Michael leads the Civic Imaginary Partnerships research project and is Research Fellow in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. He completed his PhD at the University of Hull, and has held research posts at the Universities of Glasgow, Southampton and Sheffield working with communities, policy makers and place-based organisations to understand what motivates and sustains participation in place. He is particularly interested in emotion and place, and how civic feelings or feelings about being ‘civic’ or ‘civil’ are mobilised, ignored or manipulated by different groups. Michael had an earlier career as an actor and director and his research experiments with creative ethnographic methods, often in collaboration with poets, visual artists, playwrights, musicians, community-based artists and film makers.
Perhaps it is the independence. The markets. The community groups, noticeboards and conversations. The festivals, parades and carnival. The architecture. The people who organise things, campaign, make art. Or decide that if something needs doing, they might as well do it themselves.
These are only some versions of Frome.
On Saturday 19 September, we are taking over the Silk Mill Gallery with The ForEm: a pop-up fête of ideas, dedicated to exploring the town, its stories and its possible futures. There will be films, oral histories, artworks, a community loom, talks, walks and plenty of opportunities simply to wander in and see what catches your attention. The day concludes with a screening of short films created by Frome residents through our community-led filmmaking project.
The ForEm flyer, designed by Kate Keara Pelen
Collaboration and partnership
The ForEm is the work of Frome-based artist Kate Keara Pelen, developed through her collaboration with us. We commissioned Kate to immerse herself in our research, relationships and emerging questions and to develop an artistic response. The concept and creative design of TheForEm, including its playful installations, games and participatory activities, are the resulting artwork. Rather than illustrating completed research, TheForEm takes some of its questions and tensions and turns them into things people can play with, alter and argue over.
Theevent is being co-produced by the Civic Imaginary Partnerships team andSue PalmerofFuture Shed Frome, who has been involved in the research since its earliest development. The Frome partnership grew from conversations with Sue at the research-bid stage about arts-based community action, local governance and understanding change in ways that are useful to residents and local organisations.
That collaboration is important. Rather than producing a research exhibition in which academics simply display their findings, we are experimenting with what happens when research questions are handed over, reinterpreted and played with through artistic practice – and then opened up again to a local community.
TheForEm also gathers together creative work made through other collaborations across the project. Textile artists Claire Orpin and Tamara Jones have designed the community loom project, working with children and young people to create a collective piece that visitors will be able to see and contribute to during the day. Filmmaker Dr. John Sealey of Fabian’s Film has led our community film project, supporting Frome residents to develop filmmaking skills and create their own short films about their lives, experiences of the town and ideas about its future.
The community loom at a workshop at the Boulder Rooms, Frome
What is The ForEm?
This isn’t going to look like a conventional research exhibition. TheForEm is deliberately somewhere between a forum and a fête: a gathering place, a site of exchange and a meanwhile space in which unexpected encounters can happen.
The event includes activities created by Kate that will turn Frome’s network of organisations into a slightly improbable fruit machine. The Frome Way will transform familiar assumptions about the town into a signpost that refuses to settle. Community Fridge Poetry will invite visitors to dismantle and rebuild the lettering of the Frome Times. And Co-Opoly asks whether one of the world’s most famous board games can be redesigned so that every being gets to thrive.
There will be performances too: Kate has invited theatre-maker Tom Spencer to create his own guided tour of The Forem: bringing together storytelling, fantasy, and local legend. She has also asked Martin Scott to combine two of his public personas – Town Crier and Cheese Lord – in a playful game about the town’s civic tribes and archetypes, with the audience spinning a wheel to decide where the performance travels next.
Running through all this are some serious questions:
Over the past year, our Civic Imaginary Partnerships project has worked with residents, artists, community organisations and our local partners Frome Town Council and Edventure Frome, to investigate how people experience the town and imagine its future. We have hosted and taken part in events at the Key Centre, the Silk Mill, Frome Football Club, Frome Town Hall, RISE, Fair Frome, Edventure, and Victoria Park. We have collected oral histories, made community-led films, run creative workshops and spoken to people involved in civic life in many different ways. You can read more about our work in Frome here, and we will be adding lots of resources, images and videos to our Frome research page here over the coming weeks.
