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 […]

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 […]

The future of retail needs a radical rethink, and fast. High streets need to be multi-purpose, multi-use, reflective of local context and relevant to the way people are now consuming. We believe the future is bright for our town centres, for they are the beating heart of the community. We believe that recent store closures […]

Musings on the first lockdown, creativity and the future of public space.  It’s now almost 40 years since we started our design business and perceptions of the creative industries have changed hugely over that time. I grew up in a household where my mum and my nan were always making clothes and my pop was […]

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 […]

We are all for localism when it truly serves the best interests of the local community. I recently read that Preston has been named as the UK’s most improved urban area in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and think-tank Demos and was cheered by the fact that a town I know and love is doing well. […]

Our town centre thinking continues… This week it’s the turn of another so called “retail institution” the House of Fraser to announce a significant store closure following a shrinking of Mothercare and the demise of the likes of Maplin’s, Toys R Us and a whole raft of retail “brands” (that often actually has done the […]

We hate betting shops and the misery they cause.  For the past few years I have been including this image in my urban design talks and arguing that it’s time we either introduce planning legislation that allowed councils to ban betting shops altogether, or restrict them to one per square mile. Initially my views were […]

Improving equality and life chances for the younger generations have always been hugely important to us. Growing up in the 60s and the 70s my guess is that most young people in normal working class communities like the ones Gerardine and I came from in North East Lancashire had the belief that if they rolled […]

In 2015 we continued to discuss and document our positivity about the evolution of town centres, as a more indie and experiential spirit started to replace the dinosaurs that continued to fail and cease trading.  I have “mouthed off” pretty regularly these last few years about the future of our high streets – one recurrent […]

Wayne has always loved Blackburn, the town he grew up in, and in many ways made him, where we “give back to” whenever we can. Published in the Guardian on 25th August 2015 As a Blackburnian it’s great to hear that the town has been named the best place in Britain to make a living. […]

Oh how we hate this selling of new homes in London to “buy to leave empty” investors overseas. This is a plea to the Mayor of London to do something about it. Read The Guardian’s news story, 200 Flats Worth £140m Sold In Just Four Hours and the Independent’s take on it here. Surely it should be seen […]

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, […]

From day one we supported the idea that London with its fabulous network of green spaces could be a National Park. Now it is. I have been following and become increasingly intrigued about the campaign for London to become a National Park. Uniquely combining a biodiverse landscape with nature reserves, parks and gardens, the Greater […]

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 are excited about Margate as Dreamland, the project we led on, is about to open. Last year I wrote about some words about Margate that were published on the Design Council website.  Margate  A seaside town that the press often depicts as a bit of a basket case. I have one word for it: […]

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 […]