InSandown

Sandown is a town, a parish and a community in discontent, permeating its public and private conversations, its outlook and its governance. Its High Street and seafront have been blighted by ruined hotels and indifferent landlords, and the fate of its public places is increasingly controlled by commercial interests. It has no business association, and its council has, in recent times, been unable to meet the challenges that the town faces. Sandown has amongst the highest levels of income deprivation, and lowest life expectancies of any community on the Island. These are the consequences of the powerlessness, neglect and loss of hope that have grown here in the last two decades.

Sandown was an unplanned Victorian settlement, created to serve the demand for more affordable seaside holidays amongst the affluent nearby resorts of the mid-19th century. This central purpose has remained the primary focus of development planning ever since, despite fundamental shifts in domestic tourism and coastal resort lifecycles, and the inability of tourism alone to support and sustain a living, resilient place. There is now a critical dislocation between the needs of the community and a reliance solely on the visitor economy, a problem clearly visible in the debates around the future of Browns and Culver Parade, and in a High Street being slowly destroyed by the very hotels that created it 150 years ago.

And yet Sandown has arguably the best combination of traditional seaside and wild coast anywhere in England; it contains a huge public estate (almost a quarter of its land area) and thereby room to instigate and manage change, and it hosts one of the three Island ‘locality hubs’ for public health services bringing a concentration of NHS employment. There is a busy network of volunteers, clubs and associations and a rapidly growing engagement with social media, there is a major free annual science and arts festival (Hullabaloo) a calendar of community activities (Discovery Bay) and a spring and summer programme of free live music shows (The Campfire Sessions). Sandown, with Lake and Shanklin, is part of The Bay Area urban district, and the largest conurbation on the Island. Annual visitor numbers can reach half a million and The Bay remains the capital of the Island’s tourism bedspace. The raw materials for positive change are already here.

But there is a local momentum building, to push ahead with small-scale, imaginative change, focussed on priority public spaces. These activities have in common, a culture of collaboration and shared learning. Each initiative finds a way to use local content, features of significance, landmarks and locally distinctive information, to attract funding, secure public assets, create opportunities for people to participate, learn more and add to the store of social and cultural capital available to the next initiative. The twin themes of an encounter with the natural world and an exploration of artistic expression run throughout and are perfectly represented by the town’s most famous guests, Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll. The beauty of this approach is that it creates a place that is filled with curiosity and experience sought out by visitors; tourism is not abandoned, it becomes the successful by-product of a place that looks after its own community first.

This is the basis for cultural regeneration, made from the materials that already constitute Sandown, an essential antidote to the too-prevalent attitude that the town can only be saved by selling itself to the richest mainland buyer because ‘the right sort of people’ for success aren’t here.

Sandown will have to rediscover itself, perhaps even reimagine itself, but it is still young enough to do so. The next chapter will be an evolution, a new expression of Sandown’s capacity to be a living, working place, profoundly influenced by what has gone before but unrestrained in where it might go next.