Pendleton
CLIENT
Salford City Council
PRINCIPAL STAKEHOLDERS
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Salford Urban Regeneration Company
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Salford Arts Theatre
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Salford University
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Salford Museum and Art gallery
Summary
Plan was appointed through Salford URC to develop an ACS for Pendleton in the context of the ‘Creating a New Pendleton’ project. The New Pendleton project represents a concerted effort on the part of public sector actors to effect the transformation of the area; our study looks at the potential for cultural activity of different kinds to contribute to this process of regeneration.
Context
An understanding of the place in which any cultural projects were to take place informed our approach to first conceiving ideas and then assessing them for suitability. This understanding was achieved through a series of research projects. First and foremost, community engagement, secondly looking at the position and renewed role of Pendleton within its urban context and thirdly, an audit of the key cultural assets as they exist within Pendleton.
Community
The community consultation within Pendleton involved working with a locally based practitioner to conceive a series of creative sessions designed around the people taking part. This led to a rich resource from which we were able to harvest ideas for creative projects and gain a clear understanding of Pendleton as a place, and the community’s relationship with it.
Vision
The ACS represents an exciting and multifaceted body of culture based projects designed to address the root cause of some of Pendleton’s most intractable problems. In delivery, the strategy will be rolled out as part of the regeneration of Pendleton to enrich the process of change and allow the community a direct role in the shaping of this new place.
Key Recommendations
The recommendations within our report took the form of setting out a series of objectives, addressing four key areas of life within Pendleton: economic opportunity, skills, the environment and social issues. We then devised a series of Area Based Cultural Initiatives (ABCIs) designed to offer real solutions to the challenges our study had identified.
‘Plan Projects were appointed to prepare an Area Cultural Strategy for Pendleton area of Salford. We were very impressed with the way the Plan Projects team delivered the community consultation aspect of the commission and their enthusiasm to reach the most difficult parts of the community and engage them in the consultative process. The result of this enthusiasm is a strategy which has the potential to encompass the whole community.’