And obviously what we're trying to do is to reveal some of these hidden histories of community-led planning.
This is our website page. Hopefully you've had a chance to have a look at it.
There's a very long list of names on the team. I won't read them all out, but basically we're an interdisciplinary team of historians, planners,
artists from universities around the UK. And next slide, please, Gerrit.
And as well as the team working on the project, we've had a really great steering group. Again, lists of names there, thanks to everybody.
We've also been supported by the Digital Humanities Unit at Sheffield University, who've helped us with the website.
We've been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
And last but very much not least, we want to say thanks.
And it's great to see so many of you here today as well to all the people who contributed to our interviews, to the workshops, to the walks, to the blogs.
You really helped us contribute and responses and challenges really helped us shape the work.
Next slide. So why did we do the project? What were the aims? Why did we start the project?
We were very much aware, and this was partly linked with the 50th anniversary of the Skeffington report on participation in planning in 2019,
I think that was, that there had been a lot written about participation in the formal planning system,
but much less other than maybe case studies that had been looked at about the very rich history of planning outside the state system.
And those of us like me who've been involved in this for a while, we know we're not getting any younger.
Lofts are being emptied, memories are fading, and we really wanted to capture this before we got lost, basically,
with the idea not just to reveal it, but also to bring it into the present day and to bring it into conversation with what's happening now.
And the second reason for that is related to the quote from Leonee Sandercock there.
It's very much about not wanting to miss the transformative possibilities for planning about these histories, which was again one of the main drivers.
So we've used a range of techniques and methods. We've done archival research.
The photograph on your left is actually the TCPA archive. We've done workshops.
There's one there in Birmingham. We've collected materials. We've run events. We've started to build a website.
We've put out calls for evidence.
Next slide, please. And we've done seven case studies.
They're listed there. And you'll be hearing from some of those case studies later on today.
We've done a number of other case studies in a bit less detail as well. For example, Gobel Road in Notting Hill.
And next slide. One of the key aims and methods that have been used is gathering and telling the stories.
So we've been collecting people's experiences with the top of Dundee, the group at the bottom of Birmingham, at the different events that we've been done through storytelling events.
We've got an exhibition together. We've done walks that have told the history of community-led planning in some of the areas.
And we've done events that have brought people together and have been involved in the past and in the present.
We're aware with all of this that we're just scratching the surface.
You may have seen the website and the little flags and the examples that we've got.
We know that there's emissions. We know that there are some gaps. We're not finishing work today or tomorrow.
So if there are any more additions that you feel we should make, we'd be really happy to hear about them.
This is a photo of Andy putting up our exhibition.
Those you can download those boards, the PDFs, and use them if you want.
And you can also borrow the boards from us if you'd like.
So I'm just going to raise a few questions and issues, which hopefully we're going to talk about later on.
Some of the themes that are emerging from the project as we're bringing it together at the end.
I think the first one of these next slide, please, Garrett, is what is community planning?
And we've been scratching our heads for the last two and a half years, really, and asking lots of people what their definitions are.
And I think the view that we've come to is that there are lots of different ideas, lots of different definitions.
As you can see here, here are some of them. And on the next slide as well, there is some more.
Some people can we even talk about it, about does it actually exist?
Underlying it, though, there are things about representation, about voice, about power, about control,
about local people wanting to find the space, basically, to create their own ideas, to create their own places.
And that's been a constant really over the time that we've been looking at.
Next slide, please. As well as definitions, things have changed over time. The context for whatever we might call community planning has changed over time.
So if you think back to the 60s and 70s, 68 and the rise of community action, Skeffington report about participation,
opposition to road building and inner city clearances and then coming through from that techniques like planning for real alternative plans
and sort of clashing ideologies in the 70s and 80s about the future directions for planning coming forward to the present day,
when we're much more situation of austerity with an emphasis on community assets and partnership.
Next slide, please. So what does this tell us? What does it tell us about planning?
Well, we probably don't need to repeat this, but I'm sure a lot of you will think the same.
But I think this history underlines the fact that we have to see planning as more than land use.
It's about the links with community development, about the links with the social purposes of planning and an alternative to the increasingly economically driven driver of the main sort of planning system.
And also that there are a range of different knowledges and different skills that is really important to bring under this banner that we call planning.
We started out the project with this idea of potentially a neat division between planning in the formal planning system and outside of that.
And obviously, through all our case studies and our work, we realise it's not as simple as that.
Most of the examples we talk about have either been in opposition to the state. Some have worked with the state.
Some have had people who work for local and central government working with them.
So it's quite a complex picture, but it does raise the issue. Next slide, about power and control.
You know, is community led? Is there ever community led planning? Are communities ever in control?
But also this continuing creativity of the way that people have carved out spaces within this.
Also related to issues of power, we've also realised that there are layers of what's hidden.
It isn't just the planning outside the formal system that's hidden. Within that, there were also different layers of inclusion and exclusion.
And this is probably an autocritique, but we find it easier to get the stories of professionals and counter-professionals that we have potentially other groups.
And that's why we've been trying to challenge this with the case study that you'll hear about later from Birmingham.
And next slide, please. Also, we did some work, Deborah Broomfield on the right here, working with black and community, black and ethnic minority groups in Birmingham about the relation, different relationships with community led planning in different sections of the population.
Next slide.
One of the major things that's changed over time is the support that's available and the context and the possibilities that there are for community led planning. These documents are from the 70s and 80s when there was a dense network of groups, some funded by central government, some funded by urban policy.
And so, as the people who could live in cheap housing and spend time working with community groups and as the quotes there from the present day show, that is much more difficult now.
Next slide.
So, overall, what is the total, what is the story, how do we bring all this together? Is it a narrative of failure of a number of fragmented initiatives that don't come together as a movement or change or is it the rise of planning that is very much more economically
inclusive, more liberal planning, or we as a group of people who want to see socially just and inclusive planning been looking for this in history. We've found that we've walked a tightrope, I suppose, between celebrating these examples but also trying to pull
out those wider issues.
But even so, behind this, there's this persistence of communities coming together to change where they're living.
Next slide.
So, the questions which we hope will be returning to during the evening, which is what are the legacies? The photograph there is of the People's Plan, one of our examples, which has been placed within the current regeneration landscape in Docklands.
And the ripple effects of these initiatives, it's more complicated maybe than the simple failure or success that they live on, that the past can enter the present and influence what's happening today. We can raise issues about what we mean by planning, ideas and practices
today. And then of course as the individuals and groups themselves have been looking at trajectory over time and how they continue to influence things. Next slide.
