Northstowe highlighted in webinar

Thanks Dean and thank you to Homes England for inviting me to join you for this webinar. I’m Mari O’Neill, founder and director of Northstowe Arts CIC, and I’ll be speaking to you today about the context for the organisation, a little bit about what we’re doing, why and how.

I live in Longstanton, one of the villages surrounding Northstowe, and before the pandemic I was working remotely for a US arts consultancy. I was made redundant in February 2021 and wondering what to do next career-wise – I had two young children so work needed to fit around them, and – like many, I think – the pandemic had made me realise I wanted to work hyperlocally, feeling a part of my community and making a difference to the people around me.

I was aware that this new town was being built next door to Longstanton – a town growing from nothing, that will eventually be home to 25,000 people. One of the reasons we’d moved to Longstanton was that there would be a town centre with a library and shops that our children could visit independently when they’re old enough. I’d heard that it was being developed as a “healthy new town” and that sports and outdoor activities were being actively invested in and encouraged by the local authorities. I knew that the arts and creativity could play a really complementary role to all this – but I couldn’t see that anyone was doing anything about it.

Concurrent to this, I was aware that there are no cafes in Northstowe or Longstanton, no permanent community centre that people can pop into any day of the week, no shops in Northstowe, nowhere for people to meet informally and have those quick chats that help people feel at home in a place.

So I decided to do something about it. I got in touch with the South Cambs District Council communities team in Northstowe, I attended a couple of meetings with people running community groups, and I started talking about this pipedream I had about opening a mini-Royal Festival Hall in Northstowe – a café, bar and workshop space where people of all ages feel welcome to spend time, with arts and creativity at its heart and backbone, but where people don’t have to be taking part in creative activities to feel comfortable there.

And people really loved this idea, and started coming forward to help make it happen, and about two years ago now Northstowe Arts was born with two other local residents, Paula and Nazanin, as co-Directors. Nazanin has since moved back to full-time teaching and we’ve brought in another local resident, Lawrence, as a third Director. And that’s the reason I’ve told you all of this – I think it’s one of our core strengths, that we’re part of the community ourselves, living the challenges and hearing our neighbours’ gripes and delights.

So Northstowe Arts is a CIC, supporting community development through creativity by developing community-led creative activities in Northstowe and the surrounding villages, celebrating the nature, heritage and identity of the new town. We do this by engaging as many members of our community as possible in creativity to support their wellbeing; delivering an inspirational, inclusive, ambitious, professional creative programme for all ages; supporting local creatives to develop their practice and businesses; and working with partners to create opportunities for participation in creative activities. We are open, welcoming, enabling, creative and ambitious!

We’re constantly chatting with Northstowe and Longstanton residents to find out what they want. There’s no commercial space for a sort of arts centre yet, so in the meantime we’re supporting a community café and the Warm Hub, attending networking and forum events and being a community partner of the county council’s Northstowe Support Partnership, we’re having stalls at wider community events and we’re running projects in partnership with lots of varying local groups and organisations.

We’ve managed a lantern parade and performances at the town council’s lights switch-on in early December for two years now; we’re programming the Pavilions with Northstowe Secondary College – temporary arts spaces for joint student and community use; we put on a ceilidh and ran some decorations-making workshops as part of the Jubilee celebrations with all sorts of community partners; and we’ve run drop-in craft sessions at the community café during school holidays. 

We’ve got a really interesting project at the moment thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Homes England, Cambridgeshire County Council and Northstowe Foodies, in partnership with Homes England, the county and district councils, and Longstanton & District Heritage Society. During archaeological digs before development in Northstowe could begin, as well as several historically significant artefacts they found five tons of mostly Roman pottery that’s maybe too broken to be worth keeping – so the councils approached us about using this material creatively, because otherwise it would have to be reburied. So we’ve commissioned a local artist to work with our community to design a mosaic and metalwork sculpture that will use some of the fragments of pottery, to eventually go in the courtyard of the new Heritage Centre that the county council are currently building.

This is the new temporary community centre in Northstowe which will literally open in 90 minutes' time and be in place until the permanent local centre is ready in three years’ time. The District Council recently commissioned us to run a project for the community to design the artwork for the external wrap of the building.

Creative Get-Togethers is a weekly low-cost series of very informal sessions for adults and older children to spend time being creative together. The aims are to improve individuals’ wellbeing, encourage new friendships, strengthen people's sense of place within the community, and build artistic and transferable skills.  Each week has a different focus on a rolling basis, so there’s singing, crafting, jazz jamming, dancing, to attract different people. There is no commitment needed to attend every week, rather people are encouraged to attend the sessions that most interest them. There is also no requirement of a minimum skill or experience level: inclusivity and enjoyment are the priorities for this project.

Group size is kept small, and local creative professionals lead the sessions to ensure a high quality and accessible, inclusive experience for all involved.

During our first eighteen months, we’ve been fortunate to secure placemaking funding from Section 106 contributions, and project sponsorship and funding from local businesses and organisations including the town council. One of the reasons we’ve been successful on very limited capacity and income is that everything we do is in partnership with others: local authorities, schools, faith groups, community groups. 

We’re lucky in Northstowe in that partnership and co-creation are concepts that almost all organisations, agencies and local authorities working here are keen to prioritise. There’s the Northstowe Support Partnership, a high-level multiagency group with representation across all sectors meeting bimonthly, bimonthly Community Networkers meetings for all the local-level community groups and organisations active here, and active working groups of representatives at all levels for specific initiatives and events. 

The Homes England team asked me to mention some of the opportunities and challenges we’re identifying at the moment. I think this partnership thing is a key opportunity here, enabling us to do more and to reach more people than we could otherwise – and that the local authorities are facilitating and supporting by providing forums for partnerships to develop is vital. One challenge is that this CIC business structure is still fairly new, not everyone has come across it before and therefore understands how best to support us: we’re a professional organisation with our community at our heart – we’re not a community group run by volunteers, so our budgets and income need to cover higher costs. Equally though – that’s another massive opportunity: we’re a part of this community so co-creation and community engagement are easier, and we can act as a bridge facilitating communication between our community and the local authorities.

Just to touch on what’s coming next for us: partnership is something we’re going to continue to explore through development of an Arts & Creativity Roadmap for Northstowe – a cultural strategy that will drive our work over the next five years and explore models for community leadership and co-production of creative activity that supports and engages everyone in our community. It will fit within Homes England’s community engagement strategy that Dean mentioned, but we hope will give us the evidence base and community-created direction that we as an organisation, we as a community, and we as a network of stakeholders need to thrive.

So just to finish, here are our website and contact details. I would love to hear from you, or for you to put me in touch with, other organisations supporting community development and placemaking in similar ways. It can sometimes feel like we’re reinventing the wheel here, which seems unnecessary!

That’s it from me; I’m going to hand you on to the next case study for this webinar, with Tom Johnston from Communities CAN.