Residents of Abbey and Arbury demonstrated what can be achieved with large neighbourhood-level events that bring along city-wide organisations to hold stalls
The Arbury Carnival is something of an institution in itself given how long it has been going for.
How the estate came to be is described in the Arbury Blogspot video below
Above – from Arbury – Cambridge The Blog
…where they had the “Nice Bucket Challenge”
Which makes a change from throwing ice around – that said given the heat of mid-June, ice was more than welcome!
People making their neighbourhoods worth living in – despite, not because of the institutions
One of the things that has often struck me ever since I joined the civil service is how central government and national politicians point to such events as the sort of thing they want to see lots more of… …and then go and put in place policies that make such things ever so difficult to organise. I’m not talking ‘elf & safety gawn mad!’, rather not having the local public service institutions, systems and structures in place to make it easier for people to organise things. These include:
- Having a system of housing/property ownership that hotwires short-term tenancies ahead of longer term residencies at a scale that makes it impossible for people to put down social roots – even though I assume more than many in unstable accommodation would love to do so.
- Having long, complicated, and exhausting commutes to work – the more time spent stuck in traffic, or on a train, the less time you have for community activities where you live. And I lived that lifestyle in my late 20s and it burnt me out.
- Having nothing in place locally to enable people to learn about how their village/town/city functions – local politics to public services in particular.
- Having a system of property ownership that enables developers to extract both financial and social value from sites that might otherwise be suitable for – and may once have had a social function (thinking the Hobson Street Cinema)
I’m trying to avoid any patronising tones in this piece – because it could easily come across reading like an upper-middle-class connected person saying: “Oh poor people helping themselves! Isn’t that wonderful! Big Society! Round of applause!” …before supporting a candidate running on a manifesto demanding more cuts to public services.
This is one of the reasons why Save the Children Founder (and local resident in the early 1900s) Eglantyne Jebb influenced my thinking when I first read about her in 2016 having spent the previous six years trying to get my head around what David Cameron meant by ‘Big Society’ as a serious government policy proposal.
“I was a long time realising that the social reform on the part of the Conservatives is like charity in the hands of a Lady Bountiful – everything to be made nice and pleasant, but the ‘upper class’ is to be respected and obeyed. “
Eglantyne Jebb in Cambridge Independent, Fri 08 July 1910
Above: Lost Cambridge hero Eglantyne Jebb circa early 1900s from Palmer Clark in the Cambridgeshire Collection. (And now part of a new City Council project celebrating Cambridge Women)
One of the things Eglantyne was red-hot on was the cost of living for the people on the lowest of incomes. This was why she appeared on public platforms (such as here with John Maynard Keynes and Horace Darwin) during the free trade vs imperial preference and tariffs debates of the early 1900s making the case for removing tariffs on food imports so that the health of the poor might improve. The fallout of the EU referendum means the subject of their debate over 100 years ago is relevant again today.
Which reminds me – I must ask the city council if the stage play Celebrating Cambridge Women they put on earlier this year can be part of the Open Cambridge series this September.
“I think I’m a bit of an intermediate, actually!”
For those of you unfamiliar with Cambridge, both Arbury and Abbey wards are historically two of the most economically-deprived wards not just in Cambridge but in Cambridgeshire as well. Any local teenage sociology students may have some observations in comparing the different community events across the different neighbourhoods in Cambridge.
I’ve put the above from the perspective of someone who grew up in Cambridge and never really had the opportunity to mix with children who lived in North Cambridge – so it might be the topic of an extended project about ‘diversity on our doorstep’, mindful of the quotation “From Papua to Pampisford” from Sir Cyril Fox of the Cambridge & County Folk Museum in 1936. (I dare say that further education colleges could help facilitate combined projects via a collective of students from different neighbourhoods across city and county).
Looking at the calendar of events at Cambridge University’s exclusive neighbourhood of Eddington, the yoga classes – that stereotypical activity of the affluent, footloose, cosmopolitan cohort of people, is conspicuous by its prominence – an activity long-lampooned by comedians in popular culture too!
Above: “What are the Yellow Pages?!?!?”
Gen Z may well ask – Yellow Pages were like a paper version of the bit of the internet that had lists of contact details of local suppliers of everything people needed in life, with firms paying a premium for anything more than name, trade, address and phone number. About as relevant to today’s younger generations as police call boxes were to my generation of teenagers when Doctor Who was no longer on telly.
On a more serious point, I had an in-depth conversation with researcher Verinoca Hera of Hughes Hall, Cambridge (where she is researching for a Ph.D doing a comparative study on trust in politics across a range of countries), about how to break the class barriers between communities. This matters given that the housing market and Cambridge’s booming sci/tech economy is inevitably putting these up because there is a massive financial incentive for actors in those sectors to do so – whether estate agents highlighting. the locations of private schools in their literature, to the locations of private hospitals in the same brochures. It’s not something anyone can legislate against short of nationalising all private schools and private hospitals so that there are no such facilities to advertise.
“Why is our city not routinely using such community events to encourage residents to get more involved in decisions about our city that affect them?”
The changes brought about to the range of social media platforms since I first started calling for local government to make better use of all things digital has (for me at least) started to swing the pendulum away from social media-led engagement and back towards face-to-face engagement. Whether it’s the changing of algorithms that inevitably reduce how frequently users see updates from friends and contacts in favour of adverts, to the toxic content and messaging that we’re all too familiar with, isn’t there a case for some marketing budgets for specific projects to be redirected to support community events by booking stalls/supporting the costs of organising? That was one of my take-aways from the pair of events: Go to where the people are, and provide something interesting for them to engage with (instead of policy hard-sell!), and make such engagement an annual/routine thing. Furthermore, invite local public service providers outside the local government remit to have stalls and if needed, organisational event support. (And advertise their presence in advance). That means less of the [financial] burden rests on the shoulders of unpaid community activists.
Food for thought?
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