And then finally, the present day, where are the spaces of hope today? What is the context today? What lessons can we draw from history into current activities and current community-led planning?
I hope we'll be hearing about that for you later on. And just finally to end with, again going back to this idea about why we hope to do this project, about how in telling new stories about our past, our intention is to reshape our future.
And this is an image that was done from one of my students, Joe, of a proposal that was in the People's Plan that didn't get built. That site is still derelict 40 years later, but it does show the possibilities and the ideas for the future that hopefully we'll be able to build on.
So thank you.
Thank you, Sue. So the next section of the, so I'm just going to try and get some images up before I introduce the next section. So, so in the next section we've got very brief insights unfortunately from four of the case studies, we've been included so we've invited four people
that we've been discussing these various case studies with to give a very brief insight to this. It's a bit intense and time but our colleague Francesca will try and keep us to time as well.
So, if I, so let me just share my screen, and then I'll introduce the first person.
Okay.
Hopefully you can see that image so the first was we've got talking is Pat Webb from Belfast and Pat's now a social worker based in in Dublin but he grew up in Davis flats in, in West Belfast in the 70s and 80s, and he completed a PhD at University of
Leicester in 2017 explored very complex community struggles that occurred around the campaign to demolish Davis flats set against the backdrop of the troubles in the 70s and 80s.
We've asked each of the speakers just to take one image or artifact from this archive that we've been building up just to talk around this and so you see on the screen that the image that Pat suggested he could talk about. So over to you, Pat.
Thanks, current.
Thanks, Sue. As I was listening to you there, I'm mindful of the fact that I'm not a planning person. That's one, I am a social worker, and this research was done out of a fascination with the community activism, as I was growing up, both by those above me and those who were coming after me when I was growing up in Davis flats.
So, when you were mentioning there, power was a significant component of what I was trying to look at, but I'm not going to belabor that stuff at the minute, but when you were talking about elites, I definitely think there's something of a journey here in the campaigns around Davis flats from
me planning towards a very assertive working class local drive to demand to be involved in planning and actually, I'll try and give you a brief thing. But the image there, that is Davis Tower.
Davis Tower was the one and only tower block, large tower, single point tower that was there, is 20 stories high, it was first built. Now, there was a permanent army base on the top of that tower for surveillance of the area.
That's quite an unusual thing, I'm sure, for you in the UK to be looking at that and thinking, both in reality, they had surveillance, and they also had some very experienced snipers. So all I can tell you is that they were very observant and very lethal at times, but
over an extended period of time, and none other significant fact is, one of the last things in the demilitarizing of the Northern conflict was the removal of that in 2005.
You think back to that, it's 2005, that's not that long ago.
It was one of the last acts of demilitarization, they removed that and you have a lovely image of Davis Tower there now. It's almost a gated community now with a concierge and the people are in it, have always felt secure in it because of its very nature.
So I'll move on. My research was intended, the battles for Davis Flats, and I could go into all the battles for Davis Flats, but obviously I can't. But the helicopter itself signifies the military and the insurgency and the counterinsurgency aspects of it.
I might touch a wee bit on that as we go along because they do shape community activism. But I focus on the campaigns surrounding the construction, demolition and redevelopment of the Davis Flats complex.
I'm just using, yeah. So there's some possible themes that might come out of this, which I'll scout over. Each group represents a discrete but stable coalition. So there are five groups in the campaign and they all over a historical period of 20 years.
There's a causal chain between them and as soon as you ever make a point, people from the previous campaign influenced and encouraged decisions that impacted on the lives of those engaged at that stage.
There's some continuity of membership, very thin continuity of membership, and there's a thread of organized, what I would call left republicanism. I borrowed that title from somewhere else.
There are groups who were driven by a bigger ideology, but also working class activists from that area who at various times were competitive with one another, so therefore leadership changed over time.
I'm not dwell too much on that, but just to let you know that's the background of what's happening.
The Davis Carves constructed in 1968, I called my chapter on the building of Davis, the Loney in the Sky. It was the redevelopment of an old traditional working class area with a very, very resilient community.
That area is the oldest nationalist area in Belfast. I'm going to elaborate on that, but just to say that it was a problem in the 60s, that it was the most highly dense working class area.
There had been significant trouble in that area prior to the conflict, so it was an issue that needed resolving from the planners perspective. Now, there wasn't much engagement with the local community.
There were two key players, the church and the local nationalist politicians, and the local unionist politicians got into sessions within the planning committee. The whole plan was devised, and by 1966 it was pretty much agreed without really public discussion of it.
There was a small campaign against the complex organised by left Republicans, but the sheer social capital of the Catholic Church and the elected representatives at that time meant that it was pretty much marginalised.
So, the Davis Tarbes constructed in 1968. The Davis Flats, it was a large multi-storey complex of 12 interlinked access blocks, huge blocks, 750 individual flats, and a 19-storey tower. The population of about 5,500.
That fluctuated at times, and you'll see why as we go along. The building commenced in 1964, and the first show flat opened in 1968. Initially people saw these places, and like the people in Sheffield, they looked at them, they marvelled at the things inside.
They were inside toilets, baths, hot water, toilets upstairs, toilets downstairs. They never believed the deaths. So the first wave in were utterly amazed by the facilities. It didn't last long though, but they were.
Can you wrap up? Time is up.
Can I wrap up? I think I'm not slow. Where am I? 10 minutes?
Well, take it to the end as best as you can.
I don't know. What I'll do is I'm fully, okay.
What I will basically suggest is there were five different campaigns, different leaderships, but a general development of approach, moving from the local to the national to the international.
I would suggest that the, I think, Garnt has a copy of the Devis report, the final document produced, overarching talk.
That is the product of a coalition, a broad coalition that also was very successful. But if you read the document, it's layered with the work of previous campaigns.
And I think that's essentially what it is. The way it was successful was the continual integration of the local community groups with conflict.
But essentially, it was what Nemos, as Gerry Adams, I think, said was one of the most successful working class campaigns of the 80s in a very bleak and pessimistic time.
And I remember that. Apologies, I didn't realise I was so slow there.
Thanks very much, Pat. That was really interesting to give that insight and appreciate we didn't have much time to speak about all of them. If we move on to the next one.
And this is going to be by Bob Colnut, who worked as a community planner for the North Southwark development group in the joint Docklands Action Group in the 70s and 80s.
