Places need historians
I woke this morning to the announcement that government had stumped up some of the cash for the regeneration of Blyth Town Centre. It’s been a good month for Blyth by any measure. It’s only a month since I woke up to rumours that a factory that had been promised to the Welsh government might be built in North Blyth, and to even deeper rumours that the Prime Minister would be coming to Blyth later in the day.
I like news. I love journalism. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t read Frank Keating, Nancy Banks Smith, Paul Foot and PJ O’Rourke. I started to understand George Orwell once I knew he’d been a journalist, and I started to understand the British Left once I understood how much they were in thrall to journalists like Michael Foot, not to politicians like Nye Bevan.
These days I might also put my hand up and acknowledge that my interest in the topic I’m studying might owe something to the journalism of Stuart Maconie and the academic writing for a wider audience of John Grindrod, both of them writers who are embedded in ideas of place as well as politics and process.
One of the justifications of journalism is that it’s the first draft of history, according to Alan Barth. Barth of course was writing at a time when the production cycle of news was dictated by typewriters and printing presses. Today, our news cycle is defined in terms of minutes, not hours or days, and the idea that a chap called Eric Blair might write an article for a magazine about his experiences as a down and out in Paris some months previously is entirely out of date. The news we consume now is not the first draft of history — it’s not even the first draft of tomorrow’s newspapers.
What I do here isn’t journalism. I started writing blogs back in the noughties, when bloggers with pretensions called themselves citizen journalists. That isn’t what I do. This entire blog is nothing more than a reflection on what goes through my head in spare moments, like my regular walks with my dog, when the difference between journalism and history comes to mind. As I’ve said before, this blog is most akin to a reflective journal.
All the same, the question has to be asked, if place management is about what happens in the present and the immediate future, why do I also think places need historians?
When I first moved to Blyth Valley and got involved in local politics (as a side effect of establishing a residents group) I shared the common perception that Blyth was a town with a past, not a future. I lived in Cramlington, and I think, like a lot of people, my expectation was that Blyth would ebb away as a place while new towns like Cramlington would grow and expand.
Then I met Dave Stephens, and I started to understand again Marx’s off hand remark that we make history, but not in circumstances that we choose. Dave was the leader of Blyth Valley council, a practical, down to earth man with an astonishing range of ideas and insights into a town he loved and served. He was intent on changing that perception of Blyth, and he was adept at getting others to buy into his vision.
These thoughts were originally sparked on the night that the PM came to town to talk about the battery factory that might be built across the river. I was walking down to Blyth Quayside and was surprised by a ship sailing upstream, that I glimpsed through the gap between the harbour sheds and the lifeboat station. I was taken back, in that moment, to the experience of getting off the bus in North Shields in 2002 and walking down Bedford Street to my new job in the Labour Party Head Office. The ships moving along the Tyne would loom in my vision like the facilities vessel, designed for supporting wind turbine installation, that I saw being backlit by the cameras of an outside broadcast unit waiting to do a piece to camera about the Prime Minister coming to Blyth. Back in 2002 a piece to camera for TV or a prime ministerial visit would have been an unlikely event on the quayside. (There’s a great article about the redevelopment of Blyth Quayside and its historic coal staithes here).
In 2006 I stood on the quayside alongside Dave as one tall ship tried to tell the story that Blyth wasn’t just a redundant coalport. In 2015 I got to spend three days on Blyth Quayside as the Tall Ships North Sea Regatta turned the port into a theatre of the sea. Dave Stephens fired the first shots in a campaign of rebranding Blyth; I remember my shock and amusement when he told me, in a bar by the harbour, that he’d decided to to build some beach huts on Blyth Beach to change people’s ideas about the place. Eight years later, when I did a small scale branding exercise for the unitary council’s vehicles operating in Blyth, those self same beach huts were the most common image of the town that I could find on Google, and became the logo for those council vehicles.
It wasn’t all easy, or, always, right. Back in the noughties local government, at the behest of the government, was involved in plans to relocate Blyth Harbour entirely, to the north side of the Blyth where the proposed battery plant that brought Boris Johnson to Blyth will now be built. The groupthink of government, and its advisors back then, was that ports like Blyth had had their day, and should be regenerated as sites for aspirational housing like the blocks of flats that I’d walk past on my lunchtime strolls from Party Head Office and offices. Nowadays, of course, Blyth Harbour is a complex mix of port, industrial site and research centre, mostly as a result of investment won from government by lobbying and persuasion. History has a habit of reminding us when we were wrong as much as when we were right. It’s why history is essential.
