Great Levelling Up Fund news yesterday for two seafront regeneration projects HemingwayDesign have played a key role in, a project we kick-started some time ago, and for a town we have been working in for a decade. Cleethorpes / North East Lincolnshire will be awarded over £18 million for a transformational regeneration of its seafront and town centre. This […]

This was an interesting one for our team. Between ourselves and our friends at CTConsults, we have plenty of experience in place brands for whole towns or cities. We have experience in creating place brands for places that don’t exist yet, and for places with lengthy histories. We’d worked on heritage projects and Action Zone […]

HemingwayDesign has a long and illustrious history. We are in our fifth decade now but the first Friday in November 2022 will go down as one of our proudest when three independent organisations which were set up when we were in the midst of urban regeneration projects and who we contributed to their inception and […]

In 2016 HemingwayDesign embarked on a project to produce a Vision for Lowestoft South Beach, with aim to rejuvenate the seafront and help enliven the town’s leisure and tourist attractions. Labelled ‘rundown and dirty’ in a recent article, Wayne Hemingway spoke to BBC Radio Suffolk’s Sarah Lilley about ‘click bait’ culture, the reality of this […]

In 2020, working with NEW Masterplanning, HemingwayDesign completed a Vision and masterplan for Andover town centre. Our team worked closely with Test Valley Borough Council, with extensive consultation with Town Council officers and members, key employers, local retailers, and the local community to secure widespread support for a comprehensive redevelopment focused on four key proposals: […]

In 2016 HemingwayDesign embarked on a project to produce a Vision for Lowestoft South Beach, with aim to rejuvenate the seafront and help enliven the town’s leisure and tourist attractions. With its extensive sandy beach, two levels of promenade, seafront parks and gardens, all flanked by handsome period buildings, it quickly became apparent that Lowestoft […]

I am not an expert on skateboarding, none of my children ever got into it, and if I were to try it I would, for certain, do myself a mischief. But I do love watching skateboarding and recognise it as an important part of youth culture and urban sport; one that’s totally durable. Now it’s […]

Everyone missed festivals and events in summer 2020, but boy did we miss them at HemDes. We’ve established and are involved in 7 cultural festivals across the country, and usually summer for us is those every weekend plus our London-based design-led markets happening around the year, making for a busy events team and a packed […]

Until now, this would’ve been met with cries of ‘bang goes the neighbourhood’. Charity shops popping up on high streets have long been seen as a sign of a town’s demise – sitting alongside pound shops, greasy takeaways and long-empty units who’s previous owners were victims of austerity, or Brexit, or universal credit, or whatever […]

The definitive history of Blackburn is Open and the build up to The National Festival of Making. In 2012, we had the idea to take what Blackburn had – empty shops in prime town centre locations, an open minded Council, unused evocative buildings, strong industrial heritage, successful diaspora – and embrace these assets to start […]

A blog about how affordable rents helped us get started and how through the markets we curate we are, in a small way, helping start-ups “have a go” by providing low cost opportunities.  I grew up in modest background to the sound of whirring sewing machines and with a mum and a nan who always […]

But so much more yet to come… After 4 years of working on the Dreamland Margate project, after so many false starts and times when we thought that some of the enormous obstacles that presented themselves could in fact be insurmountable, the first phase of this amazing community instigated project is open. The June 2015 […]

At HemingwayDesign we work in a number of towns and cities that have suffered economically and socially over the past decades and I occasionally attend round table discussions or conferences in these towns that focus on regeneration. There is no fairy dust (as Oliver Wainwright said about what we do, possibly snidely, see here) to be sprinkled, […]

HemingwayDesign spend most of our time working on projects outside of London, and we have always had a lot to say about Levelling Up.  For too long the media and often the politicians and the residents of regions and cities have been bemoaning the perceived dominance of London. But there is a wind of change […]

We love working in places that open our eyes to the world. We fell in love with Derry / Londonderry working on the team helping the city become the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013. I was first invited over to Derry-Londonderry in 2012 to advice on the build up to their City of […]

Here we reclaim the much maligned term “hipster” and sing their praises for their contribution to regeneration.  The word hipster is much maligned. The media has helped turn a sector of young folk who are interested in new things and being a bit different – someone who in the past might have been described as […]