Our Place - Blackburn

The Our Place project aimed to transform empty shops in both Blackburn and Taunton into accessible creative and learning centres. The overall aim of the Our Place project in Blackburn was to provide creative and learning centres in an empty shop, with a focus on presenting a learning offer that will support people to start engaging more actively with the changes in their community.

It was underpinned by the vision that to be successful and sustainable, regeneration programmes need communities of confident, curious, critical and creative people to engage with and help direct the regeneration process.

POP: Project Our Place – Arts in the heart of Blackburn was an arts focused programme, co-ordinated by local artists to celebrate Blackburn and its community. The project was run for the Arts Services and Town Centre Regeneration teams of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council by artists from Artichoke Studios.

www.popblackburn.co.uk

What?

Blackburn suffers from high levels of unemployment and informal learning was viewed as the first step for many such adults to access training and routes into employment. Other local factors included extensive regeneration in the town centre, as well as a lack of easily accessible informal learning environments. The project provided an opportunity to create a neutral, secular and informal environment in the town.

The programme of activities included arts related workshops and events – covering a range of topics including drawing, painting, performance, poetry, music and dancing - as well as workshops about regeneration, the environment, and museums.

In total Blackburn ran 24 formal workshop sessions, and partners felt the project achieved good attendance – due to promotion and the effort that was put into the events themselves. Target participants for the formal sessions varied depending on the workshop topic, with some aimed specifically at family audiences, others at adults, younger people, or students. More generally, the target for the project of focusing on hard to reach groups (i.e. those that do not normally engage in learning) also influenced the type of workshops offered. For example, specific workshop themes were designed to appeal at harder to engage groups.

When?

POP provided six weeks of activity in the shop, running from 1st February until 13th March 2010.

How?

The project received funding totalling £50,000 from The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Skills Learning Revolution Transformation Fund.

Collaborative working between the key partners involved has underpinned the planning and delivery of the project, and all partners feel that the partnership working within Blackburn was very effective for this project. A key factor is the joint working that these partners have been involved in previously with each other. In addition, the enthusiasm, creativity and gregariousness of the artists had a strong positive impact on all aspects of the project, as did the role of the local project manager (which is a joint post between Regeneration Services and Arts Services within Blackburn with Darwen Council.

Marketing and promotion was an important aspect of POP especially given the need to compensate for location limitations. Key routes that proved effective are thought to be the website and blog, local radio, directly approaching people in the town, distributing leaflets, and placing an advert in the local council newspaper. In terms of lessons for future projects, partners noted that the effort and resources required to develop and implement effective marketing should not be underestimated.

Summary: Impact and Outcome of the project

In terms of participation levels, POP received a total of 1,601 visits (well exceeding the target) which was a combination of 475 workshop attendees, and 1,126 drop in visits.

Further impacts from the project included:

• Community Impacts: In particular supporting community/social cohesion, which was achieved by bringing different age groups together through the workshops and drop in sessions, as well as engaging with families in an informal learning environment. POP also offered diversionary activities for young people (especially those that congregate in the town) – something that potentially has a number of community impacts.

• Learning Impacts: As well as directly providing the informal learning environment, the projects also signposted participants onto other (both formal and informal) learning activities – e.g. through the local colleges. Other learning impacts included the development of the workshop tutors themselves, individual participants that have been stimulated and encouraged to look at other routes to learning or volunteering as a result of the project, and also people who would not normally engage in cultural activity (e.g. by visiting a museum, gallery etc.) being able to do so.

• Business/Economy Impacts: There have also been business/economic benefits Our Place, in that the empty shop used is being brought back into commercial use in the near future, and it is thought that the Our Place project showing what can be done with the premises contributed to this.

• Involvement in Plans: The project also gave local people opportunity to be
  involved in plans for the town, with some workshops having a regeneration theme.

• Products and resources: POP is also producing a community archive, a
  commemorative book, and is contributing to the development of a national ‘how to’ guide.

Evaluation

An evaluation of POP was carried out and the key lessons for other empty shops projects related to:

• The importance of having a sufficient timescale to plan and deliver all aspects of the project.

• Finding appropriate premises is very important, and the task of finding and
  securing an appropriate shop location can take a significant amount of time.

• Offering a varied programme of activities (good mix between drop in and workshop sessions), maintaining an open door policy, and having consistent opening hours are important in helping enable engagement with a wide variety of groups.

• Informality of learning offered is a key success factor, as is developing the project to allow for local delivery to be sufficiently flexible to suit the localities.

• Our Place is a ‘labour intensive’ project that required a significant amount of staff time and resource. This needs to be fully appreciated in any future such projects.

• A significant amount of effort and resources were committed to publicity, promotion and marketing, which proved to be successful (as measured by participation level) – the requirement for promotional activity needs to be recognised.

• Partnership working is a key aspect of the planning and delivery of such projects, and receiving time commitment from partners is important. Previous experience of working together is a contributory factor to effective partnership working (as it will have allowed trust to develop between partners), as is having a shared vision/goal for the project.

• Measuring Impact: A balance between collecting impact data and providing informality needs to be reached. Whilst this is a difficult, it may be that collecting some of this information in a relaxed and informal way may allow the data to be collected without adversely affecting the informal format of the learning sessions. This should be considered for future projects.

Future Developments

Empty shops projects have been used previously in Blackburn (such projects are
typically used to help to make the street look better, bring the shops back into use, help to ensure that there is activity on the street, and increase the cultural offer in the town).

Blackburn (along with other local authorities in Pennine Lancashire) is in receipt of
funding from central government for empty shops projects, and this is being matched with funds from the Arts Council to provide a range of empty shops projects across Pennine Lancashire that focus on artists/creative businesses. These projects will deliver empty shops projects and will also provide support to artists/creative businesses to develop, grow and move towards sustainability.

Contact details

Piotr Bienkowski
Cultural Planner, Department of Culture, Leisure and Sport
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

Piotr.Bienkowski@blackburn.gov.uk