The grunge economy

Is Rockpoint a model for urban renewal?

"Grunge" might be a tad harsh for a regeneration project that began with an art gallery and has a rather fine vegan restaurant as its centrepiece. I use grunge as a term to indicate a place that's generated a unique vibe through local entrepreneurship, community action and a counter-cultural kick. 

Local serial entrepreneur Dan Davies kickstarted the Rockpoint after returning to the area. Dan grew up in New Brighton and witnessed the town's deterioration in the 1980s and 1990s. Even as Liverpool recovered and became a thriving "creative capital of Europe" in 2008, nothing seemed to turn around the prospects of this Victorian seaside town well past its glory. 

Even now, there continues to be pockets of dereliction amongst the disastrous redevelopment projects of the 1980s onwards. Replacing the iconic Art Deco swimming Lido with a mega Morrisons will be an architectural crime paid for by someone in the furnaces of hell. 

The iconic New Brighton Lido

But back to practical matters. Rockpoint began as a specific local project providing physical space for online micro businesses. These businesses then outgrew the premises, generating expansive energy in the locality. Meanwhile, art galleries, restaurants, bars, barber shops and an assortment of locally owned businesses set up shop in what had been a declining and drab high street. 

The most distinctive feature of Rockpoint is its street art. Mundane facades were turned into art canvasses. First local, and then global artists, began a makeover of the area. You can feel this creative energy around you. Even ordering a kebab, as I did, felt like a post-modernist statement. 

What intrigued me about the Rockpoint redevelopment is how local and international skills blended together, offering the prospect of a very different type of adult learning. Young people helping out with cleanup activities, building projects, or art installations learned vital cognitive and physiological skills, from teamwork to manual dexterity, how to give instructions, and how an artist reconfigures space. 

Most of all, the young people of New Brighton will have learned that things "don't have to be shit". People can change places they live in and make them something to be proud of. 

What price can you put on that? 

The future offers a real opportunity but also dangers. Gentrification, or worse, corporate capture, presents very real risks as seen from projects across Merseyside. Even if the economy doesn't grow quite as fast or as far, the value of building local skills and keeping the profits in the area outweigh the "benefits" of another 'kin Tescos, deskilling the area and extracting profits. The key is to keep Rockpoint authentically local, with a focus on micro-entrepreneurship and the creative arts. 

I see the opportunity to build a self-sustaining entrepreneurial culture where community members develop a sense of identity, a folk wisdom, that means they have uniqueness - a monopoly of insight. This is what happened in Seattle, to the extent that LA music executives were dressing down, growing beards and hanging out incognito to find out what was really happening. 

There's a magic sauce brewed up in these localities, and the key is not to give this away too soon. 

Like the global artists working in the area, there is plenty of scope for blending local business know-how with world-class entrepreneurship, financial and technology education. 

My hope is that young people can learn on the job, outside formal education, and migrate from one project to another, building up micro-credentials in life and work skills. They get war stories, social media badging and links to images of real-life projects that say, "I worked on that!" This informal learning might be as valuable as any college qualification and perhaps combine with it in the future. 

Rockpoint might become a place to think about how different streets can be but how different our learning might become.

Rockpoint is not only a potential development model for the future; it's a nice place to hang out, get lunch, look at the art around you, and imagine what could be. 

Dr Andrew Atter