The Cat who stopped trying to chase its Tail
Spoiler: Street Space will now be focussing our energy up North!
I’ve worked in Barking and Dagenham for 10 years…the social enterprise I set up four years ago, Street Space has grown to a team of four, plus a number of associates. We’ve worked on over 18 projects with hundreds of people across communities in East London. Listening, learning, hatching ideas and experiments in collaborative and creative ways to tackle massive social and community challenges — making streets and spaces feel safer, bring joy and social connection. Some of our proudest work and moments include:
- collaboratively designing street interventions making it easier (and safer) to walk and cycle rather than drive short distances as part of Covid 19 recovery in Dagenham
- pushing the boundaries of participatory decision making through an online collaborative visioning process to develop the foundations of a new masterplan for Fairlop Waters in Redbridge
- experimenting to understand where in Barking Town Centre people, especially women and older people feel unsafe and testing ideas to improve perceptions of safety
- navigating conflict following a high street pedestrianisation scheme in Camden where we moved the conversation from tribalism to positive action and ways forward
- successfully coordinating powerful actors in a place to achieve small scale and low cost transformation (painting it green!) of an unloved footbridge across Barking railway tracks, stewarding a small group of residents to lead the process throughout
- channelling over £36,000 (in 2021-2022) to local creatives, producers, makers, artists and community organisations directly in the neighbourhoods where we’ve worked
We’ve worked on loads of exciting and groundbreaking projects and we’ve learned a heap of things about communities, about change and collaboration, about leadership and vision, conflict and collective grief. We’ve experimented with collective dreaming and how to inspire and imagine different futures even when the present reality feels stuck.
We’ve done things that haven’t worked too, well meant initiatives that haven’t had enough buy-in to sustain themselves. We’ve worked with tiny budgets and stretched them to try and meet our and community member ambitions. We’ve worked with inspiring colleagues in local government, relentlessly plugging away to make things better within hostile funding environments. We’ve been part of community collectives and risk taking towards working more collaboratively, systemically trying to understand and tackle root causes with a view to building trust and relationships between ALL the actors working in a place and experimenting with how to put residents at the heart of all this.
We’ve been inspired by the growing passion and love for a place and identity that evolves over time and the richness everyone feels when they ‘listen better’ or understand another person’s perspective they didn’t know before. We’ve made friends with people who share our sense of commitment and energy to making a place better for everyone and empathised with people who don’t. We’ve tested and experimented with new and exciting ways to do this when you have different amounts of power and money, but want to include everyone.
But it’s also been exhausting. Since the pandemic, like many small social enterprises we’ve moved into survival mode. In part from a huge shift in way of working (creatively taking community engagement online), in part from growing uncertainty in terms of where our next project will come from and in part from soaking it up from everywhere when we are out, in community. We started working increasingly away from our host borough Barking and Dagenham, initially next door in Redbridge, but then to Camden, Haringey, Enfield, Lambeth and most recently to Newham. As our team has grown (in part to sustain the business whilst I took six months off after having a baby!), we soon found ourselves completing tenders and collaborations taking us to new towns and cities across the South of England. Places we have little connection to, and whilst we’re always committed to employing and skilling up engagement practitioners locally, this is an exhausting way to work requiring huge amounts of energy and time.
Zooming out, with a renewed intention to increase our impact and create the conditions for citizen co-creation — participation in genuine decision and change-making in a place. For the communities we work with to see and experience the shaping of streets and spaces to reflect their ambitions for their community and what the result of these changes are. To do this we need to be really intentional about who we work with and where we work. Not simply growing and growing, taking projects here and there because we’ve been asked or to sustain our growing team. We need to understand how each project and collaboration will help us to achieve our mission, move us towards our vision.
We’ve witnessed such leadership and the seeding of a culture of collaboration in Barking an Dagenham, a place not without challenge but that, for over a decade has been flooded with leadership from the council and third sector. Leadership that sets out a clear vision of a positive future and puts residents, empathy (and engagement) at the heart of how to get there. We’ve benefitted from an environment that challenges traditional ways of doing things, embraces experiments and is open to new ways of tackling some of the sticky issues like anti-social behaviour or perceptions of safety.
So we’ve decided, for now, it’s time to focus our energies somewhere new.
I am returning to my own roots in the North. Bradford. A city full of potential, one of the youngest populations in the UK, a place where my roots run deep and where there is energy for change. A city with complex and interconnected challenges but also creativity, passion and entrepreneurialism in abundance, but nearly always less money available. I want to raise my family here and seek new challenges for Street Space within a totally different context. We’ll be bringing our learning, experience and ideas whilst being open and ready to be refreshed by different energy, new contexts and challenges. It feels uncertain but also exciting!
We’re hoping to pilot a range of new ways of working from developing and testing a meaningful community engagement training programme as well as setting up a new studio in Bradford and seeing how we can be a part of shaping inclusive and accessible streets and spaces that make people feel safe, bring joy and social connection. If you work for a local authority and are interested in our approach to sparking meaningful conversations in communities you don’t often hear from, or from an architectural practice or transport planning organisation looking for creative engagement collaborators or critical friends, please do get in touch for a chat.
We’re inviting friends, collaborators and partners to our studio in Barking to say thank you, to celebrate our work and what we’ve learned together. Please RSVP here — we look forward to seeing you. This isn’t goodbye, but the start of a new chapter. Everyone is welcome!
Thursday 30th June
4–6pm
Studio 3, Ice House Court
56 Abbey Road
IG11 7FR