Since then, he's worked in a variety of settings.
I don't know if you can hear me. Yeah. Someone can mute. Yeah.
So I'll start again. So Bob worked as a community planner for North Southwark Community Development Group and the joint Docklands Action Group in the 70s and 80s.
And since then, has worked in a variety of settings in local government, regeneration and academia.
And he's recently published a book entitled The Property Lobby.
So over to you, Bob.
Good evening, everybody.
42 years ago, the vast rural dock system in East London was closed down.
In that year of 1981, the Thatcher government set up the LDDC to oversee development of Docklands. Local authority powers were removed.
In 1983, a plan for short takeoff and landing airport was proposed by Bremen Airways and backed by the LDDC.
A campaign against the airport rose up against the noise and the preemption of any democratic plan for the rural docks.
This coalition included trade unions, tenants associations, some local councillors and trade councils.
The local authority, Newham, stood on the sidelines.
But the Greater London Council backed the campaign.
It funded a people's plan centre to draw up a democratic plan for the docks to show there was an alternative.
The people's plan shown on this slide aimed to keep some of the docks open to retain existing industry,
to build affordable housing, to create space for leisure and community services.
The plan was presented to the public inquiry into the airport, but was disregarded by the inspector and by the secretary of state.
The Greater London Council made a bid to buy the docks in order to implement the people's plan. That bid was rejected.
Forty years later, the rural docks are still not fully developed and so much for the short takeoff and landing airport.
It is now a busy airport with a longer runway with jets roaring over Canning Town and Custom House.
Yet the spirit and legacy of the people's plan lives on in local campaigns in Newham.
Campaigns for the community in East London to be heard.
Forty years ago, on another large site in London, the GLC did buy the site and passed it on to a community land trust to build out their own people's plan.
That plan was Coin Street, located on the South Bank by the National Theatre.
It includes co-op housing, workshops, leisure, open space and riverside walks.
To some extent, what the rural docks would have been like if the GLC had been able to buy it and stop the LDDC and the airport.
That is the alternative and what the rural docks could have been.
Thank you.
Thanks, Bob. Our next two speakers are Tonya Clark and Polly Feather, both of whom were part of the Birmingham for Women's group from 1989 to the mid 90s.
This is a group emerging from the Birmingham for People Community Planning Group.
And like them, Birmingham for People Women's Group was focused on campaigning for people friendly Birmingham city centre.
The women's group sought to improve safety and access for women in the city centre to influence planning and ensure women's needs were heard and embedded and to improve women's participation in planning and the planning professionals.
Neither Tonya and Polly had experience of the world of planning and built environment before.
I put up a static image of the cover, but I think you wanted to flick through the report, which I can get up if you want to flick it through it for you.
So let me know if you want me to do that. So it's you Polly and Tonya.
Hello, everybody. I'm Polly, Polly Feather, and I'll just kick off.
I'll start with a very brief background to how things turned out.
And I'm actually going to read this for speed. Sorry.
The Birmingham for People Women's Group came about in the context that Birmingham had undergone wide scale clearance and redevelopment since the war.
Some of the biggest, most massive redevelopment in Britain. This included pushing residents out of the city centre.
The city centre was then encircled by a motorway style road system.
And by the 1970s, the city was being developed as an international business centre.
That was the focus of the City Council. So by the late 80s, which is when we're pitching ourselves,
Birmingham had become notorious for bad city planning. And the main way I would summarise this was that we had loads of unattractive,
let's be honest, ugly, insensitive developments. And above all, a very unfriendly environment for people, especially pedestrians.
Now, the main trigger for the coming together of some resistance to this from the grassroots was the City Council's plan to redevelop the Bullring shopping centre.
I should say that at that stage, the shopping centre was sort of falling apart. It was a very large shopping centre, like in the style of an American mall, enclosed, but very, very rundown.
And by this time, it went up in the 60s, but by this time it was just very downmarket, very, very rundown.
And what seemed to kickstart some of us into action was the fact that the council was putting it out for redevelopment.
But the developers, what they were proposing was just as horrible as the 60s version.
And we thought it was repeating all, if not more than the old mistakes.
A bit of a groundswell feeling must have been coalescing because a few people called a public meeting.
And from that, the Birmingham for People campaign group was formed.
We had a lot on our plate. So an initial focus was chosen, and that was going to be the city centre.
But really, we were spoilt for choice, but particularly the proposed Bullring shopping centre.
And one of the roles we felt we were taking on, this is the Birmingham for People general group, was a sort of role of Friends of the City Centre,
because, as I've already mentioned, by this time, there were hardly any residents in the city centre.
Now, Birmingham for People was undoubtedly a good thing.
Capital G, capital T. However, I have to say, right from the beginning,
some of the women in that first public meeting were starting to feel very uneasy and actually outright,
downright dissatisfied with the way things were being organised.
And I'll just give as an example the assumptions, really, that men would be the spokespeople, men would be in charge.
Men, of course, are the experts in the public realm.
And I mean, I remember being at that meeting myself and feeling, oh, no, here we go again.
It wasn't that there weren't women at that big public meeting, that there were lots of women.
And we even had a token woman elected to the committee.
But I was just getting the sort of same old uneasy feelings that any time a woman made a suggestion,
it was sort of very quickly just glossed over and pushed to a side.
So when I heard that a woman's group was forming, I gravitated very quickly to the women's group.
And yeah, I'd had previous experience of women's groups with what's called the second wave of feminism.
So it felt like my natural home. And at this point, I'm going to hand over to Tanya, who's going to say why she joined,
well, was one of the founder members of the women's group and take it from there.
Thanks, Tanya. Hi, thanks, Polly. So like Polly, I was just cross-frustrated that women's voices weren't being heard.
And so I really wanted to get on with some practical action. And that was one of the things that was so good about the women's group.
We kind of became, you know, that phrase about expert patients, but we became kind of expert planners in the community.
And we had really good links with some women in the planning department and a woman who was a community architect.
She became part of the group. And I think that was one of the things that it was a very empowered but small group.
And we were very action focused. So one of the first things we did was hold a meeting in the city centre in the council house.
We've got the local MP Claire Short to come along and talk at it.
We did some survey work with women to really find out what women wanted from the city centre and what some of the problems and challenges and barriers were for them.
So we produced a report, this women in the centre report, based on the survey work that we'd done.
And, you know, we really tried to use the media as much as possible. And it makes me laugh now.
But media then it was like the Birmingham Evening Mail. It was the printed press.