Co-critique
We have heard enormous affection for Frome’s independence, creativity and capacity to make things happen. We have also heard questions about belonging, class, housing, visibility, access, power, care and whose version of Frome gets to dominate.
The ForEm is where we report some of those ideas back and make sure we have understood them and all their different points of view.
Crucially, we don’t want people simply to agree with our findings. We want Frome to co-critique them (for more on this concept, see Beth Perry’s blog here). What have we got wrong? What have we missed? Which uncomfortable questions need more attention? And what should happen next?
That is also why the artistic collaborations are central. The playful objects, structures, performances, films, loom and installations invite different ways of responding to the research. You don’t need to read an academic report or speak in the language of policy to have something important to say about the place where you live, nor to engage with others’ views, ideas or theories. That said, there will also be drafts of our academic report available to read and comment on too.
Those conversations will help shape the final research report and recommendations presented to Frome Town Council later this year and they will help us shape the next phase of our project and our case study plans with collaborators in Chester, Hull, and Southampton.
Daring to imagine alternatives: learning from Bologna and Emilia-Romagna
In his short book The Red Tenda of Bologna, John Berger describes Bologna as “an improbable city”, one “you might walk through after you have died”. The title refers to the red linen seen hanging from the windows of municipal buildings. Berger writes about wanting to buy a length of this red cloth, to hold it to the light, fold it, smooth it out, and “dream of what’s on the other side”.
The image of civic fabric is resonant with our research. We are interested in the infrastructures, relationships and practices that make collective imagining and action possible. In Bologna, this can be seen in public buildings, neighbourhood houses, collaboration agreements, reused cultural spaces, municipal strategies, informal networks and everyday acts of care.
During recent visits to Bologna and the Emilia-Romagna region, we have been learning from researchers, practitioners and organisations working across urban planning, participation, culture and community development. The visits have helped us think about the civic imaginary not only as a concept, but as something that is shaped by local histories, political cultures, institutional arrangements and creative experiments. A senior leader in the city told us, civic imagining is “the culture” of Bologna and the wider Emilia Romagna region.
A particular phrase has stayed with us, spray-painted on a portico pillar: OSA IMMAGINARE UN’ALTERNATIVA – dare to imagine an alternative. The message was not part of an official consultation or public art programme. It was a small intervention in the everyday life of the city, capturing something important about the work of civic imagination. Imagining alternatives requires hope, capacities and resources – which are unevenly distributed – and it also requires daring. It means testing new forms, taking creative risks, and accepting that futures are often provisional, experimental and unfinished.
Bologna and the long history of participation
Bologna is well known for its porticoes and towers. These are striking features of the city’s civic identity, but they are also forms of social infrastructure. The porticoes shape how people walk, meet, shelter and gather. They make some kinds of public life easier and more visible. They also show how the built environment can support everyday forms of proximity and encounter.
With Martina Massari and Valentina Orioli at the University of Bologna, we have been learning about the city’s long history of neighbourhood action, participatory urbanism and policy co-production. Martina introduced us to the story of Giuseppe Dossetti, who ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Bologna in 1956. Although Dossetti lost the election to Giuseppe Dozza, aspects of his manifesto, e il Libro bianco su Bologna, were taken up by the administration. These included ideas of a “civic consortium” and planning processes that engaged peripheral neighbourhoods.
This history helped shape a longer tradition of decentralisation and citizens’ participation in Bologna’s municipal administration and is one reason why the city is an important reference point for us. Its civic culture has developed through a particular combination of political history, institutional commitment, urban form, territorial scale and economic resources. It cannot be treated as a simple model to transfer elsewhere, but it offers important questions for thinking about the UK context and our project’s place-studies. Civic culture cannot only reproduce established forms. It has to keep adapting. Even in places with strong traditions of participation, there remains a need for experimentation.
