In addition to consulting closely with the range of key stakeholders, Plan Projects devised a programme of creative consultation events directed at communities in Middlesborough. We recruited to our team a locally based practitioner to conceive a series of sessions that would give us a clearer idea of the values and identity of local people’s attitudes and allow them to contribute their own thoughts and feelings to the strategy.

This led to a rich resource from which we were able to harvest ideas for creative projects and gain a clear understanding of Middlehaven as a place, and the community’s relationship with it. As a developer, Bioregional Quintain foreground issues of sustainability. The input provided by the cultural strategy fed into behavioural strategies designed to encourage sustainable living.

Given the focus on the physical regeneration of the site, our strategy looked at the opportunity for public art in particular to add value to the site in environmental, social and environmental terms. In addition, we aimed to model a different approach to commissioning ‘public art’ at the site by putting together multi-disciplinary teams to produce solutions. The ‘artists’ in our strategy would be briefed to produce dynamic and novel responses to briefs for both for smaller items such as lighting, seating and other assumed components of the public domain and major commissions, such as the Tenemos sculpture.