‘Future Stories’

The book and exhibition is a synthesis of what I learned during an eight month action research project across Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Town Centres. I conducted street interviews, worked with local businesses, ran workshops with the public, conducted archival research and collaborated with Dr Caroline Jackson,  to devise a set of principles for town centre renewal. (image below)

I used these principles to design a series of interventions and frameworks for each high street, the image above is an idea to transform the Dolphin Centre, Poole, into a living building with green roof terrace and network of art spaces in the underpasses.

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This plan is genuinely co-designed with people from BCP. I spent many hours walking and talking to local people, independent business, chatting to groups in library’s and making on street interviews and facillitating workshops with pupils at local schools and students at Arts University Bournemouth and Bournemouth University to learn what local people wish for their town centres of the future.

The aim of these conversations was to capture and synthesise collective aspirations, create design principles and sketch out site specific interventions in line with what I’d heard. To imagine interventions that would foreground what people care about.

It was great to collaborate with Caroline Jackson, eventful cities consultant, and to think about flexible architectures that could facilitate conversation, community, culture and ecology.

Fantastic to work with Graphic designer and Illustrator Kimberley Murphy who did such a brilliant job of designing the book and collaborating on the drawings and illustrations.

… and to commission photographers Richard Page, Ashley Woodfall, Zeynep Aktuna, and writing from Play:Disrupt, Cora Clarke, NATASHA PLAYER, GreenBlue Urban, to respond to and expand ideas and principles through their own practice and writing.
what our urban town centres could be as we emerge back on to the high street.

Photography by Richard Page, Ashley Woodfall & Zeynep Aktuna.

Huge thanks to: co- contributor Dr. Caroline Jackson,  Amelia Rose– researcher / Kim Walker, designer/

Photographers: Richard Page, Ashley Woodfall & Zeynep Aktuna.

Play: Disrupt/ Cora Clarke/ GreenBlue Urban/ Natasha Player & Richard Shipway each wrote chapters on a specific principle.