Relational proximity and trust
Questions of trust and proximity to decision-making are central to our conversations. As in many places, there is a growing context of dis/mistrust in Bologna, especially mistrust of institutions. One solution is to develop relational proximity by enabling methods and practices that respond to local contexts, rather than assuming that one model of participation will work for all groups. For example, Collaboration Pacts are a framework through which the municipality and civic actors can work together around the care and management of urban commons. These pacts are part of a wider civic infrastructure that supports collaboration between institutions and third-sector organisations. They show how civic imagination can become embedded in administrative processes.
Relational proximity is not only about physical closeness. It is also about confidence, recognition, familiarity and the quality of relationships between residents, associations, institutions and intermediaries. Different groups participate in different ways and on different timelines. Some may already be active through formal organisations, others may be involved through informal networks of care, mutual aid, family, faith, culture or neighbourhood life.
This is relevant across all of our place studies. In Frome we are interested in the ways independent political, economic and community networks interact with one another. In Southampton, we are asking what it means to be visibly civic in communities where citizen-led action may be present but unevenly recognised. In Hull, we are exploring how young people understand democracy and collective decision-making in a place often discussed through low voter turnout. Bologna helps us ask how civic infrastructure can support these different forms of proximity. It also reminds us that the work of participation is not only technical. It is emotional, cultural and relational.
Participatory budgeting and democratic experiment
One of the clearest examples of participation during our most recent visit was a participatory budgeting session in a Bologna neighbourhood house (a kind of community centre). The setting was important. Participation appeared not as an abstract ideal, but as a set of relationships and processes through which residents could discuss priorities and make claims on the future of their neighbourhood.
What was striking was not only the mechanism, but the atmosphere around it. Participatory budgeting depends on trust, patience, translation, confidence and listening. It requires people to believe that taking part will matter. It also requires institutions to create conditions in which neighbourhood knowledge can shape decisions.
This has resonance for our work in Hull. With local young people, we are exploring how democracy and collective decision-making are understood in a community with one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country. If participatory budgeting in Bologna shows one version of democratic practice — formal, neighbourhood-based and supported by civic infrastructure — Hull raises another set of questions. What does democracy feel like to young people who may not recognise themselves in existing political forms? Can animation, storytelling and youth-led creative work open different routes into civic imagination?
Creativity is important here. It is not an addition to civic life after the “real” work has taken place. It can be one of the ways civic life becomes possible. Creative methods can make democracy discussable, visible and open to different forms of participation. They can also help people describe feelings and experiences that may not easily fit into surveys, meetings or policy language.
Rimini, Chester and the afterlives of cinemas
We also spent time thinking about civic imagination through cultural reuse and the afterlives of buildings. In Rimini, we visited Ritorno All’a Storia, a project focused on bringing the former Astoria Cinema back to life through community-led cultural activity. The name suggests both a return to the Astoria and a return to history. People do not imagine the future from nowhere. They imagine from places that already hold memory, attachment, conflict and possibility.
Although it is a vast, iconic building, Ritorno All’a Storia treats the former cinema not only as a property issue but as a cultural and civic resource. It asks what can be tried before everything is settled. It works as a juxtaposition of memory, care and experimentation, exploring how performance, community activity, local history and reuse might help a building become public again.
This has particular relevance for our work in Chester, where Storyhouse also began with the afterlife of a cinema. Chester’s former Odeon has become a theatre, cinema, library, restaurant, festival space and civic meeting point. Storyhouse is now an established cultural institution at the centre of Chester’s public life, while Ritorno All’a Storia is working with more uncertain energies of return and possibility.
The colonie and difficult civic memory
Along the Rimini coastline, we learned about the abandoned colonie. The architectures of these enormous former seaside colonies speak to changing ideas of welfare, childhood, health, leisure and the state. They are not only ruins but archives of regional wealth and power. They raise questions about memory, reuse and responsibility. What should happen to the material remains of past social projects? How can difficult histories be encountered without nostalgia or erasure? How might the Rimini coast itself become a site for thinking about care, abandonment and the future? These questions are important for us because people imagine futures from landscapes already shaped by past decisions. Buildings, infrastructures and institutions carry histories of inclusion and exclusion, and shape what people feel is possible or desirable to them.
