community narratives and regeneration in peripheral regions
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Cornwall has seen the collapse of all major traditional industries, but the loss of mining is arguably the most profound. Outside of the fishing villages, it has been seen as the activity and industry that defined the county for thousands of years. Cornwall also exhibits all of the challenges of a peripheral area, exacerbated by the physical nature of a long thin peninsula which can make places within the same county feel like they are a long way apart. In a cultural sense, Cornwall exists at the pivot point of the Celtic Atlantic sea board rather than the geographic margins of the UK. Being “on the edge” also has distinct benefits (not least in allowing new ideas and new originality to bloom), but for these ideas to lead to sustained change we need effective processes for community transformation. This means using the past as a foundation for moving forwards rather than systematically undervaluing its continuing impact on the present.
We believe that effective regeneration of areas that have seen the collapse of defining industries should be lead by a sophisticated understanding of community narratives rather than a focus on the built infrastructure and the attraction and retention of new businesses. Our past lives on in living communities, and in the absence of a vibrant contemporary purpose heritage takes on special importance. The most advanced thinking about the role of heritage in our lives suggests its value lies in its ability to inform and contextualise the present. By doing so it gives us the vision and the cohesion we need to face the future. In this sense heritage is seen as an “accessible narrative” open to and legible by all of the community (English Heritage, 2004, “People and Places – a response to Government and the Value of Culture”).
The reality on the ground falls far short of this vision. Our environments are rarely legible in this way; the reality of community engagement with them is often confused. They remind us of the past, but they are ineffective at setting a context for change. In Cornish mining towns such as Camborne and Redruth, there seems to be two main fates for the physical heritage – it is either swept away and replaced by uses with no link to memory or history, or converted into “heritage tourism sites”. There are many traps in this conversion, not least that it is usually done in ways that freeze the sites and divorce them from a continued narrative with the community. Neither honours and remembers the past in a way that provides a focus for moving forward, transformation and change.
Many aspects of the Eden Project are a direct response to these issues. We have set our project in a worked-out mine, because of the symbolism it entails. In Cornwall, one of the results of industrial collapse has been loss of motivation in the communities, who do not have new challenges to work for. Tourism is the dominant industry, but it focuses on the past as a better place. The Eden site therefore deliberately contrasts this trend. It raises questions of how we should face the future, and acts as a reminder that human endeavour can turn dereliction into new possibilities. The landscape is constructed to have a legible narrative and we see cultural engagement as a key to promoting attitude change. We believe we have developed expertise and experience in an important and under-researched area. Our next challenge is to work more through outreach, developing community initiatives away from our site that can provide new material to inform public policy.
In particular we would now like to expand our work on the role of cultural
events and community narratives as a focus of change in peripheral regions that
have lost their defining industries. In this model '”culture lead regeneration”
does not mean encouraging creative industries to flourish in an area, it refers
to the use of cultural activities as a tool for making more explicit and supporting
the shift in community narrative. There is increasing evidence that internal
narrative plays a key role in our ability to recover from catastrophic events
such as bereavement or traumatic illness. Processes such as Griefwork and exploratory
work with narrative as a health care tool explicitly reflect this. In many ways
this is true of communities as well as individuals. The internal narrative of
a community is rarely captured or articulated, but cultural activities reflect
and dialogue with this narrative. Our hypothesis is that cultural activities
can also be the focus of a transformation of that narrative, embodying the equivalent
of Griefwork at a community level.