Mid Pennine Arts Facilitates First Spaceshaper Workshop

Mid Pennine Arts is helping Pendle Borough Council consult groups of young people on Youth Centre site plans. We are facilitating our first ever ‘Spaceshaper’ workshops in partnership with Pendle Council’s Nelson Neighbourhood Management team and Housing Regeneration Services, and Lancashire County Council’s Young People’s Service. ‘Spaceshaper’ is a toolkit designed by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Our education coordinator Steph Hawke is leading the facilitation over two evenings in August.

The workshops are focusing on an area of land at the front of the Bradley Youth hub; a development which consists of a new Youth and Community Centre alongside some supported accommodation for young people. The land will be subject to significant improvement in the coming months and will be designed with the input of young people from Nelson.


The Spaceshaper sessions examine young people’s opinions about the place under categories of ‘access’, ‘environment’, ‘maintenance’, ‘design and appearance’, ‘you’, ‘use’, ‘other people’ and ‘community’. Using CABE’s online software, opinions are illustrated as innovative ‘ramblegrams’ whereby the participants are represented as avatars or fun cartoon characters which illustrate the group’s opinions by moving around the screen.

Talking Shop in Lancaster

By Lucy Green

Talking Shop engages creative practitioners to work with independent businesses to document, celebrate and highlight their importance as hubs of the local community.


Artist Alice Angus (http://www.proboscis.org.uk/) has been commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts to deliver the next project in the Talking Shop series celebrating independent shops and shopkeepers, this time in Lancaster city centre. The project is being delivered in partnership with Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce, Storey Gallery and the History Department, Lancaster University.


Talking Shop in Lancaster will highlight what makes the area unique in terms of its independent retail offer. It will also encourage shopkeepers, shoppers and city visitors to see the area in a new light, and bring footfall in areas of Lancaster that have been adversely affected by the recent economic problems.


Alice is planning various activities to involve shopkeepers, stallholders and individuals and will spend time in some of the shops and market stalls, talking with traders, observing and recording life in those places. She will also be working with local people, in groups and individually to understand their experience of shopping in the city.

The final artwork will be a series of large scale drawings and illustrations on show in empty shops in the city centre during the autumn, a website with audio recordings and images, and a publication. We’ll be launching the exhibition of artworks in Lancaster with a celebratory community event, so keep an eye out for further details as the project develops.