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ОглавлениеInnovation outside the state: the Glendale Gateway Trust
Patsy Healey, Tom Johnston and Frank Mansfield
Introduction
Our story is about a civil society initiative activated by local concern over the steady decline of economic and social opportunity in a ‘remote’ rural area in Northumberland. As with many other parts of the Western world, such areas are on the margins of political attention these days, experiencing youth out-migration, ageing populations and difficulties in sustaining needed services (Shucksmith and Brown, 2016). Social renewal in such areas means searching for pathways towards a sustainable future.
The Glendale Gateway Trust (GGT) has grown from the efforts of committed locals, experimenting with how to do things, into an established part of the governance ecosystem in the county of Northumberland. It started in the mid-1990s, centred on creating a community centre and facilities for young people in Wooler, the main centre in Glendale, North Northumberland. It then grew into providing a platform for a range of activities, which have established a community and business hub, generated improvements to the high street, built a locally significant amount of affordable housing, ensured the survival of the local youth hostel, and created a base for a range of other initiatives and programmes. Infused by a sense of the changing wider context, the GGT has developed an entrepreneurial culture, looking out for opportunities and innovating with new ways of doing things. Over time, the GGT has become a significant actor in local development in Northumberland. As a result, it has increasingly been in a position to grasp available opportunities, both economic and political, drawing down investment from the private, public and charitable sectors.
The initiative was motivated not by a particular driving ideology or a specific local crisis, but by locally widespread perceptions of the ebbing away of an old life and the search for practical ways to both renew community vitality and find a sustainable future for the area. On the one hand, the focus has been on remedying what has disappeared or been neglected; on the other, the GGT has tried to open up new opportunities, such as affordable offices for microbusinesses. It can be seen as helping the Glendale area move beyond the sense of a place ‘left behind’ by agricultural change towards alternatives based on what the area can offer in terms of local amenities and assets, notably, the attraction of the landscape, heritage and sense of community for visitors and in-migrants. The GGT has brought new knowledge, ideas and practices into play in local development work, and contributed to changing how the much-stressed public sector undertakes its various activities and responsibilities. Its contribution is not uncontested locally, with tensions between expectations rooted in the past and the arrival of new opportunities, as well as between different groups in the community as each seeks recognition for its various contributions. However, such tensions reflect the challenge for any community forced to find new ways to sustain itself into the future.
Rural life on the margins1
Glendale lies just south of the Scottish border in Northumberland. In 2011, nearly 6,000 people lived here, in scattered hamlets, villages and the small ‘town’ centre of Wooler, where around 2,000 people live.2 The nearest larger towns (Berwick and Alnwick) are around 17 miles (27 km) away, though these are small for English market towns. The large urban centres of the Tyneside conurbation are over 50 miles (80 km) away and Edinburgh is 65 miles (105 km) away. In economic terms, until recent decades, the main employment was in agriculture. According to Murdoch et al (2003), the area had the political economy of a ‘paternalist countryside’ and a ‘welfarist’ government regime. One facet of the GGT’s activities has been to challenge this culture.
Tourism has been important for many years and the visitor economy is now as significant in terms of employment as farming. Meanwhile, many former farm workers’ cottages have been converted into holiday homes, or sold to more affluent incomers and second-homers. There is a steady inflow of people starting microbusinesses in a range of sectors, as well as professionals working from home. Young people are still leaving the area, driven by the search for wider horizons and especially the pull of urban lifestyles, along with limited work and leisure opportunities at home. In contrast, in recent years, there has been an inflow of those in middle age seeking a different lifestyle. This has resulted in an increasingly skewed demography. Nearly 26 per cent of people in Glendale in 2011 were aged 65 and over. The inflow of people from especially Southern England has put pressure on house prices in an area where, for many, incomes remain low and precarious.
The result is a transforming local economy, an increasingly skewed demographic and an accelerating crisis of housing availability and affordability. Despite a widespread appreciation of a strong feeling of ‘community’ in the area, there are also potential social tensions – between locals and incomers, the professionally skilled and those with less formal education, and those in Wooler town and in the outlying small villages and hamlets. Therefore, as in many rural areas across Europe, Glendale is experiencing not just significant economic and social change, but an existential challenge to find a sustainable future.