Making absence visible
The “Freak of Nature” of Emilia-Romagna is an anonymous artist who paints bamboo stalks and numbers the windows of empty and abandoned shops across the region. The intervention is modest, but powerful. As local press report on the spread of the bamboo, they also chart the number of abandoned buildings and absent landlords. The bamboo becomes a metric counting loss and makes absence visible. This question of visibility speaks to our work in Southampton where we are asking what it means to be visibly civic in a place where forms of citizen-led action may be present but unevenly recognised, supported or connected. Here again, creativity matters. It can provoke conversations about what is missing, what is valued and what alternative futures might be imagined.
Cesena, Frome and place-based independence
We also learned about independent place-based political organising, and how some people are turning away from national left/right party agendas. There are echoes here with Frome, where the Independents for Frome movement has reshaped local politics through a commitment to non-party, place-first decision-making. In a collaboration with the University of Bologna, we hosted a webinar with members of Cesena Siamo Noi, Bologna for Climate Justice and Frome Town Council, exploring the wider civic implications around the concept of ‘independence’. Cesena and Frome are not equivalents, but the comparison helps us ask what happens when local politics begins by asking what a place needs, rather than from the logic of national party alignment. This, too, is a form of civic experiment. It treats local governance as a creative field in its own right, while also raising questions about who has the time, resources and confidence to participate.
What travels?
Bologna does not provide a model simply to import into the UK. Its civic culture is shaped by specific political histories, institutions, economic conditions and urban forms. However, it does offer questions and perhaps some principles that travel.
How do municipalities and local authorities sustain participation over time? What forms of trust make co-production possible? How can informal civic work that is already happening yet is hidden, be recognised without being absorbed or flattened by institutions? What kinds of daring are required to imagine alternatives that are not yet fully available?
Bologna and Emilia-Romagna help us place our work in a wider international conversation, reminding us that civic imagination is not a singular thing. To return to Berger’s red cloth, the civic imaginary is something to hold to the light and think with. It is a form of urban fabric made from law, memory, architecture, administration, friendship, care, conflict, art, libraries and universities.
Daring does not have to mean dramatic rupture. It often means the patient, experimental and often unseen work of care and making another version of public life imaginable. Opening a room, testing a process, marking an absence, telling a story, hosting a meeting, painting a bamboo stalk.
Huge thanks to Martina Massari and Valentina Orioli, generous and welcoming hosts; to colleagues at the University of Bologna, Fondazione Innovazione Urbana, and the many people who shared their time, work, places (and gelato) with us. Thank you to the University of Glasgow international partnership development fund, Sunil Hutchin-Bellur – and the College of Social Science Research Development team for supporting these exchanges. Grazie a tutti.
We’re excited to announce a new opportunity for a Research Associate to join our team.
The post will focus on Policy and Communities Knowledge Exchange at Grade 7 level, 0.6 FTE (21 hours per week) for 2 years. The full details are here.
Why this role matters With the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Pride in Place agenda and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s recently refreshed areas of research interest (ARIs), there’s a lot happening in this policy domain. As Professor Tom Crick, DCMS Chief Scientific Adviser stated in this blog, “the refreshed ARIs […] reflect the fact that many of the department’s most important questions are questions about complex and dynamic systems: how economic, cultural, technological and civic systems interact; how social, cultural and information infrastructure supports places, communities and public trust; how interventions generate benefits over time; how risks propagate through sectors and supply chains; and how public value is created, distributed and sustained”. Hence, the research of the Civic Imaginary Partnerships project is timely and relates to key government policy concerns and research priorities. The Policy and Communities Knowledge Exchange Research Associate role is important in communicating our research.
Our project is working with communities across the UK, developing evidence and methods that speak directly to these agendas. We’re looking for someone to lead creative and ‘traditional’ policy KE activities with a range of policymakers and the third sector.
What the role involves and what we are looking for
The successful candidate will work with us, our partners and collaborators across the UK to develop long-term ethnographic understandings of contemporary civic cultures. They will be supported to lead key activities relating to policy engagement with local and central governments and the third sector.
The role requires expert knowledge in local governance and participation, creative research methods in community settings and experience developing policy facing materials and activities. Theoretical/conceptual knowledge of place, the civic, and a detailed awareness of place-based policies and practices across the four nations of the United Kingdom and internationally will be an asset.
