from his apprentice company, at DanceEast in Ipswich. We are so grateful to have such incredible work available for us to experience, in the intimacy of a studio theatre, so close to home. Some apprentices - the dancers were outstanding, and the piece intense, emotional, at times painful.  I spend so much of my time working with words - writing, reading, editing, sharing stories and using words to analyse and persuade. As often, it took some time for me to turn off my word-brain and allow the non-verbal world of movement to sweep me under. The wonder of dance and music is, for me, the chance to do without words, without analysis, for an experience that can mean something completely different to each person on the audience. Once in that world, it is hard to decompress afterwards and try to put words to what has been experie...

This week has seen a lot of work at HAT on the new public realm projects we are working on for Colchester Borough Council and Colchester BID.  I can't emphasise enough how fantastic it is to work on projects that are literally on our doorstep. We are designing improvements for streets we walk through every single day.  Even so, looking at them through the lens of a project reveals things I had not known at all. Helena and Katarina, in our team, have done some amazing research into the history and the present day of these streets and spaces. Dredging up old photos from the library round the corner and paintings from the local museum archive, standing on street corners counting people, bikes and cars, taking photos of all the pavement types in the town centre has been totally illuminating. (My contribution was finding a couple of Nigel Henderson photos of our patch in the Tate's online archive - they must have been from when he was teaching at the Colchester Sch...

Last week was certainly an eventful one as, at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, we launched our big Local Plan consultation on 1st Nov. This is the third major plan-making stage I've shepherded out into consultation at GCSP and slightly bittersweet as I'm moving on at the end of the year. But it also shows exactly why I'm moving on. The launch went really smoothly - and I know the team can now build on a solid foundation of engagement and communications practice that I've helped develop. We've got the interactive map which links through to the full digital plan , we've got three gorgeous videos  on targeted social media placements which have already had over 20,000 views, we've got great illustrations to show that planning isn't just blobs on a map, and we've got over 30 events , online and in-person, from youth club sessions to community coffee mornings and webinars that are actually interactive, not just chalk-and-talk. Already we...