The scale of this challenge has been exacerbated by a decade of austerity. With a combination of low incomes and an ageing population, there is an increasing need for affordable and appropriate housing. Budget cuts have amplified the difficulties of sustaining services, from health and social care to adequate local shops, in an area where people are geographically scattered. In this situation, the GGT’s implicit development strategy has focused on limiting the continuing outflow of younger people and the decline of the services that support them, while accepting the energy and investment of retiring incomers and providing for the needs of increasing numbers of older people. This demands continual recognition of the complex interrelations that make for place quality – work, housing, transport, health, education, training, social care, leisure and sport, and community vitality. It also requires an appreciation of a geography in which physical distance still really matters.
Meanwhile, formal government has become increasingly distant. Up to the mid-20th century, many services were provided in the different farming communities or through the churches, often on a parish basis. Until 1973, the lower-tier local authority was the Glendale Rural District Council (GRDC), based in Wooler, which covered the area to which the GGT now relates. The GRDC was merged into Berwick Borough Council, which, in turn, was merged into the higher-tier authority, Northumberland County Council, in 2008. This became a unitary authority covering a large and varied area. Grasping and responding to this changing context, while managing the merger of several districts into a single organisation and, at the same time, dealing with continual severe funding cuts, has been a fraught challenge for county politicians and staff. Yet, the county has been keen to promote community initiatives and social enterprises, and, in the past decade, has become much more interested in working with civil society actors such as the GGT.
Northumberland County Council’s capacity is severely limited by its dependence on national government for funding. During the 1997–2010 government, there was a rich and varied flow of ‘targeted’ resources, with investment programmes in regional development through the regional development agency (One North East) and coordinated through the Northumberland Strategic Partnership, as well as regeneration funds for rural areas, market town improvements, playgrounds, community enterprises and national park initiatives. Many of these programmes provided resources for which civil society initiatives could bid and from which the GGT benefitted. However, this flow came to an end with the financial collapse of 2007/08 and the change of government in 2010. It has been replaced by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, which focuses primarily on the industrial parts of the region and has a much smaller budget than One North East. At the national level, the Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs had a small rural development programme, the Rural Growth Network, from which the GGT benefitted during 2012–14. Community enterprises could also bid for funding for social housing for rent from the national Homes and Communities Agency, so long as they were set up as registered social providers.3 Even this opportunity was much reduced after 2015 as national policy swung against building more social housing for rent. The GGT has also had access to the EU LEADER programme over the years, a source that will presumably disappear after Brexit.
Along with many other small trusts and charities in Northumberland that had grown up in the 2000s providing local services, the GGT was catapulted into a much harsher funding environment. Yet, during the 2010s, the challenges for a rural area such as Glendale increased: the farming economy has contracted and is even more mechanised, along with forestry, and farming activity may contract further as a result of Brexit; the retail sector has been transformed by Internet trading, with shops closing in Wooler High Street, along with banks; public services have been further cut and centralised, being subject to funding regimes that have little recognition of the challenges of dispersed populations in rural areas; and the uncertain economic climate generated by Brexit has held back investment in potential projects. This has increased people’s sense of being abandoned, both economically and politically, which, in turn, increases the potential for angry hostilities to break out, threatening the sense of a cohesive community.
Yet, there are opportunities to be grasped too: the Internet enables people to live in Wooler but work across the world; firms can similarly develop trading links in a wide geography; the beautiful landscape and the feeling of community attracts not only older people from further afield, but also those seeking to raise families in such an environment; and tourism continues to expand, offering attractive options for those interested in encountering the natural environment through walking and cycling. It is in this shifting context of the past 20 years or so that the GGT has evolved into a significant local development organisation.
