I was invited this week to give a short talk on day one of the Sussex & Brighton Devolution Policy Sprint, which was being held to start exploring requirements for the formation of a Mayoral Combined County Authority for the local government areas of East Sussex County Council, West Sussex County Council, and Brighton and Hove City Council.
I was presenting alongside Noel Hatch of Adur & Worthing Council; Noel gave an excellent overview of the Kitchen Table programme which used start-up grants and mentoring to help grassroots initiatives and established groups to get their ideas off the ground.
Below are my notes from the talk, and at the bottom of the post you can find the slides.
Hello. My name is John, and I’ve lived in Sussex for nearly two decades. I want to tell you today why Sussex is a Thing.
Despite my accent – which is *Northern* Sussex – my grandad was born and raised here as a boy. You don’t get a surname like Willshire from the central belt of Scotland.
My wife and I run a strategic design practice called Smithery, which we’ve done since 2011. Amongst other things, we’ve designed a bottom-up Future Trends and Signals Systems for the United Nations Development Programme, a strategy for a community participation for the Climate and Health Team in Welcome Trust and a process for Richmond Housing Partnership to reorientate their customer service around a realistic entanglement of residents and neighbourhoods.
But through all of our work, we focus on helping organisations Make Things People Want, rather than Making People Want Things.
And I use the word thing with a particular intent.
Thing is a very democratic word.
It was through French philosopher Bruno Latour’s work that my attention was drawn to the etymology of the word ‘thing’. It comes from the Proto-Germanic ‘ding’, originally meaning a gathering where people came together to discuss matters of concern.
It echoes through democratic settings across Europe today. A courthouse in Norway is a ‘Tinghus’ – the house where things are sorted out.
The parliament in Norway is the Storting – the ‘great’ thing. The Danish parliament is the Folketing – the ‘people’s’ thing. In Iceland, the parliament is the Alting – literally, ‘all things’.
Over time, the meaning broadened. We use it today in lots of different contexts.
- Have you managed to get anywhere with that thing?
- There’s a thing about apples on at the community hall, shall we go?
- No, I can’t make it, I’ve got a thing to do.
- There’s this thing happening around devolution in Sussex, do you know anything about it..?
A thing is basically an assemblage of the social and material factors related to each other.
We don’t use the word thing when we’re being imprecise. We use it when we are being conscious of how messy it is.
To go back to Bruno Latour, a thing is a “complex assembly of contradictory issues”.
My proposition today, here, is that I believe Sussex is a Thing.
But why?
For me, this thing starts here. We moved into a new build house in Lindfield, Mid-Sussex, in 2016, our fourth home in Sussex.
And it was an absolute wildlife desert.
So we set about rewilding our garden creating a home for nature as well as ourselves. It is a story that starts with insects, and ends (so far) with hedgehogs.
One version of the story goes that I wrote a blog post about this process, and a researcher from Gardener’s World found it, and so I ended up on Gardener’s World talking about what housing developers could do to avoid people having to start from scratch.
Monty Don said I was “absolutely right”. I have lost count of the number of times I have employed this, completely free from context, in family discussions…
But the much more interesting version of the story is our rewilding garden became a discussion point with one neighbour, then four, then more. It became a neighbourhood Nature Watch group with over 70 members.
Most importantly, it become a platform for ideas.
George suggested we tried No Mow May on some of the green spaces. So we used the world’s most powerful piece of technology – the printed A4 sheet – to gather interested parties for a half hour talk on what this could do for nature
Ray and George then suggested we could make a map of all the potential places we could make more homes for nature around Heathwood Park.
Maddie applied for a free saplings pack from the Woodland Trust. We then planted them together, with beers donated by local craft beer hostelry, The Tap.
We planted the saplings at 11am I the morning… we took the beer home to drink later…
Over the 18 months that the group has existed, it has become a more of a connected community than anything else we have experienced since the new estate went up.
We have been recognised as one of Forum for the Future’s sustainability ‘Bright Spots’, and very recently invited to be part of Weald to Waves Community Champions for Gardens and Greenspaces.