A flexible/hybrid working arrangement is possible. While the project includes national and international travel, we are committed to ensuring accessibility, and can plan adjustments to support candidates with specific needs.
Interested in applying?
The closing date for applications is 22nd June 2026 at 23:45. The application portal is available here.
In November 2025, the Storyhouse Theatre in Chester held their annual Futures Festival: two weeks of events, shows, films and activities dedicated to sustainability. The Civic Imaginaries team, in collaboration with the Storyhouse, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, hosted two exploratory events designed to help shape our research.
With artist Tim Foxon, we delved into the Cheshire Archives , exploring moments from the past when Chester has reimagined its futures. On Saturday 8th November Tim led a free art session with participants designing their own Visit Chester 2075 poster, in response to some of the stories and artefacts that interested us. On Monday 10th November, we facilitated an interactive focus group for local planners, councillors, creatives, small business owners and educators interested in the creative future of Chester. Together, we reflected on Chester’s creative histories, the current landscape, and prospective futures, offering participants an opportunity to discuss Chester’s creative trajectory.
Report on the future of tourism in Chester by Glasgow & Associates, 1988
The Chester At Home Scheme commenced in 1973 and lasted until 1987. The scheme, ran on a voluntary basis, providing opportunities for overseas visitors to visit homes in the Chester area for an evening.
Also from the 1945 Redevelopment Plan, a 1,500-2,000 seat concert hall – where the New Market now stands.
The 1945 Plan for Redevelopment by Charles Greenwood contains several visions for Chester painted by Gordon Hemm, including this proposal to radically alter the Groves.
An extract from a paper delivered to annual convention of North West Civic Trusts in March 1964, by Dr. J. Quentin Hughes
We are looking for a creative practitioner to work with us to creatively reflect our research experiences, data and findings in Frome and to produce a work that will provoke conversations, thinking and action.
Across our case-study neighbourhoods we are experimenting with different artistic forms to:
Advocate for the value of imaginative practice in addressing civic challenges
Develop creative ways of evoking, representing or embodying the civic imaginary
Communicate a broad spectrum of thoughts, ideas, and alternative worlds, that can provoke audiences’ understandings of the civic imagination’s multiple affects, resonances and contradictions
The outcome from this and similar commissions in our other case-study neighbourhoods will complement our more traditional academic outputs (journal articles, policy papers and reports). They will showcase the unique potential of arts-research collaborations and enable collective thinking and imagining to challenge, test or solve real world issues.
What / Who we are looking for
The key task is to interpret, translate and synthesise our research into an artistic / creative work that has relevance for Frome’s communities and represents the civic imaginaries of the town.
We understand ‘artist’ in the widest sense to include all media and forms of practice. You might be a visual artist working with textiles or digital media, a musician, sound artist, poet, playwright (or anything else). Your practice might be socially engaged and participatory – or you might work on your own in a studio, workshop or greenhouse. If our project and this brief speak to you, we are open to all suggestions. We only have one exception which is that we are already working with film on the project. So, on this occasion, we are unlikely to fund an idea where film is a primary method or outcome.
Frome
Frome has a national reputation for its uniquely independent political culture. Over the past twenty years, it has contributed significantly to the development of new models of local governance and community engagement. We hope to learn about the kinds of imagining and agency that Frome has nurtured and if it is possible to transfer these to other places and contexts. Between November 2025 and March 2026, Michael and Ellen (the project researchers), will live and work in Frome and have co-designed the research foci and activities with partners from Green and Healthy Frome, Edventure’s Future Shed and Frome Town Council Communities Team. You can read more about how we are approaching the research in Frome here.
Factors to consider
1.The final work should be for the widest possible audience. However, as the research progresses, the artist/s may identify the need to engage a specific group (by age, gender, profession, whatever it may be) and we are open to this. The only stipulation is that target audience/s are Frome residents.
2.Our funder requirements mean that all outputs adhere to Open Access principals, including Creative Commons copyright licences. Our previous artist/research collaborations have involved CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licensing, though we are open to discussing alternatives.