Case study: creating a community hub4
The GGT was formed in 1996, following discussions about how to improve Wooler’s future facilitated by the then Rural Community Council. These had identified the need for a better community centre, which could combine meeting places for community groups, business spaces for start-ups and a base for key local services, as well as improved services for young people. It is run by a small employed staff and trustees from the locality. A drop-in facility for young people was created in a vacant building on the high street, while the neglected former offices of the Glendale Rural District Council, formerly a workhouse, provided an opportunity to create a community centre, now the Cheviot Centre. The building was transferred to the GGT by the then owner, Berwick Borough Council. The case study focuses on how the Cheviot Centre was transformed into a joint community–small business hub that not only helped save and enhance local services, but also, in time, came to be financially sustainable, largely by clustering services together. In parallel, while created to manage the development and operation of the community centre, the GGT grew into a multifaceted community development organisation with an entrepreneurial and proactive culture. In its early days, the GGT’s activities were backed by funding from the Rural Community Council (now Community Action Northumberland) and the Northumberland Strategic Partnership.
For the first few years of its existence (1996–2000), the primary focus of the GGT’s work was on converting the building. The challenge involved taking on ownership of the building, raising funds and organising the conversion process. To guide this work, as well as the creation of the drop-in centre, the GGT was created as a charitable trust, with a board combining local people and representatives of local government. This time is remembered as a risky, nail-biting experience as trustees embarked on ambitious projects, taking on grants and loans against uncertain achievement. However, this was the era of relatively accessible grants from government and other institutions.
By 2001, the job was done (see Figure 4.1) – a couple of community rooms were available for hire and there was a kitchen, office space for GGT staff and a few rooms left over that were rented to local businesses. The local Tourist Information Centre took one of the upstairs rooms, and there was initial talk of Wooler Library moving in, though Northumberland County Council procrastinated for many years over this idea. A key tenant of the community rooms was the local University of the Third Age (U3A),5 which helped generate income. The Cheviot Centre slowly evolved as a base for delivering services, such as the Citizens Advice Service, the local credit union, a day centre run by the Royal Voluntary Service (RVS) and the Wooler Work Web. It also provided local offices for several voluntary sector services, which provided useful rental income.
Figure 4.1: The Cheviot Centre from outside
Source: Rachel Sinton
The building was old, so it was not cheap to run; in addition, a full-time manager was needed. Fortunately, this early period coincided with generous national government funding for local initiatives of various kinds. This meant that, after the first couple of years, the Cheviot Centre operated at a reasonable surplus, based on a number of tenants who were themselves the recipients of public or charitable funding. Meanwhile, the GGT expanded its activities by investing in high-street improvements, funded by the national Market Towns Initiative, creating affordable housing for rent and taking over the local youth hostel. These initiatives helped to expand the revenue-earning asset base of the GGT, though public funding was still an important contribution. The financial basis of the GGT was therefore significantly affected by public sector budget cuts and the reduction of charitable funding opportunities in the 2010s. The revenues for the Cheviot Centre itself no longer covered running costs.
So, what to do about this? The GGT was aware of potential demand for more office space from the increasing numbers of microbusinesses in the area. The national charity RVS also located its regional office in the building, where they had begun to run a day event for older people. In 2012, the GGT saw an opportunity to do three positive things in an interrelated way. First, the trust applied for, and got, £212,000 in grants from the Rural Growth Network and the National Lottery for a major refurbishment of the building. It was pretty much gutted inside, providing extra office space without losing community facilities (the GGT made sure that local groups, especially Wooler U3A, the biggest customer of the Cheviot Centre, were kept onside during what was potentially a worrying time for them). Three ‘pods’ were also put in the garden – attractive one- or two-person units designed for start-up businesses. These have proved very popular (see Figure 4.2). Some small businesses have indeed moved on to larger premises and the GGT has never had any problems letting them. One early tenant who had been commuting to a job in Newcastle started their own business in the one-person pod, switched to a two-person pod within a year and then moved into one of the larger offices in the main building when they took on another employee.
Source: Meg Vickers
Therefore, the first positive achievement was a significant improvement in the small business offer in Glendale – particularly for start-ups. Currently, more than 20 people are employed, either full-time or part-time, in the various businesses and activities based in the Cheviot Centre. In parallel with this refurbishment, the facilities of a community room were improved, raising the roof to provide for a Wi-Fi-connected sound system, which has not only allowed for film shows, but also provided a useful seminar space for business and community use.
