Bath Unlimited 6 page V2 .qxp_Layout 1 23/10/2020 16:35 Page 1
CITY | GLOBAL INTERESTS
Unlimited thinking
Do you feel battered and bruised by recent months? And are you concerned about how Bath is coping? Emma Clegg talks to Kevin Peake, director of marketing and business development at Royds Withy King, and the brains behind the Bath Unlimited project, and discovers that the city is firing on all cylinders – 17 of them, in fact
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hings have been tough. In Bath, in Britain and in the world. It’s not surprising that we’ve been feeling downcast over the past few months, swept up in a situation over which we have little control. We – as individuals, business owners and employees – are still looking forward, but our buoyancy is weighed down by uncertainty. We are waiting for some good news, angling to find a chink of light, and the hope of a future that’s positive and full of potential. So what would you say if we told you that Bath is a superpower, a strong and resilient centre of energy, way up there with the big cities in Europe and beyond? That this a city that we should be proud of and grateful to live in, full of enterprise, talent, business acumen, character and vision? That there are powerful forces behind the headlines that give the city strength and permanence? Would you guffaw, and point at the empty retail units, the closed galleries, the empty theatres, the football and rugby matches playing to empty stands, and the organisations in funding crises? Bear with us. Being a superpower is all about vision. And nobody knows that better than Kevin Peake, director of marketing and business development at Royds Withy King. At the start of lockdown, he was asked to join the Economic Recovery Board, led by B&NES Council. Including tech, culture, manufacturing, services, tourism and education representatives, they put their heads together to come up with ideas to activate the renewal of our economy, to rebuild confidence in our area as a safe, sustainable and green place in which to visit, study and work.
BELOW: Truespeed deliver some of the fastest broadband speeds in the world. They also provide free ultrafast broadband to local schools (as well as local community hubs) in south west communities
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Avon Rubber manufacture the world’s most advanced underwater life-support capability for global military divers, capable of supporting an individual for 4-6 hours at extreme work depths
“We had a Zoom meeting at the beginning of March,” explains Kevin, “to develop ideas for a future big vision. I said, ‘I think one of the problems with Bath is that people don’t know about the great companies here, and so when we market ourselves outside to attract other companies, people don’t come’. People come driven by a herd mentality – they go where there are lots of businesses. So that was the genesis of the idea. “We needed to create a brand. The name ‘Bath Unlimited’ was the idea of Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne, because he had been thinking about an exhibition with that title to do with Bath’s amazing talent. As soon as we said the name, it seemed to be the glue that brought some of these amazing firms together, those that think in a very imaginative, creative way.” “Earlier in the year I’d gone to a presentation of design agency Mytton Williams’ Made in Bath book attended by a number of Bath businesses. While I was there I asked people questions about the different firms in Bath to see how well all the amazing companies we have are known. As I did this I became more and more convinced that they are not all well known, because nobody I spoke to knew that the aircraft carriers that the country had just invested billions in were designed by BMT.”
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Kevin Peake is open about his own learning curve on the stature of businesses in Bath. “Buro Happold put out on social media that they had just designed a new stadium for Everton Football Club, an eco portside development on the edge of the Mersey. I said ‘Wow, I didn’t know you did sports stadiums’, and they said ‘Well we did the Tottenham Stadium’. I said ‘Wow, how did you get the Tottenham Stadium?’, and they said, ‘Well we did the Olympic Park’. I then said in a meeting with the Council, ‘Did you know that the Olympic Park was designed in Bath?’ and they said ‘No’. And someone there from Buro Happold said, ‘Well, we also designed the Millennium Stadium’. Every brilliant new stadium is designed in Bath.” Let’s take another example – eyewear company Inspecs supplies over 100 countries, and are stocked in some of the world’s biggest retail chains. Their head office building in Bath used to be the heart of energy supply to the city during Victorian times. And the company handmade all the frames worn by Daniel Radcliffe in the Harry Potter movies, as well as supplying John Lennon’s iconic round eye gold wire specs – the pair were recently sold at auction for £137,000. These are not just individual success stories within our city, says Kevin: “I wanted to talk about the sectors as much as the companies.”
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