We did some radio interviews, that sort of thing, because it was hard work getting the word across.
There was no social media then to just to do that. So it's hard work.
But, you know, we really felt that there was nobody at the city council level looking at issues to do with women and planning.
And so there was a bit of a vacuum there which we had to fill as a community, as women in the community.
And I think, you know, there are lots of community based planning groups and we went down to see the Coin Street Redevelopment team.
But I think we were one of the few that was focusing on women particularly, because we really did feel that a city that was good for women would be good for more people as well.
So, yeah, I mean, if you want to have a look at some of the graphs in the report, you can.
It's on the report is on the archive and we've got lots of information in there.
And we really felt that it was a kick off point for us, really.
So from here, we set up another group, the Women's Safety Initiative, and we started doing women's safety audits around Birmingham in conjunction with local councillors, in conjunction with the local planning department.
And we also did a public toilet survey because toilets are really important for women and women with small children or carers with small children.
And unfortunately, I don't think there's any public toilets left in Birmingham city centre. They're all in shopping centres and restaurants and cafes.
So we didn't have a lot of success there. Obviously, they've all been privatised.
And we also wrote an access to architecture and the built environment course, because we wanted to try and encourage more women to go into this field, but also we wanted to put a kind of a feminist perspective on the work that was being done.
So we wanted to kind of like see that, have a bit of a legacy really.
I don't think that was taken on by the local university, but it's still there somewhere.
So, I mean, I think, you know, we did a lot of work. It was quite high profile.
It was good to involve people in the local authorities.
So we were quite collaborative in our work. I mean, sometimes we were quite, you know, not against.
Well, we were against a lot of the things the council was doing. So we did have our moments of protest, but we were also quite collaborative as well.
And I think being able to do both is quite interesting.
But, you know, wrap up. Sorry. Yeah, sure. So I think one of the interesting things, Polly, do you want to just say our last bit.
Yes.
We thought about a conclusion but mainly just came up with questions to throw out to for future consideration really.
And I've just jotted down.
What was then and what is now.
Very, very, very simply, definitely then in the late 80s women's voices were not heard, not even professionally.
They were not heard. And our response then was just to keep shouting louder effectively and to make some strategic alliances and and actually put out a lot of publications, etc, etc.
And do a lot of actions. Things seem different now. Things have changed.
And in some ways they seem better. But we realized when we were discussing this a bit that actually the way things have changed socially really has big implications for future campaigning.
I mean, and questions arose like, would it be possible anymore to organize as a women only group.
Would we only be able to organize in conjunction with other.
I was going to say, I was going to say minorities, Freudian slip, but with other marginalized groups.
So, yeah, and, and in the process if we are doing a broader based campaign.
In the future is some of the group solidarity lost. We didn't have any answers, and I'll stop there.
Thank you very much Polly and, and Tonya we might come back to some of those in the question and answer.
And next speaker, and before we come on to the question and answer is Selwyn Williams and Selwyn was brought up in the Conway Valley, and has worked as a farm laborer research scientist school teacher and lecturer colleague normal, and the University of Bangor is a background
in teaching this research and writing in the fields of biology philosophy, economics and community development, and he's a director of several community enterprises, including the community hotel penguin, the San Festino and community bro Festino and as well as the driving
force between community Dolly. So over to you, Selwyn.
Thanks very much. Can you can everybody hear me all right.
Yes, that's fine. Yep. We'll start with two quotes from Raymond Williams' work. First, ideally, a new movement comes out of new ideas, specified in particular places. Then there may be a model being expressed, which is adaptable to the interests of other places and scales of operation.
It's perfectly clear that ideas have to feathering, which is the nature of new analogy.
The second quote from Raymond Williams, radical and communal Wales will be real to the extent that it develops in plan and practice, new forms of cooperative work and communal socialism, new kinds of educational and cultural collecting.
I want to talk a little bit about my own area.
Selwyn, could you speak up a bit, because some can't hear you really well.
Okay, I'll try to.
The area I come from, Blainey-Vistinjog, was the second largest town in North Wales in 1900, with a population of about 13,000, but by now it's less than half of that.
Today, the area is economically one of the poorest in the United Kingdom.
Despite the deindustrialization, the community cultural inheritance survives to a significant extent, and is the basis of a community development model, which has pioneered in the area today.
We have more community enterprises to a head of operations than anywhere else in Wales, and I think in the UK.
17 of these community enterprises have come together as a network under the banner of Comme des Blois-Vistinjog, which is a community enterprise.
The company's aims are to facilitate cooperation between the community enterprises, nurture new social enterprises, and work with small private businesses that are anchored in the community, as well as with local and central governments.
The activities of the community enterprises that are members of this network company include running two hotels, shops, cafes, food centre, leisure centre, mountain biking centre, co-operations, ocular, environmental work, energy conservation, food, food plants, and so on and so forth.
Between them, the members of Comme des Blois-Vistinjog, which requires 750 people, and analysis of the economic impact of the community enterprises shows that a high percentage of their income comes from trading.
Further, a large proportion of that income circulates and multiplies to other things.
So we reckon we've pioneered a model of community development which interweaves environmental, economic, social, cultural aspects, integrated with the principles and practice of the foundational economy and the circular economy.
Central characteristics of the development model are a pioneering vision, a culture of enterprise, co-production, acting as a catalyst bringing stakeholders together, networking enterprises, sharing resources among social enterprises, asset-based financial independence, research-based action, non-hierarchical democratic organisations, flexible response to community needs,
and the promotion of self-reliant cultural change.
The model has been an exemplar leading to visits and advice to community organisations from Anglesey, consulting and accepting of the network from Ormorn, similarly with the establishment of a Pembrokeshire community development network.
Recently, a Guinevere, rather the county-wide network of community enterprises, has been established, called Piminidori, which brings together nearly 40 different social enterprises.
Just looking at 23 of these social enterprises shows that their total turnover is 10.8 million, they employ 188 full-time, 152 part-time, and as well as their social value, they have assets of 26 million.
Initial steps have been taken to establish a network through it which brings together social enterprises operating across all counties in West Wales.
Also, in collaboration with building communities trust, community movements can be reasonably set up as a network organisation in the poorer ways.
We argue that the national dissemination of the model could transform Wales.
Dissemination of the model provides a challenge to the Welsh Government to develop policy and support to promote the model of community development across Wales.
It is reckoned that tourism in Wales brings in £17 million a day on average.