At the same time, and after more than a decade of trying, the county agreed to move Wooler Library into the Cheviot Centre. By 2012, Northumberland County Council was beginning to suffer the cuts that have since further eroded their capacity for service delivery. This forced officers to seek new ways to deliver services. Meanwhile, by this time, the GGT had established a reputation as a capable local agency. The second achievement in this period was to bring Wooler Library and the Tourist Information Centre together with a single front desk. Sharing Northumberland County Council and GGT staff makes both services much cheaper to run and therefore more viable. The former library building just off the high street was transferred to GGT for £1 and was converted into two attractive affordable homes for the over 55s. The old library had been open for just two half days a week; the new library is now open six days a week, with a very evident uptake in usage. The Tourist Information Centre moved from their upstairs office to the reception area, thus creating a far more visible presence in the town. There is now a single reception desk for all activities in the Cheviot Centre, staffed by one person. As far as Northumberland County Council is concerned, these two services are now being operated efficiently as a much improved service is being provided at a very much reduced cost – so much so that the county have used the Glendale model as a template elsewhere.
A couple of years after this major redevelopment, another opportunity arose. The Police Authority for Northumbria decided to close a number of stand-alone police offices, including Wooler. The authority looked around the town for suitable, smaller premises to move into, and also considered moving out of Wooler altogether. At that stage, the GGT was very concerned to retain a police presence in the town. The individual police officers themselves were none too keen to lose their historic ‘police station’, but moving into the Cheviot Centre meant much reduced running costs – and it was preferable to a move out of town. The GGT did not want the whole character of the Cheviot Centre to change, with uniformed officers walking in and out of the front door all day, so the building was rapidly adapted to provide a degree of self-containment. This provided another ‘anchor tenant’, paying a significant rent on a long-term basis.
This brings us to the third achievement: the trust now runs a popular and successful community centre that actually makes a surplus. In other words, it is sustainable, as is the GGT as a whole. The small staff team (two full-time and two part-time, including the accountant) works collaboratively and flexibly, and the GGT continues to take new initiatives. When Active Northumberland pulled out of the marketing operation for tourist information centres across the county in 2018, the GGT decided to take it over and do it itself. The reception staff probably know better than outsiders what will sell to the visitors and locally, and it can be done without upsetting local traders on the high street too much (see Figure 4.3) – and staff enjoy trying out new lines.
Figure 4.3: The reception area
Source: Rachel Sinton
The Cheviot Centre now exists as a thriving operation, realising the ambition to combine community and business activities, encouraging the cross-fertilisation of ideas. The Cheviot Centre is also the office base of the GGT, which has come to manage a varied portfolio of assets: 18 affordable housing units; commercial properties on the high street; and the Youth Hostel, now leased to a locally based operator. In 2019, the GGT has taken on another major conversion project. In addition, it has come to act as a platform for generating initiatives that, in time, become self-supporting, from the Wooler Youth Drop-In, to the Wooler Wheel cycle events that now run twice a year, and a small grant fund, created in partnership with Northumberland County Council’s promotion of health and well-being. All those who interact with the GGT, from tenants to representatives of national and local government, experience it as a friendly face in the midst of the flow of multiple activities.
To achieve all this, the GGT has had to act in an innovative and imaginative way, trying out new ways of doing things and demonstrating what a community-sensitive service delivery culture can look like. It has always been infused by the idea of ‘partnership’, both among proactive people in Glendale and in relations with external agencies. In this way, the GGT has become valued by formal government agencies forced into finding ways to ‘co-produce’ public goods and services with market and civil society agencies. Throughout, it has been important to maintain a strong vision, along with a commitment to finding new, more entrepreneurial and more approachable ways of providing community services, challenging traditional public agency practices but also helping them to change. But what has been its role in relation to agendas of ‘social renewal’ and ‘social justice’?
