Shirebrook, 2016 - 2019

Shirebrook, Derbyshire. It’s a town with a name that gets spat out — Shitbrook, they call it there. Or as The Sun had it, ‘Village of the Damned’. Caught in the long aftershock of deindustrialisation - ex-mining, post-hope, pre-something.

But underneath the cynicism: care, resistance, joy even. A nurse tending chickens at a community farm during addiction recovery. A boxing club run by former miners offering identity to young people. Tea poured by council officers who’ve learned listening is more powerful than leaflets.

We arrived not long before Brexit and left a few years later. This project was about the slow, collective work of believing that something else might be possible. We began making a podcast asking people where they found hope, took thousands of photos, shot hours of film and ended up creating a film school for young people to tell their own stories of their place.

As the project went on, I felt more and more angry about the Labour party’s strategy being based on hour-long focus groups made up of people from places like Shirebrook. The result: you get policies built around sound bites, the fear and cynicism. Instead of doing the deep and entangled work to create something more life-giving.

Through the project, we ended up treating imagination as essential infrastructure—as real and necessary as roads or broadband. Shirebook asks what happens when a place is allowed to dream on its own terms, without permission or apology.

More at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/imagination-infrastructures/working-with-social-imagination-learning-from-shirebrook

A W.I.G.S. project by Jake Garber, Jo Harrington, Mills Dray, Tee Byford, Irit Pollak in partnership with Mark at the Boxing club, Keeley at the Hole in the Wall youth centre and many, many others.