It would have been nice to have. had a few more local residents coming along to this event given the number of council staff there were, but even that handful of residents reflected a diversity of views and life experiences that taught us something new
Let’s face it, an evening session in the middle of December wasn’t going to be a packed house. We also had a minimal turnout for the first of the Trials of Democracy workshops a few weeks ago – although the later ones had more people turning up
For a start, the city council was beginning from a very, very low base.It has been over a decade since we had anything like this in the ward. Furthermore, with the suspension of local area committees along with the continued austerity in local government, the city council (and wider public sector) ward presence has declined to the bare minimum. To the extent that the delayed Devolution White Paper is ‘make or break’ for the entire sector.
“So…where do we go from here?”
Start where the people are at, and go where the people are.
For a start, the people are not at school on a cold December evening or at a neighbourhood-level small community hall on a rainy Saturday morning. This time of year is always going to be a struggle in starting something new. But sometimes it can be things such as budget timetables, consultation deadlines, and making use of limited capacity breathing space that compels institutions to pick such times. And you have to run with it and make the best you can. Put it this way, the number of posters a few of us printed out and put up around the ward did not reflect the low turnout. It’s similar with leafletting a ward in a local election. Some people may work their socks off, but the votes and turnout won’t necessarily reflect this.
Start with where the people are – in this case, Coleridge Rec
The dragon slide, which has been a surprising long-term success as far as council purchases go, is ten years old in summer 2025. The children that play in the park have made the dragon their own. Ten being a nice round number – hold a celebration around that.
Above – Cambridge City Council, Shaping Coleridge
They may not know who their councillors are, they may not know the story behind how playground equipment or the splash pads got there (or who paid for it) ***but they know that there is a dragon slide there***
Above – Puffles the Dragon Fairy next to the late Marie Ferguson-Smith, who recently passed away. She probably knew the ward better than any political activist of recent times. From April 2014 in the run up to the city council elections
Cllr Lewis Herbert confirmed that following the contest, he and Cllr Carina O-Reilly came up with the idea of using Section 106 funding to install a dragon slide.
While Puffles has long-since retired (and the social media platform on which a huge (7,500 followers having culled spam accounts regularly) following accumulated no longer being anything like what it was, the physical installation of the dragon slide, and the story of how it got there remain. Furthermore, it’s a nice connection to help children learn about who decides what gets built and installed in their communities, and then give their ideas and work out how people solve collective problem. (Even if it’s having a small pot of funding and having to choose between say a swing or a slide).
Put fun stuff on and advertise it well in advance, and people will show up
We’ve proved we can do it before.
Above – from August 2021 at Coleridge Rec – part of the Music in the Parks line up
I counted about 200 people there – and over a hundred a few years later.
Above – Coleridge Rec 09 July 2023 – most of the people were to the right of the photograph in the shade of the trees!
The missed opportunity with both those events was the lack of additional stalls from both local public services and also local community and activity groups. If the City Council runs a similar line up of brass bands in the park in 2025, they could easily combine it with the 10th anniversary of the dragon slide, and make a bigger go of it. (Alternatively, running two separate events and having a Coleridge Community Forum presence at both might be enough for those that see volunteers at both events to get involved).
Soft consultation activities vs hard consultation activities
With so many heavy consultations happening over the next few years, Cambridge has got to come up with a better way of finding out what residents think in what I can only describe as an anti-social media age. The use of Facebook and Twitter as a means of sharing information quickly and efficiently to self-selecting large audiences at minimal cost seem to have gone. One of the things I suggested to two of the councillors was for the Mayor of Cambridge to host an event at The Guildhall inviting communications specialists from across the city to come along to a workshop / discussion and thrash out what our collective response as a city (i.e. not just as a council, a local public sector, or business/charity sectors) should be. Because it’s something that we’re all struggling with.
At the same time, with so many different and disparate consultations going on, it’s no surprise that people don’t know which events are the ones they can have a reasonable impact on. On top of that, our fragmented structure of local government means that Cambridge City Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, and the Combined Authority are each running separate consultations on their budgets (as the law requires). What percentage of residents have the time, the knowledge of finance, the knowledge of the institutions, and the motivation to respond to all three of these?
The Societies Fair and The Junction
Cllr Anna Smith (Labour – Coleridge) mentioned that when her group discussed the various questions and things on the flipchart paper, only at the end did anyone mention The Junction and the Cambridge Leisure Park. Which reminded me of pre-Lockdown work we had done that was easily forgotten.
Have a read of the Coleridge Residents’ Survey of 2019
Above – detail of responses when asked: “Which Community Events/ Groups have you attended in the last year?”
The units are small, but it says something when three people ticked ‘Extinction Rebellion’ while four ticked ‘The Junction’. I wrote up the findings from the community meeting in January 2020. Less than two months later, the world changed.
Fortunately we are seeing more youth work being hosted by The Junction – noting the Youth Assembly video here.
And yet the future of The Junction matters – not just as a local arts venue. And the leaseholder of the site formerly known as the Cattle Market (which it once was as a livestock market in the olden days) is being revamped.
Above – from Cambridge City Council’s forward plan, in which there are a few other things you may want to look at.
Local architects 5th Studio had a look at this (and were surprisingly rejected when a commercial tender was put forward on the previous now abandoned scheme)
Above – the view from the train as imagined by 5th Studio in their piece here
As I mentioned at the Coleridge meeting earlier, both the Devolution White Paper and the Curriculum Review provide an opportunity to build in local democracy into the national schemes of work for school teachers and also commission materials for them to use on both local history and the future of the city that they will inherit as adults.
Seven days and counting before Parliament breaks for recess. Between now and then, we’re due to get the Devolution White Paper and a new National Planning Policy Framework, but of which will have a huge impact on the future of our city.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 