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.