Currently, most of this income goes to externally owned large companies and money leaks out to the communities which operate the tourism facilities.
In contrast, to community-owned enterprises, that is, tourism enterprises, which retain and multiply the income from tourism.
Welsh Government tourism subsidies are heavily slanted towards the large externally owned companies.
A stark example is Surf's Madonia on the site of what used to be an aluminium works in Golgaraog in the Commons Valley.
It opened as the first inland surfing regime back in 2015, supported with at least £8 million of Government support.
Last year the venture made a loss of £1.82 million and has now closed.
There are obviously fundamental, environmental, economic, social and cultural questions about this whole venture.
Environmentally, the vast use of electricity to create waves, the financial losses, the way workers have been treated and the companies' reluctance to look to the future is the Welsh language.
Evidently this raises questions about the Welsh Government's policies of heavily favouring, subsidising, private capital at the expense of community enterprises.
Raymond Williams provides a wider framework for a surface relationship between capital, community and government.
Pronounced capital, as associated with a city in London, continuously seeks investment outfits to obtain a return on capital.
Private capital continuously addicted to environmentally unsustainable growth.
Raymond Williams' framework also applies to an understanding of our history in Wales.
The Welsh people that laboured in coal, slate, iron, steel, tinplate and agricultural industry produced such real wealth which capital extracted, leaving communities in Wales amongst the poorest in Europe.
The process facilitated past and present by London-based government primarily serving city finance which in turn finances the Tory party.
Raymond Williams' views on community development in Wales offers a way forward.
Comunidor Fustinho in a very minor way exemplifies an integrated model of community development with which we could begin to transform our country if the model was widely adapted and adopted by communities throughout Wales, with central and local government increased support.
Every community-owned asset deprives the city and the financial institutions of a way to accumulate, that is to extract profit and add to finance capital.
Look that in this way...
Salwin, can you wrap up?
Yeah, OK.
Look that up in this way, this really inverts the conservative perspective on the relation between the city and Wales.
Public and community ownership of capital, it thrives in a dependent city in London.
So we're arguing that based on Raymond Williams' analysis, that this offers in a small way a way forward which really offers a transformation of community in Wales.
I will wrap up there. Thanks.
Jochen Rauw, Salwin. So just to now go into some questions and answers. So there are some on the screen and a colleague, Francesca, will highlight those and then put on the audio for who's going to ask the questions.
But the questions could be to the research team or indeed to any of the speakers that we've heard this evening. So Francesca, do you want to...
Yes, I think the first question came from Michael Edwards and it's about archival and what we've been doing, maybe for Sue.
OK, I'm just trying to find the question on the chat.
Maybe Michael can ask it again.
No, I've got it. I've got it. It's a really good question, Michael. So it was about how do we archive it and how we are advising people and particularly issues in London.
I mean, it is something that we... I mean, this is a... we're addressing this in a whole number of ways. Some of the archive we've managed to put on our website.
So, for example, we got, as you saw from the Birmingham for People's Women's Group,
we also did this stand alongside project where we managed to get extra funds to digitise the Community Action Journal as well.
I think this whole question, though, about the fragmentation of archives and where it's kept,
I think is a really important one and it is something to maybe think about in terms of follow on funding and groups getting together about how to do this, because digitising is really expensive.
What we have done, though, is where we've got examples, we've put links to where other people have started archiving.
We've told people where more information is in the archives and we're still working on our sort of like...
actually documents, we've got so many documents and photographs and trying to get clear about permissions and put more on the website.
But I think it is and it's a really important question. I mean, in London, for example, there's a May Day Room, there's a Bishopsgate Institute,
there's the Museum of Docklands in London, there's a London Metropolitan Archives, there's Southwark Archives, we've been to all of those.
It's all very... some of it is... a lot more is there than you think, but it is kind of very fragmented.
So I think it's a very good suggestion as well about advice about this.
And it is something that we could think about in terms of bringing some of this together and maybe as well getting groups together
to come together for follow on funding as well to try and pull these together and save things before they get thrown out.
I don't know if anybody else on the team or anybody else wants to add anything to that?
Just that we've, you know, we're putting a lot of this stuff that people have given us onto our website.
So if you go to particular episodes or particular case studies, at the bottom of them, you'll find links to images and archives and things,
even though we've had a few issues with getting permissions, but... and that's an ongoing process.
Like it all takes quite a lot of time. But there's already stuff there and moving forward, there'll be more stuff there,
particularly from people's kind of own personal archives.
And I think just to add very briefly to echo what Sue said at the beginning, a lot of these things are inspirations for the future.
So by looking at the past and putting it out there for everybody to look at, the hope is that new things will come out.
But just quickly, so there is Tim Jones and Iris Bird are commenting on Birmingham.
Sorry, Michael's asked a quick follow up question in the bottom of the chat I spotted. Maybe it's good to pick up whilst we're on the topic.
Which is just about how we make sure the website endures, which is a really good question, Michael.
We do have the hosting kind of in perpetuity through Sheffield, which is relatively secure.
Websites have a shelf life before they begin to look old and tired. That's true.
But for as long as we can keep updating the website, I think the plan is to try and keep it and make it available as an archive.
And we welcome anyone. If anyone has stuff they want, we'd like to see archive there to make sure that it's public.
Then feel free to get in touch with us as well. And we'll get to the point of considering how tired the website gets in a few years time.
Maybe it has to think about whether we can get funding to give it a facelift.
But for now we have at least there's a kind of some security to the hosting into the future.
Thank you, Andy. So just quickly, so Tim Jones and Iris Bird were commenting on how change is still happening, not necessarily welcomed in Birmingham city centre.
Dean Armand was fascinated by the experience of the women's plan. I think the next question is by Alina Congreve.
Alina, do you want to ask it with your voice?
Yes, sure. I guess I'm just very aware that some of the locations you're talking about in Birmingham are being redeveloped again.
And there are groups, activity groups, actively campaigning to stop that redevelopment.
And that's perhaps something we may see the Docklands in in a not too distant future as well as some of that office development becomes very problematic.
I guess I wonder, interested in your reflections on how we respond to another cycle of change when we were there for the first round.
I think your question as well raised the interesting issue about the environmental impacts and the embodied carbon in buildings.
So I think I think the same, there's the same issues in arguments. It's about what are the uses of the buildings? Who's been involved?
Who's whose whose ideas are driving things and making sure that there's discussion, debate and a whole range of different alternatives are considered about into this as well.
