CULTURAL PLACEMAKING AND REGIONAL STRATEGY

Placemaking is at the heart of the University’s regional strategy – we aim to use our resources to make our region a better place to live and work – and iCCi’s contribution to this work is to think about it culturally.

Creativity is central to placemaking – through it, art and culture build pride in our places, help them to thrive and be healthy and raise their profile. As the recent LGA publication ‘Cornerstones of Culture’ puts it, ‘We need people and communities who can respond with creativity and innovation to the social, economic, and environmental challenges and opportunities facing us. We need places that are able to draw on their unique local heritage to develop resilient and inclusive futures. We need new diverse voices to bring fresh thinking to the table and iCCi has a significant role to play in that work’.

Creative Estuary

At the beginning of the year our partners Metal released Estuary festival’s final evaluation report which demonstrated that a total £6.5m of “new” money has been injected into the Thames Estuary region as a result of the festival. Work is now underway to develop the model for the next iteration of Estuary in 2025.

Our Creative Estuary Co-commissioning programme continued to develop opportunities for estuary-based artists and creative organisations to create ambitious new work with and for our communities. To date we have worked with 28 organisations, delivering 44 commissions and engaging 348 practitioners. With a commitment to invest at least 17% of our co-commissioning funds into black and brown led organisations, or for opportunities for black and brown practitioners, we are proud to have invested 24%.

Re:Generation 2031 continued to develop the next generation of cultural and creative leaders, delivering 30 paid, entry-level work placements and six new practice-based training programmes, enrolling 58 young people with 33 different organisations and practitioners.

To support and promote the talent and creativity across the region, we launched our Business Directory. Alongside this a wealth of rich new content has been developed for the website and social media, including interviews profiling our Champions as well as guest blog posts and case studies on the Re:Gen 2031 programme and the impact of our co-commissions.

In May, we took the message of the value and importance of creativity and culture in high quality placemaking to the inaugural UKREiiF in Leeds and convened a national roundtable of developers, investors and cultural organisations. We shared our vision of harnessing the power of culture to drive the creative and economic evolution of the Thames Estuary and the write up was published in Property Week and The MJ

Also in the Spring we were invited by the Global Cultural Districts Network and by Samoa to speak at international creative industries festival Chtiiing! in Nantes. Another invitation from the Global Cultural Districts Network saw our Chair Sarah Dance give the opening keynote in Lugano at their annual convening.

We continue to lead the peer learning network for the first national cohort of Cultural Development Fund projects. There are useful synergies in our work for example the reuse and restoration of historic buildings within Grimsby Docks which relates to our work in Chatham and in other heritage locations across the estuary As a project with enquiry and testing at its centre, Creative Estuary is committed to learning with and from others.

Docking Station

The Docking Station project is now progressing at pace The Design Team, led by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, were appointed in the summer of 2022 and will soon complete RIBA Stage 2 designs. These will reflect an exciting new design brief which outlines the detailed digital requirements of the project established in collaboration with Digital Consultants.

The technologies we are aiming to provide at Docking Station include virtual production, motion capture, volumetric capture and photogrammetry as well as pre- and post-production facilities, to ensure the full range of technologies required to create immersive digital experiences are available to our community of students, academics, creatives, local people and businesses. The studios will complement the community, co-working, teaching and office spaces that will be provided within the historic Police Section House that will undergo full restoration and refurbishment

Detailed design work (RIBA stage 3) will commence in January/February 2023 Two funding applications have recently been submitted to The National Lottery Heritage Fund (for £3.9M) and to the Cultural Development Fund Round 3 (for £3.5M), the results of which will be announced in March 2023.

We are working closely with partners at Medway Council including the Library Service, Learning and Skills Hub & Brook Theatre to ensure Docking Station is linked to these sites in Chatham to increase accessibility to a wide range of communities. Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust continue to play a key role in supporting the project in terms of site acquisition and the provision of expert heritage advice and we are liaising closely with Mid Kent College regarding the design of the new curriculum. Additionally, we have close working relationships with numerous Medway arts organisations and are keen to involve local artists and creatives in the development of the project.