Social renewal and social justice in a ‘remote rural’ context
It would be difficult to deny that the activities of the GGT have made a difference to the quality of life and opportunities available in Wooler and Glendale. It has: created a multifaceted community hub; provided 18 affordable housing units for rent through conversions, targeted at young people starting out and the needs of older residents; helped to enhance the vitality of the local high street and sustain the visitor economy; become a ‘go-to’ place with a face for many looking for information and advice; and acted as a platform from which to draw down resources from elsewhere and present a voice in larger arenas relevant to the area. In this way, it has created significant value for the ‘public’ of Glendale. This value has been material, in terms of drawing down resources for investment and producing both capital assets and services. However, it has also been institutional, both in creating a presence locally and more widely, and in demonstrating a proactive and entrepreneurial way of working. Along with other initiatives locally – by landowners, farmers, a few firms and the lively array of community groups in Glendale – it is working to help create a sustainable future to replace that based on the traditional labour-intensive agricultural economy.
The GGT can thus be understood as a vigorous agent for social renewal in the area. In this situation, social renewal must be understood in terms of structural adjustment from one economic geography to another. The experience has been of continual existential threats and opportunities. How far will it be possible to retain some of the old sense of a lively working and living community, centred around connections with the land and landscape, while adjusting to the changes in possibilities available to those who live and create a living in Glendale? Is the future, as some fear, to become a ‘retirement’ locale or a haven for those seeking to escape from the stress of an urban world? Does an Internet-based economy offer real potential for attracting a wider range of economic activities into Glendale, or will its impact be to reinforce the closure of shops and services, and the replacement of face-to-face interaction with live-chat, YouTube and email? Will there be enough variety of economic opportunity to support young people entering the workforce, or will they continue to leave? If so, where will the workforce to support existing local businesses and services, let alone staff new enterprises, come from?
The GGT is feeling its way through innovation and experimentation into an unknown future. In this sense, the challenge involves socio-economic reinvention rather than just renewal. It is also about political reinvention, showing a different way of acting for the public benefit to that long associated with increasingly stretched and distant public agencies. Creating a forward-looking and innovative culture of action, prepared to try out new things, means being open-minded and outward-looking, rather than introvertedly focusing on what has always been done. It means encouraging a proactive attitude towards doing things, rather than waiting for some public authority to ‘authorise’ or ‘lead’ a new activity. It means working with others, locally and more widely, to drive initiatives forward.
Not surprisingly, the GGT and its activities are not uncontested locally. Some feel that the Cheviot Centre is not a relevant locus for ‘their’ part of the community. For others, the way the GGT articulates a community voice is a challenge to other possible representations. Elsewhere, agencies such as the GGT have been created from within a local parish council. In this case, though one of the Glendale parish councils was, until recently, represented on the board of trustees, there is always the potential for conflict over who should be the community voice. Many people say the GGT places too much emphasis on Wooler, rather than the wider area of Glendale. Sometimes, the GGT’s legitimacy is questioned, or its priorities. Part of this critique is about competition over ‘who is in charge’. However, it is also fuelled by feelings of nostalgia for a disappearing past and fears for the future, driven by all kinds of misapprehension, which is not easily dispersed.
The trust is aware that its legitimacy, within Glendale and beyond, depends not on who it represents, but on what it does and how it does it. Here, the GGT also has to counteract some local critique that implicitly casts it into a new generation of ‘paternalists’: professionally educated people acting for, rather than with, the fellow citizens of Glendale. Social renewal is no easy process and is inherently conflict-ridden. In this context, the GGT is always taking a bet on how the future may work out. It is committed to finding ways into the future that look as if they can be sustained while that future unfolds uncertainly in front of us. However, one issue that rumbles away under the surface of the GGT’s work is who in the community most benefits from what is done. How do the GGT’s activities stand up to the criterion of social justice, and is that a relevant criterion for activities such as this?