So I think the issues, the issues keep the same rather than should we knock the buildings down or whatever, that there's a constant need to make sure that these sorts of debates are happening in these initiatives and ideas to still keep coming through.
Tanya's got her hand up.
Yeah, so I just wanted to say, I mean, that's a really interesting point, and I think every every kind of generation has to pick on whatever's going to work for them.
And certainly at the moment, anything about embodied carbon, net zero adaptation and resilience.
You know, those are the tools we've got to use at the moment to stop massive redevelopments of our city centres or wherever into from public space to private space.
And I think, you know, we were at a certain time where in the 80s, 90s, it was looking at hearing the people's voice and people were realising that actually you had to talk to the users of a building to find out how the building was going to work and how to plan and design it most effectively.
So we kind of jumped on that. I'm not going to call it a bandwagon, but that kind of way of thinking.
I think now you just have to use whatever tools you have.
Thank you, Tanya. So we've got Michael Stanley with hands up.
Can I just ask you to speak, if it is in answer to the previous question, because I've got a few other question that were out first, but yeah, if there's an answer to the question that has been already posed Bob.
Yeah. I just want to respond to Alina's point about office buildings.
Canary Wharf is a case in point in Docklands, a vast office complex, of course we vigorously opposed at the time, and now is somewhat under, under occupied.
But the key point about these buildings any buildings who owns it. And until we can, the community the public society can get hold of some of these properties.
To be honest, it's not much we can do about it so I think the push for public and community ownership is what I would suggest is a way forward.
Thank you, Bob. Michael Stanley-Parks, is that another answer?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I don't know.
Can you hear me? Yes. Yes.
I totally agree with Bob actually. Land ownership and planning policies about community development are critical for the future and now is quite an important time in the run up to the next election to coordinate and promote
the findings of this project. On the matter of land, in my own article on the People's Plans project, I draw your attention to work I did at Spitalfields, where land was actually a planning gain for the local community.
I'll leave it at that, but congratulations and good luck for the future.
Thank you so much, Michael. There is then a question by Roy Dark. As a retired university teacher I wonder what the project offers for planning schools?
Maybe one for Andy?
I can try. I hope it offers a lot. One of the comments I was going to make in my closing remarks was I think that kind of trying to recover, in a sense, Bob talked about the lost features and the lost sense of possibility and the idea that there are alternatives
and that there have been active experiments and groups campaigning and trying to make them real. That's hugely important.
And these are all kind of records and archives of those efforts over time. And I would hope that that's a really rich set of resources for thinking about the possibilities of planning and how it could be otherwise and it could be more than it currently is.
So I hope that the resources that are on the website that are in development in various ways in terms of other other bits of writing and things we've got planned will all help to inform the ways in which we can teach and think about planning generally.
I don't know. Is that alright? There's maybe more that could be said.
Great. Thank you, Andy. There's then Brian Whiteley. Brian, do you want to voice your question?
Okay, I can't hear Brian. I can't find Brian, so I'll read it out loud. In towns and cities, neighbourhood plans have proved easy to get off the ground to help inner city communities achieve their aims.
Do neighbourhood priority statements and metropolitan mayors offer a better vehicle for those communities to shape the places where they live and work?
Sounds like an exam question.
Is there anybody involved in neighbourhood plans on the call who might like to say something about that?
It's interesting because we've had quite a lot of discussions on the project about how we see neighbourhood plans, which is an initiative that came through from the 2011 Localism Act, and whether or not they're taking on the community planning banner or whether or not they're diverting a lot of resources to it.
For those of you who might not know, there's some new ideas called neighbourhood priority statements, which are meant to be a bit less involved, but I think this issue is still whether or not communities are going to have a say in that and are they part of the formal planning system or are they not, basically.
So, yeah, I'll start off with that and I think Tanya as well has got her hand up.
I can just let you know that in Birmingham we have two neighbourhood plans, one for Balsall Heath and one for the jewellery quarter.
And I think it's great because there's obviously a place for them in the planning system and that means that consultation is kind of embedded.
But these are both areas that already had quite a lot of social capital, that had already had 30, 40 years worth of community planning, kind of at a grassroots level.
And so I think it's not a question of kind of either or, it's another one of these and it's a stepping stone.
But I think you still need the grassroots kind of community cohesion stuff and to kind of point that in a built environment direction.
I think as well, I think it'd be quite good if the resources that go to neighbourhood planning could be spread out, not just go to neighbourhood planning groups,
so that other groups can develop things as they would want to. That's a question for government.
Thank you. So we'll move on. Alicia Pivaro, she says that our students, Second Year Architecture at Westminster are using the People's Plan for inspiration and are creating a new version for 2023/24, which is I think great.
And she shares her email address. She also says that there are lots of live projects that work, lots of Sheffield University, also Westminster at Cardiff. We've had one for 20 years.
After Alicia, there's Jude. Jude, would you like to voice your question?
I'm sorry, I've got two questions. You can have two questions.
One is the one of the important distinctive features of the Birmingham Women's Group, that it did its own research and survey. And so it prioritises issues which are ignored or marginal.
And that, so it actually wasn't just reactive, it began to propose a sort of alternative and I think often,
you know, community planning is reactive. And in fact, it is even now, I think, you know, coming on the question of the new round of redevelopment that's now proposed in Birmingham.
It's instead of having, you know, what was the successes and the new thinking of the alternative that came from the last round,
it's reacting again to another round which wasn't laid down by community groups or grassroots planning.
So that's the first thing. Is there something in the method and the approach that should be more, that can be taken from the Birmingham Women's Group that can be more
proposed, proposed rather than reactive more generally. And the second thing is, is the whole political framework that has changed. And this whole problem of local government being salvaged financially, but also the acceptance, widely in the Labour Party,
of a neoliberal form of incentives to get private investment, and that they don't use effectively their powers to at least lay down conditions.
And that has been very widespread in the last, you know, it's very difficult to challenge, I mean I've found it in the Olympic redevelopment.
So, that's the two questions really.
Thank you Jude. Is Roy going to answer or comment on this, or shall we?
No, it wasn't on those I'm afraid. But yeah, I was going to raise another question.
Let me get somebody to answer or comment on Jude's point and then we'll come to you in just a second.
Sue, would you like to come back on Jude's point?
I think, I think the point about local government, I think this is really important.
