Practical. Thinking.
Teesdale once had the worst broadband access in the whole of the UK but a project led by the regeneration team at Barnard Castle Vision is aiming to change all that. The Digital Teesdale scheme will provide regular, high-speed internet services to all the area’s towns and villages, including some remote parts where broadband is […]
Where there’s muck there’s brass goes the saying, but in Wakefield they could add that where there’s muck there’s fish, vegetables, wildlife and a training project for long term unemployed people. The ABLE project is a social enterprise based on 34 acres of Yorkshire Water land at Caldervale sewage works. The former landfill site combines […]
European governments are bickering over what to do with the influx of migrants fleeing violence and upheaval in north Africa. Perhaps they should take a look at the Italian village of Riace, where a positive attitude to refugees has brought new life to a community that was struggling to survive. Riace (pop: 1700) looks idyllic. […]
Artists, shoppers and businesspeople have all benefited from an innovative project to make the best possible use of empty shops in Coventry. Coventry Artspace, acting as arts development team for Coventry City Council and working closely with the council’s property team, brought together a range of partners to manage a number of spaces in City […]
An experiment that involved Walsall Council tweeting round the clock for 24 hours proved so successful that they stepped things up a gear. Walsall 24 was a way of drawing attention to the tens of thousands of things that councils do for their residents in the course of a day. By definition, these ‘everyday’ activities […]
Storying Sheffield is a groundbreaking project which brings university students together with the people of Sheffield to create a living portrait of life in the city. Half the participants in the project are second-year undergraduates studying English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Storying Sheffield is an optional module which they can take as part […]
It’s an unusual legacy but Jane’s Walk, which gets people out exploring the areas where they live and talking to their neighbours, would surely be welcomed by urbanist Jane Jacobs. Jane’s Walk celebrates the memory of Jacobs, who died in 2006. She had radical ideas about the best way to make cities work, believing they […]
Each year, British shops throw away around 1.4 million tonnes of food. Yet at least 10 million people in the UK live in poverty and have difficulty affording a healthy diet. FareShare is an organisation that believes the food waste and food poverty demonstrated in these statistics are two of the most urgent issues facing […]
For a town which boasts Daniel Defoe and Sir Walter Scott among its first visitors, losing the public library would have been an irony indeed. But the residents of Wooler in Northumberland will be able to continue borrowing books – historical or otherwise – thanks to the intervention of the Glendale Gateway Trust. Wooler […]
A boring shrubbery that once provided cover for antisocial behaviour was transformed into a haven for wildlife through the work of the Bankside Open Services Trust (BOST) and its many partners in the local community. The garden at Christ Church on Blackfriars Road in Southwark, south London now features a huge range of plants that […]
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