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Wayne Hemingway shines in Barrow

Forward thinking architect and designer Wayne Hemingway set out his views on how a brighter future for the creative industries and local communities could be achieved at an event at the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel on Wednesday evening (12).

Candid and at times controversial, the high profile founder of the fashion label Red or Dead, who now specialises in designing sustainable and social housing, presented his vision for using design to improve people’s lives to a sell-out audience of 80 people.

It was organised by Signal Films as part of Furness Enterprise’s Encouraging Enterprising Communities initiative funded by West Lakes Renaissance.

Mr Hemingway showed examples of inspiring design practices he has seen in countries all over the world, and explained how studies have shown that all kinds of things can make a difference when improving and building communities, highlighting for example the finding that the higher the volume of traffic flowing down a street the lower the number of friends and acquiantances residents say they have made.

Mr Hemingway praised Barrow’s creative industries venues such as the Canteen and talked about how this success could be built upon to establish a ‘creative cluster’ in the town. He cited as a potential model a development in Licoln, a city with a similar size population to Barrow where millions of pounds has been invested in a creative quarter called ‘The Terrace’ which has attracted creative companies to the area as well as encouraging new ones to set up. He said that the Cookes Building adjacent to the Duke of Edinburgh could host activities and businesses that complement and expand the town’s existing provision by offering facilities such as high quality video conferencing and small ‘easy in, easy out’ incubation spaces.

Event organiser Kerry Kolbe said: “He said his ideas are about ways of making people’s lives better through design – solutions to things that keep him awake at night because they don’t work properly or could be improved.

“He’s very passionate about getting people to engage and take action to make positive things happen around them and to make their communities aspire to be better, and I think I and a lot of the audience connected with that.”

Posted by Phil Powell on 19th November 2008