Because it goes back to the, what we're talking about, about where the support is where the enabling is for these kinds of activities and, and also it, it means that local government is quite often
focusing on using its assets to generate income, as much income as it can. So, in lots of ways then the spaces for what, what people are trying to do and alternatives
is getting, is getting narrower. So it goes back to this changing context and I think what Tanya said then is really important. It's like, how do we find the windows, the spaces, the possibilities in this changed environment, but we have to recognise that, yeah, it is a very difficult environment
as well. But you have to keep, I think it's important to keep making the arguments and to keep pushing for different ways of doing things as well.
Yeah, I think that was my point, Francesca. But my feeling is now working with community groups in Oxford, is that the local authority, local planning authority has become more opaque,
more distant, more authoritarian, more tick boxy and, you know, trying to get a community involvement into that is really hard.
And, you know, I think, I mean, all powers to the project, I think it's a great project, but I think, you know, the context has changed and it's increasingly difficult for communities to have an impact on local government,
which is itself suffering from loss of planning role, loss of planning staff, all those kinds of things, sort of thing that Sue was already talking about.
So that was my point really and question.
Thank you, Roy. There are a couple of comments then from, one from Alina about the RTPI getting some funding to digitalise things and they are also aware of the urgency of this.
Ines says that the JDAG archive is now in order in the Pla archive in the Museum of London. However they want digitalise except the index.
Dan, would you like to ask the question yourself?
Dan, shall I read the, I'll read your question. This discussion about archives and archive.
Oh, you are there. Good. Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry, I was just a bit slow to find the unmute thing.
Yeah, I was just, I guess, similar to the discussion that's been happening about the changing context of interested in the, well, I thought the conversation about archiving and uncovering the archives was really interesting and it is really important.
And it makes me think about the importance of archiving sort of struggles and community housing initiatives and tenants groups and so on and so forth that are active right now and what the different contexts and challenges are going to be with that, with the, you know, obviously the digital agenda.
It was really interesting listening to the Birmingham groups talk about the importance of the printed press and printed materials and, and they're maybe not as important now and there are things that are circulating quite widely that that maybe aren't going to be captured
in traditional forms of archives and archiving and I guess, I guess the question is what lessons can you learn from the historical project of assembling these archives that might also be useful for archiving current struggles over housing and current interventions
in planning and housing and land issues.
Thanks.
Thank you, Dan. Anybody wants to add or comment?
It would be interesting to know what the RTPI is doing. Is there any information about it, about the archiving?
Alina, do you want to chip in? Yes, just briefly that the RTPI are applying for a small scoping grant from the National Archives to look not only at their own archive but also the potential to have a planning archive, where planning materials could sit.
So there may be retired planners who worked on some of these projects but it could also be other bodies and organisations that generated planning materials so it's very much something that they're the applying for funding to do a scoping project of at the moment.
I think that that that'd be certainly an exciting role for professional body, because they have got that longevity there to be able to be be a long term home for these kind of materials into the future.
I think I've heard last week that they've, they've have managed to digitise the back issues of their journal through time which is going to be made available at some point soon which is relatively new from the RTPI and will be a useful search resource I think for
those of us interested in planning. Dan your questions are a great one as well I think the kind of challenges of archiving are really really interesting and complex, the sort of politics of them but also just the sheer physical challenge of maintaining them.
Some of the hardest to get stuff and I think it's probably like kind of documents that were uploaded to a bad website in 2000, and are now incredibly scarce and weren't lodged anywhere else.
It's kind of, it's really hard to predict what's easy, you know what formats are safe and how things can be recorded. I think the other big challenge that groups have over time is just that when they're in the midst of things, they're not really thinking
about archiving, they're in the midst of things, and then often when they get to the end of things they're a bit knackered, a bit exhausted and maybe moving on to the next thing and their lives get in the way so there's a whole set of challenges there that
are really important around archiving this stuff, this kind of community led activity in particular I think, which are really worth a bit more thought and attention I think otherwise there's a real danger that that loads gets lost, I think.
Thank you Andy. Now I've got two hidden questions that only I can see. So Roy asks, what would be interesting to hear is whether the case studies had spin off into further activism.
And I think I can sort of give an answer in relation to the Welsh case. So if you look at the case study in Gwynedd, Cuminidoli, the first episodes are nearly 40 years old, and there have been generations
of community activism in that area. I don't know if anybody wants to add to this.
I'm wondering, Pat Webb, I'm wondering if the legacy and how it rolled on in terms of Divis might have some insights on that.
All I can say is that there was an explosion of community activism in West Belfast. The Divis campaign was almost like one of the most high profile.
But what I find fascinating about when I was reading it was the hidden history of how they cross community, cross political cooperation, when they passed on ideas and, you know, their practice experience to the Divis campaign.
And then it became almost like, I don't know, like a flagship campaign for community activism. So yes, but the only thing I would suggest is that it was tied into other campaigns around education and access to education and local experiments with that.
So yes, I think the link within the broader West Belfast area, there was a Falls Community Council already in place, and all of those things expanded.
So now it's one of the, I think, some of the richest areas for community development. There are so many community resources.
The only caveat I would put to that is that that was part of almost the dividend of the peace process as well.
I guarantee, remember I walked you along the Falls Road and you look at how many community projects there are now that are well funded with employment within it and then there's community development.
So yes, yes, I think it was a flagship for that in Belfast.
Great, thank you, Pat. My second hidden question is from Robert. One issue that may be of interest are the wider legacy issues that community led projects have created, in that some participants went on to careers that built on their community led experience.
That's a very good comment. I think maybe Bob can expand on this. But you know there are many who could.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what the question is really driving at so much here. Can the questioner elaborate on it?
Bob Barnham, do you want to come in?
No?
I think it was a comment that many people who've been involved in community led projects then saw it as a pivotal moment maybe for their own life and developed a career out of it.
That's my learning. So what, you know, they maybe stumbled across determines what they then did for a living or maybe did as a charitable endeavour or activism, alongside other things in their life.
Yeah, I mean, just a very quick comment on that. The sort of professional people like myself really got involved in community action.
I did, you know, go on and do stuff in local government and other places as a result of getting involved in community work, but the people who are actually leading these campaigns in tenants groups and trade unions and so on, that I'm not sure they developed a career
out of it. They certainly became, you know, politically active and political leaders. I think that their journeys are rather different from the professionals or semi professionals who got involved in these projects.
Thank you, Bob. Roy?
Yeah, I was going to say, one thing I share with Andy is somebody who was involved in the South Sheffield project, which I was chair of, who came in and helped part time in the citizens of D'Achebureau.