This project, for me, was the start of thinking about our own regenerative practices. Not just sustainability – where we sustain old systems – but really exploring what in means to create a regenerative, thriving place.
Being truly regenerative is to consider environmental, social, and economic development as an entanglement.
It is a thing; a complex assembly of contradictory issues.
Just like Sussex.
Ian Steedman, who passed away in 2023, also believed Sussex was a thing. Ian was a Worthing resident, local history expert, former employee of Brighton Corporation Buses.
Ian was massively passionate about the region, so much so that he wrote a Sussex Charter in 2006, and campaigned to have it adopted by West Sussex County Council. Ian is the reason there is a Sussex Charter, and that we have celebrates Sussex Day on the 16th June each year.
being celebrated according to the rites and traditions of Sussex.
I won’t read the whole thing, but I want to concentrate on three sequential phrases from the Sussex Charter.
Let it be known, the people of Sussex will undertake responsibility for the general well being of our neighbours.
Let it be known the people of Sussex shall be guardians of our wildlife.
Let it be known the people of Sussex will, through custom support all local business.
The people of Sussex will help our wildlife, our neighbours, and our local businesses all to thrive
According to the ‘rites and traditions of Sussex’, the people of Sussex essentially expect and demand that we are a regenerative place.
Through all of the explorative work we have found ourselves doing around regeneration, we regularly meet people who have this underlying belief in the power of place. It might start with the place you live, but you begin to realise over that this is a thing you are starting to see all over Sussex.
For instance, I was at Content Rising last summer, at Wakehurst Place in the heart of Sussex.
In closing the conference, Farhana Yamin said these words which make stick with me forever.
“Another world is possible’ said Arundhati Roy in 2003. I think it is here already. And your job is to go and make it visible.”
It is our job to make this new Sussex visible.
And I think you all probably already see it in places across the region. We see it in the actions on our wee estate on the side of Haywards Heath, as George gives a talk on no-mow May, or Maddie applies to the woodland Trust for Sapling grants.
We see it in the volunteers who become Weald to Waves Community champions, sharing ideas and contexts to help each others annual plans.
We see it as our local scouts come together with community group Bentswood Hub to raise funds for and build a brand new community centre, Barn Cottage Green.
We see it it campaigns like Class Divide, where residents have not just been fighting to highlight the persistent and deeply damaging educational inequalities that exist in Brighton & Hove, but have now successfully changed education policythrough their work.
But in this room today, I’m sure that you all have many, many more stories than I do like this, from all across Sussex. Our job, all of our jobs, is to make them visible in this new democratic era for the region.
From across Sussex, a few of us have come tougher to think about how we might be able to help. We’ve called ourselves the Sussex Futures Network, and in short it is a platform for experiments which help reveal new kinds of futures that could exist across Sussex. Jenni Lloyd, Natalie Orringe and myself are here from the group today.
And one of the first experiments, which Jenni and I have been working on with Our House, is how to make a Sussex-specific social game with surfaces the spirit of the original chartists movement into this new democratic moment for the region.
Of course, we’ve named it ‘We Wunt Be Druv‘, after the Sussex county motto. There is something really fitting about this motto in a participative democratic; we want be druv, but we will be driving…
So expect more from both the Sussex Futures Network and We Wunt Be Druv next year.
If you want to join us, or even fund some of the experiments, please get in touch.
To finish then, and before I hand over to Noel, I want to mention something we talked about together in the set up for these talks.
This kind of work, the future for more participatory democracy and opportunity across Sussex, is not an architectural one. the temptation will always be to get everything locked down so that a process flows perfectly through newly constructed procedural hallways. But this is gardening, not architecture.
You might have used the word ‘scaffolding’ in projects before – I know I have – to talk about the early stages of setting out the lines and boundaries to imagine the future finished state.
I would ask you to think more about ‘trellising’.
How can you build in places to support growth as an offer, not an instruction? Support the growing communities of Sussex, as they make the connections between the entangled realities of social, environmental and economic regeneration.
Make space for participation to take root, to grow, to thrive.
Create an ongoing invitation to citizens of Sussex to just get on and do their thing.
Thank you.
Full slide deck: