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Innovation outside the state: the Glendale Gateway Trust
Patsy Healey, Tom Johnston and Frank Mansfield
Introduction
Our story is about a civil society initiative activated by local concern over the steady decline of economic and social opportunity in a ‘remote’ rural area in Northumberland. As with many other parts of the Western world, such areas are on the margins of political attention these days, experiencing youth out-migration, ageing populations and difficulties in sustaining needed services (Shucksmith and Brown, 2016). Social renewal in such areas means searching for pathways towards a sustainable future.
The Glendale Gateway Trust (GGT) has grown from the efforts of committed locals, experimenting with how to do things, into an established part of the governance ecosystem in the county of Northumberland. It started in the mid-1990s, centred on creating a community centre and facilities for young people in Wooler, the main centre in Glendale, North Northumberland. It then grew into providing a platform for a range of activities, which have established a community and business hub, generated improvements to the high street, built a locally significant amount of affordable housing, ensured the survival of the local youth hostel, and created a base for a range of other initiatives and programmes. Infused by a sense of the changing wider context, the GGT has developed an entrepreneurial culture, looking out for opportunities and innovating with new ways of doing things. Over time, the GGT has become a significant actor in local development in Northumberland. As a result, it has increasingly been in a position to grasp available opportunities, both economic and political, drawing down investment from the private, public and charitable sectors.
The initiative was motivated not by a particular driving ideology or a specific local crisis, but by locally widespread perceptions of the ebbing away of an old life and the search for practical ways to both renew community vitality and find a sustainable future for the area. On the one hand, the focus has been on remedying what has disappeared or been neglected; on the other, the GGT has tried to open up new opportunities, such as affordable offices for microbusinesses. It can be seen as helping the Glendale area move beyond the sense of a place ‘left behind’ by agricultural change towards alternatives based on what the area can offer in terms of local amenities and assets, notably, the attraction of the landscape, heritage and sense of community for visitors and in-migrants. The GGT has brought new knowledge, ideas and practices into play in local development work, and contributed to changing how the much-stressed public sector undertakes its various activities and responsibilities. Its contribution is not uncontested locally, with tensions between expectations rooted in the past and the arrival of new opportunities, as well as between different groups in the community as each seeks recognition for its various contributions. However, such tensions reflect the challenge for any community forced to find new ways to sustain itself into the future.
Rural life on the margins1
Glendale lies just south of the Scottish border in Northumberland. In 2011, nearly 6,000 people lived here, in scattered hamlets, villages and the small ‘town’ centre of Wooler, where around 2,000 people live.2 The nearest larger towns (Berwick and Alnwick) are around 17 miles (27 km) away, though these are small for English market towns. The large urban centres of the Tyneside conurbation are over 50 miles (80 km) away and Edinburgh is 65 miles (105 km) away. In economic terms, until recent decades, the main employment was in agriculture. According to Murdoch et al (2003), the area had the political economy of a ‘paternalist countryside’ and a ‘welfarist’ government regime. One facet of the GGT’s activities has been to challenge this culture.
Tourism has been important for many years and the visitor economy is now as significant in terms of employment as farming. Meanwhile, many former farm workers’ cottages have been converted into holiday homes, or sold to more affluent incomers and second-homers. There is a steady inflow of people starting microbusinesses in a range of sectors, as well as professionals working from home. Young people are still leaving the area, driven by the search for wider horizons and especially the pull of urban lifestyles, along with limited work and leisure opportunities at home. In contrast, in recent years, there has been an inflow of those in middle age seeking a different lifestyle. This has resulted in an increasingly skewed demography. Nearly 26 per cent of people in Glendale in 2011 were aged 65 and over. The inflow of people from especially Southern England has put pressure on house prices in an area where, for many, incomes remain low and precarious.
The result is a transforming local economy, an increasingly skewed demographic and an accelerating crisis of housing availability and affordability. Despite a widespread appreciation of a strong feeling of ‘community’ in the area, there are also potential social tensions – between locals and incomers, the professionally skilled and those with less formal education, and those in Wooler town and in the outlying small villages and hamlets. Therefore, as in many rural areas across Europe, Glendale is experiencing not just significant economic and social change, but an existential challenge to find a sustainable future.
The scale of this challenge has been exacerbated by a decade of austerity. With a combination of low incomes and an ageing population, there is an increasing need for affordable and appropriate housing. Budget cuts have amplified the difficulties of sustaining services, from health and social care to adequate local shops, in an area where people are geographically scattered. In this situation, the GGT’s implicit development strategy has focused on limiting the continuing outflow of younger people and the decline of the services that support them, while accepting the energy and investment of retiring incomers and providing for the needs of increasing numbers of older people. This demands continual recognition of the complex interrelations that make for place quality – work, housing, transport, health, education, training, social care, leisure and sport, and community vitality. It also requires an appreciation of a geography in which physical distance still really matters.
Meanwhile, formal government has become increasingly distant. Up to the mid-20th century, many services were provided in the different farming communities or through the churches, often on a parish basis. Until 1973, the lower-tier local authority was the Glendale Rural District Council (GRDC), based in Wooler, which covered the area to which the GGT now relates. The GRDC was merged into Berwick Borough Council, which, in turn, was merged into the higher-tier authority, Northumberland County Council, in 2008. This became a unitary authority covering a large and varied area. Grasping and responding to this changing context, while managing the merger of several districts into a single organisation and, at the same time, dealing with continual severe funding cuts, has been a fraught challenge for county politicians and staff. Yet, the county has been keen to promote community initiatives and social enterprises, and, in the past decade, has become much more interested in working with civil society actors such as the GGT.
Northumberland County Council’s capacity is severely limited by its dependence on national government for funding. During the 1997–2010 government, there was