But she was sufficiently motivated by that to move into politics and became leader of Sheffield City Council, you know, and sadly died of cancer.
She was a bit of a smoker.
But yeah, you know, that sort of thing does happen. And my involvement in Sheffield with lots of community groups was that you can fall out of their own slot into thinking more widely and go on to do education and move into different types of careers.
So, you know, that is a consequence, I think, of, you know, self-help projects that they do move people forward.
Great. Thank you, Roy. Right. We have run out of time.
So I think we'll do the following. There are intertwining comments on various digitising projects and all that sort of things.
I think the best thing is for us to pull everything together and put it on the website. Maybe not tomorrow, but in the near future.
So that is one thing we can do. There is a question from Dave Webb that has been answered, sort of answered by both Michael Edwards and Sue on the chat.
I think to keep things short, Polly had put her hand up. Polly, do you want to quickly come in and then we really need to close and I'll pass it on to Andy and Geraint.
Just two quick points. One that it was as a result of my involvement with BFP women's group that I then left my job, my pre-existing job and retrained as a landscape architect.
But the other point is completely distinct from that, which is that because I've been out of practice, I'm retired for a long time and things have shifted so much.
I think the whole, I think the word is the Overton window has shifted so much during my lifetime and my working lifetime.
I'm aware I don't even feel knowledgeable enough to contribute to some of the discussion now about, you know, the Einstein ladder and things like that.
And, you know, I can remember terms like consultation fatigue, but I just feel that everything has shifted for the worse, unfortunately, and I just don't know where to start.
So I won't.
Thank you Polly. Geraint, do you want to?
Well, all I was going to do was just introduce Andy just to close up. So Andy Inch is one of the co-investigators from University of Sheffield. So Andy, we're just going to say a few words just to tie things up.
I'll try. Difficult to tie up at the end of a kind of broad ranging discussion that has covered so many interesting themes.
I mean, thank you everyone for all of your work and contributions across the project and today. I've really enjoyed being a part of this and I've learned a hell of a lot from it, from a lot of the people on this call tonight and a lot of other people as well.
All of which I find incredibly kind of interesting and inspiring in different ways. We've really, Sue mentioned this at the start, we really feel like we've scratched the surface of a kind of, of, of a lot of unrecorded, lost, missing, under recorded histories
through time. There's been thousands of examples of community initiatives across the country over the last 50 years. We've identified about a couple of hundred of them on our website. I think we've already discussed a bit today, you know, why it's important and I think there's a sense that it's important to try and capture this stuff and make it part of our collective memory
and our collective understanding of what's possible really and the idea that, as Bob said, that kind of the alternatives are possible, that there are other ways of doing things that it can be otherwise.
And that there are kind of a whole lot of lost futures that are embedded within these stories, possibilities of what could have been, which can inspire us and aren't lost entirely and if we recover them and bring them back into our consciousness and make them available to people today,
then they can come round again and we spoke a bit about earlier Sue mentioned the kind of circularity of some of these ideas or issues, history isn't linear, and there's the possibility for these to become inspiring to people again and hopefully our website
and other resources can help to capture a bit of that and to build it up. There's a distinctive and kind of lost tradition of radical planning embedded in all this in the UK, which I think we badly need to get back in touch with today.
And that's really important and it's one of the things that I think is most important about the project.
We sort of can't do justice to the richness of everything that Pat, Tanya, Polly and Selwyn were taking us through. A few things I take from what they said, I think from Pat in particular, the idea that this is very much about kind of various forms of activism
and community-led planning and activism around and organising around planning issues as a form of activism, which can be both oppositional to the status quo, but then always or often becomes propositional as well.
It's about collective control, influence, ownership, voice, visibility for people who don't feel they have those things. And it's about demand for change to make those things possible.
So that's not always a progressive demand in response to Dave Webb in the chat. It doesn't need to be a progressive demand, but it can be and has been.
And there's a rich tradition of it being a progressive demand, which I think we need to hold on to.
These projects are often, and community is such a difficult term, and as academics we can get caught up in it forever.
I think trying to see community here really is about the collectives that come together to demand those changes and the coalitions that come together in places at different times to make those demands for change.
And we saw in the examples that that can be groups of women in Birmingham, it can be working class residents of the Divis Flats in Belfast, or it can be
groups in Wales inspired by Raymond Williams and developing really interesting alternative community economies, so a really diverse range of possibilities.
In that these are always also, and this speaks to kind of points that Roy and others were making during the discussion, I think they're always more than planning histories.
So the histories of class struggle in some places, the histories of struggle within the women's movement, the history of struggle for alternative economies and alternative societies
in different ways. Their histories that open up, so they might start with opposition to a road or housing development or the demolition of housing, but they open up into broader local political struggles, and they create trajectories for people
that leave legacies in different ways. So people go on to other struggles, people go on to build on the experiences and the knowledge that they gain, they take that knowledge to other places.
And beginning to track and map and understand how some of that happens, and how in certain times and places for a while at least, that builds sort of capacity and possibility is a big part of what I hope we can draw out and we're still very much in the process
of trying to draw out, but we can we can draw out of the project.
So, I hope there's a lot in there for everybody and I hope we can kind of spread the word about this, and that in response to Michael's point that other groups are archiving and are interested in telling the stories and making sure these stories are
told and are recorded. And if we can be a part of lending support in any way to that then I would really like to think that we will do everything we can to do so.
So yeah, the discussion around archiving is, I think, incredibly important because of the way this speaks to the possibilities of kind of progressive organizing around planning really.
So, yeah, I'll draw it to an end there. I was going to end with just a kind of a final advert for the website, and for keeping in touch with us. Do check, there's a lot on there, it's taken quite a lot to get there, it's still work in progress.
And if you have other things you'd like to add to it, then do get in touch, let us know. We'd love to include more stories and more of what's been done and achieved in the past.
We will also be continuing to kind of write things and to be involved in discussions and stuff so hopefully those discussions will include lots of you on an ongoing basis. So thanks very much.
And I'll stop there.
That's it for this evening so thanks very much to everybody, particularly all the contributors to Francesca for helping on the chat, all the, all the speakers, all the questions so thanks very much and maybe keep up to date on the project, we do have a very slow
Twitter account, but mostly via the website. So you can get news there.
All the best. Good evening.
Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.
Bye bye. Thank you everyone for coming and speaking.
Thank you for a brilliant conference.
Thank you everybody. Thanks everybody and all your contributions over the life of the project as well.