3.If appropriate, the making process will be documented on our project website, and depending on the form of the final piece, we will work with our project partners to ensure the finished work can be publicly displayed or installed and be accessible to local communities.
4.The outcomes and documentation of this collaboration may also be used by the research team and partners for local and national policy influencing (e.g. policy briefs, calls for evidence), academic and industry conferences and publications, resources for other place-based arts/research collaborations.
Timeline
Sunday 2nd November – midnight (00:00): Deadline for responses to this call. Expressions of Interest will be reviewed by the research team who will contact shortlisted candidates to discuss proposals. We will write to all applicants to let them know whether they have been being shortlisted or not.
Week beginning 10th or 17th November 2025: Meetings with shortlisted candidates
Mid December 2025: We expect the contract to be in place by the second week of December, at which point we will invite the artist/s to attend a half-day briefing meetings where we will share our research materials with you.
December 2025 – February 2026: We will meet with the artist/s at least twice to update on our research findings and co-develop the final brief for the creative work.
March 2026: We anticipate the making period to start nearer the end of our fieldwork (Feb/March 2026). Depending on your practice, availability and the scale of the work it could be earlier or later.
Mid-July 2026: Deadline for completion of the work when it will be presented at a research dissemination event in Frome alongside the outputs of our other research activities.
We anticipate hosting an exhibition in Glasgow in 2028 where we will bring together the creative outcomes from all our case study collaborations. Should we request the selected artist/s to contribute after July 2026, we will negotiate additional fees in good faith.
Fees
The maximum award is £11,000 (including VAT) to include:
*Labour, including making/designing and research*
*Materials, equipment and studio costs*
*Attending briefing meetings and the research dissemination event in July 2026*
Depending on the responses to this call, we will consider funding two projects circa £5,500 (inc. VAT) each, depending on scale, materials and timelines etc. We will discuss this with shortlisted proposals, and the agreed commission/s will be at the maximum available.
How to respond
Please follow this link to an Expression of Interest form, where you will be asked:
-Your name and contact details
-Any websites that document relevant works/practice
-To briefly describe how you understand your practice as ‘place-based’, or how this funding could enable you to develop a place-based approach
-To briefly describe your connection with Frome. It’s important to us to work with someone who has a good understanding of the town
To briefly describe any previous research-based collaborations. Who were they with – what did you do – what were the outcomes? If you haven’t worked on a research collaboration before, please describe how you would approach one. What challenges and opportunities might there be for you and your practice?
-To briefly describe how you might respond to this brief and what direction might you take it
-To briefly describe your availability between November 2025 and July 2026. We can be flexible with dates for meetings and activities
-To briefly describe what you might need from us to help you make your best work – such as accessibility needs or considerations relating to communications and work patterns
We are happy to meet informally before the deadline to discuss the research project and to answer any questions you might have about this collaboration. To be as fair as possible at this stage, we will not comment on early ideas. Please email Michael Howcroft at michael.howcroft@glasgow.ac.uk
Between November 2025 and March 2026, the Civic Imaginary Partnerships team will be living and working in Frome. In this blog, the first of our Place-Study profiles, we outline some of the features that have shaped Frome’s contemporary civic identities and why the town is of interest to us.
Located in Somerset in the southwest of England, the rural market town of Frome (pronounced ‘Froom’ to rhyme with ‘broom’), sits thirteen miles to the south of Bath. Popular with walkers, the Mendip Hills roll on its western side and the river Frome wends its way through the town, bisecting it on a diagonal path from northwest to southeast. The settlement was established in the 7th century, growing up around a monastery founded by Saint Adhelm, and by the Middle Ages it was a busy market town with an annual Fair. Its primary product was wool, and by 1801, Frome was one of the largest towns in Somerset, bigger than either Taunton or Yeovil.
The population waned through the nineteenth century as major industrialists drew the working classes away from rural townships and villages into the cities. A partial recovery was sustained by print and metal work industries in the town, some of which survived into the 21st century. Felix Dennis, one of the men who founded – and was prosecuted for publishing – Oz Magazine (“the most controversial magazine of the 1960s”) invested in Butler and Tanner, a printing company founded in Frome in the early 19th century; and John Webb Singer, born in Frome in 1819, established a metalworks factory in the town which specialised in statuary in the late 19th and early 20th century, casting the Figure of Justice at the Old Bailey and Boudica and Her Daughters on the Thames Embankment.
The decline in demand for wool production, coupled with increasing globalisation during the latter half of the 20th century brought significant economic challenges. Butler and Tanner finally closed in 2008, making almost 300 employees redundant; Singers still exists in an industrial estate on the edge of Frome, though in a much-reduced capacity. Thanks in part, to the emergence of a flourishing small-crafting industry and independent traders – including multiple market days, its picturesque locale and an influx of urban migrants since the 1990s, Frome has been in a process of revitalisation and is now regularly voted the best place to live in Somerset, which is widely reported in the local and national press.
Catherine Hill, Frome (photo taken by CIP team)
Independence, Connection and Proximity
We are interested in learning about Frome for many reasons. Most relevant for us, it has a growing national reputation for its unique political culture, which has already attracted a number of studies including The Politics of Transition by Amy Burnett. Over the past twenty years, it has contributed significantly to the development of new models of local governance and community engagement, predominantly the elimination of Party Politics at local elections via a coalition of independents, the Independents for Frome (IfF) who have controlled the town council since 2011. Self-proclaimed as being free from ideological and Party constraints, the IfF group set out to transform the way local governance was practised, focusing on cooperation and collaboration between colleagues and with the community. After the pandemic, Peter Macfadyen and his fellow independents set up Flatpack 2021, a mentoring network to encourage others to move away from traditional frameworks of combative governance and towards respectful collectivism, where meeting the needs of the population takes precedence over (Party) political preferences.
This independent ‘mindset’ can also be seen in Frome’s local economy with various markets and independent shops, the third sector and cultural networks that support and promote independence of different kinds. At The Station, a collaboration between chefs, organic and regenerative growers, and entrepreneurs have transformed a former train station warehouse into a dining hub, creative space and community sauna. There are pioneering initiatives working on local challenges relating to the environment, sustainable living and poverty, such as Edventure Frome, Fair Frome, The Good Heart and multiple Community Interest Companies (CICs) and independent charities.
There may be some unintended consequences to this mindset. The success of IfF may have contributed to a decreased turnout at more recent local elections due to a lack of opposition candidates standing and reduced political ‘choice’. Independent makers, growers and traders have higher overheads, and so their products often cost more, presenting issues of exclusivity and accessibility. However ‘thriving’ or ‘vibrant’ they may appear on the surface, CICs often rely on volunteering to survive and are vulnerable to the short-term, competitive funding landscape. Similarly, as a recent Frome Town Council Report highlighted, there are neighbourhoods of multiple deprivation, and significant concerns about the cost of living, lack of social and affordable housing, and opportunities for young people. How can a strong and equitable political and cultural economy be maintained or is there a limit to Frome’s current model of independence within the wider political economy of the United Kingdom?
Established academic research shows that where places have residents with high social, cultural and financial capital there are a greater number of stronger independent networks and activities, as well as the capacities and skillsets that sustain them. This is particularly evident in Frome. However, many existing studies on these topics, such as volunteering or community cohesion overlook the social, cultural and material relations that sustain networks and community connectedness where and when they occur. As such, we want to learn more about Frome’s proximities – by which we mean the perceived or actual closeness between people. This is not solely about physical distance – though Frome’s population density is also a factor – proximity impacts interactions and relationships between people and things, and is a key pillar of social, institutional and ideological connections.
Next steps
In consultation with our partners and collaborators in the town, we have devised a programme of research activities that will focus on Frome’s independent mindset(s) and its cultures of connection and proximity. In addition to ‘traditional’ methods such as interviews and surveys, we will soon be recruiting participants for a series of civic imaginary workshops, an oral history project, and a community-led film project with Dr. John Sealey from Fabian’s Film. We will also soon advertise a call to the local creative sector for an exciting artistic collaboration. Through all of these, we hope to learn about the kinds of imagining and agency that Frome’s independence, connection and proximity have nurtured, and how they function as guiding principles across Frome’s civic infrastructure.