In 2003 I was a Labour councillor, trying to understand the complex world of partnerships and stakeholder relationships that were the framework within which we worked. It wasn’t the intellectual complexity of those networks that troubled me; I was cocky, arrogant, and, sometimes, a little bit pretentious about my qualifications. What troubled me was the sense that lots of the best work that the Borough Council of which I was a member was being done, not because it was a good thing in and of itself, but because it was a requirement of the political environment, at government level, that decided when and where money would be spent.
Simply put, we put huge efforts into partnership working and stakeholder relationships not because we believed in it, but because it was a prerequisite of obtaining government funding. (I think it was Nicola Headlam who described partnerships as the setting aside of mutual loathing in pursuit of funding.) As I progressed from back bench councillor to executive member I formed the opinion that government required partnerships and stakeholder working not because it believed in them fully, but because it simply didn’t believe in local government, and didn’t have faith in the ability of well run councils to do the right thing for their places. I can easily imagine a productive and healthy history of that time being a godsend to future generations of councillors and practitioners.
What’s that got to do with todays news?
I’m glad you asked.
I became a councillor in 2003. I joined a council that had developed a people’s plan for the borough, and a strategic place vision that was focussed on a future built round renewable energy and skills development, that might transform the place. The journalists recycling celebratory government press releases today might never get to see the origins, the wellspring of the vision that has made Blyth what it is (and, perhaps, what it isn’t) today. That’s a worthwhile topic for historical investigation.
As I say, the government announced today some of the funding for a plan to renovate Blyth Town Centre with the emphasis on culture and leisure that is not that dissimilar in intent from the original plans laid before the Town Centre Working Group in 2006, when I was its chair. (I quickly resigned both because I didn’t understand the project, or its critics, and because of work commitments). There’s a need for place managers to be able to look back over the history of the places they are working with, and to access a reasonable and reliable set of sources.
Want an example? The latest plan for Blyth Town Centre is built around culture, around leisure and around a greening of the space. There’s arguably a degree of continuity there, but there are also the same traps that were there in 2008. The plans implemented in 2008 were not universally popular. The water feature that was installed to a degree of derision in 2008 was permanently turned off in 2010 in order to save money on the maintenance costs. All the capital spent this time round will need to be spent with a wary eye on the maintenance costs of every item of new street furniture, every new facility. The reduction of space available to the market was unpopular then, and it will be unpopular now to those who believe that the market has contracted because of the whims of politicians, not the realities of changes in retail.
I grew up understanding some great historians, like Gwyn Alf Williams and E P Thompson who opened my eyes to the idea that history was made in places like Merthyr and Pentridge, not just Westminster. The Labour Party I joined was a place where it was normal to walk into someone’s house and find a shelf or two full of historical accounts of both the large scale ideas, like Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, or small scale detailed studies like Raph Samuel’s studies of quarrymen, miners and saltworkers.
Boris Johnson’s appearance in Blyth and today’s announcement is a brutal reminder of the ways in which Labour failed to engage with places with Blyth; if this new surge of interest in the place is as much political as it is a genuine economic plan is a question for historians, not me, but the fact that this government is willing to do it and Labour governments weren’t is an historical fact. I’ve written about that before. Labour needs to engage with the history of the last twenty years and with the stories of the places that it neglected to understand better what it’s own future might entail.
Both politicians and practitioners might be hindered by a lack of clear accounts of the work of council leaders like Dave Stephens in Blyth, who persuaded officers to develop a Peoples Plan. who laughed at those of us who wondered if his plan to revitalise Blyth’s public spaces by inviting tall ships to visit was just a naive attempt at providing bread and circuses.
See why I think we need a historian? There’s a story to be told which relies upon historians, not journalists and a timeframe no longer than the attention span of the viewers of rolling news. As placemaking moves into the centre of the public policy agenda there is a risk of the debate becoming partisan, and of politicians seeking to emphasize continuity over change, or vice versa, obscuring the necessary debate about what works. Rigorous history, allied to clear and effective mapping that enables inputs and outputs to be connected, is as essential to place management as the measurement of activity against outcomes in the present.