‘Social justice’ is an abstract term. Some definitions centre on the fairness with which life opportunities and resources are distributed. Others link the term specifically to the notion of a hierarchy of classes and income groups, arguing that a socially just policy or outcome is one where the differences between classes or groups are minimised (see Bell and Davoudi, 2016). In the political economy of a country such as ours, the levers for promoting such fairness and redistribution are far beyond the reach of micro-local agencies such as the GGT. Moreover, recent national policies have contributed to the sense that many people locally have of experiencing unfair treatment in the way national resources are distributed. Those on low and often precarious incomes have been badly impacted by welfare reforms. Education and health services in rural areas are not just stretched, but also experience the spatial difficulties of the concentration of services in larger centres, supported by outreach that ignores the time costs of rural geography. As services get ever-more Internet-based, little attention is given to those who find it difficult to engage with the fast-changing practices of technological innovation.
In such a context, what contribution to social justice can a micro-organisation such as the GGT make to promoting greater fairness and supporting those at most risk in rural areas? The GGT has seen its responsibility in this respect, in part, as promoting community vitality and economic opportunity, both materially and through advocacy. The creation of the Cheviot Centre, the provision of offices for small-scale businesses and investing in Wooler High Street all make a contribution here. The Cheviot Centre provides several opportunities for social interaction and activity for older people. An early initiative of the GGT was to create a drop-in facility for young people. The GGT’s housing contribution is specifically targeted at groups whose needs are neglected by the market. The first investments in conversions to flats above high-street shops were targeted at young people. When a local sheltered housing facility for older people was closed, the GGT refocused its efforts in housing provision on the needs of older people. The GGT continues to promote local economic opportunity through providing training courses of various kinds at the Cheviot Centre. Overall, though, the emphasis is less on the needs of particular groups in the locality than on asserting the needs and potential viability of the area as a place with the possibility of a positive future, thereby challenging the urban-centred (and Southern-centred) politics that infuse our national and regional political economy.
In conclusion
The mission that inspires both the staff who have worked for the GGT over the years and the many people who have acted as trustees has been to ‘benefit the people of Glendale’. Our locality is understood as a place full of actual and potential vitality, though at the margin of attention nationally and regionally. We have a strong sense that we are ‘on our own’ and that it is ‘up to us’ as a community to work to realise the potential that will sustain that vitality. The role of the GGT in this context is to act as a micro-local community development agency, aware that economic, social and cultural life are interrelated in how people live their lives in a place such as ours. We give value to direct face-to-face interaction between the providers and users of services. We continually balance the creation of community benefit now with the need to sustain our operation over the long term. We regularly make links with external agencies that could bring benefit to our area, while being aware of the ongoing dangers of being ‘co-opted’ into acting as agents for their policies. Understood more widely, we are one of the many civil society initiatives across the country, and to be found elsewhere in Europe and North America more generally, experimenting with new ways of promoting local futures. Our experience shows the value of building up a revenue-generating asset base and we were fortunate that we could begin this asset-building process in the years before the financial crash and subsequent austerity policies. However, there are no simple models for building initiatives like ours as each is specific to its particular time and place. Those seeking to encourage experiences like ours should focus instead on creating the conditions of possibility for such innovation and experimentation to occur.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Rachel Sinton, Mark Shucksmith, Mel Steer and other chapter authors for helpful comments on this chapter.
Notes
1This section has been partly adapted from Healey (2015: 12–14), with permission of the copyright holder.
2The population of Glendale fell from over 12,000 in 1871 to around 8,000 in 1951. The population of Wooler itself has remained constant and is now slowly increasing.
3GGT became a registered social provider in 2013.
4For an account of the overall history of the GGT up to around 2014, see Healey (2015).
5The U3A is a national organisation with local chapters led by and for local participants.
References
Bell, D. and Davoudi, S. (2016) ‘Understanding justice and fairness in and of the city’, in S. Davoudi and D. Bell (eds) Justice and Fairness in the City: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to ‘Ordinary Cities’, Bristol: Policy Press, pp 1–20.
Healey, P. (2015) ‘Civil society enterprise and local development’, Planning Theory and Practice, 16(1): 11–27.
Murdoch, J., Lowe, P., Ward, N. and Marsden, T. (2003) The Differentiated Countryside, London: Routledge.
Shucksmith, M. and Brown, D.L. (2016) ‘Framing rural studies in the Global North’, in M. Shucksmith and D.L. Brown (eds) Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Routledge, pp 1–26.
