50 Years of Creative Placemaking
50 Years of Creative Placemaking
In the lead-up to our 50th anniversary year, (2026), we asked Kathryn Welch — once a Junction Arts participant, now a Community Arts Strategist — to look back on our five-decade journey and explore how it connects to the shifts and stories within our community.
It’s 1976. There’s a prolonged heatwave across the UK, the first commercial Concorde flight takes off from Heathrow Airport, and Brotherhood of Man wins the Eurovision Song Contest with Save Your Kisses for Me. And in South Normanton, a mining town in Derbyshire, a grassroots community arts group, Junction 28, is formed. Initially a tiny project run by a group of locals with “a bit of an idea” and passion for arts and creativity, the group secured permission to host a series of open-air theatre performances, built giant puppets to wave grandly at cars from a nearby motorway bridge, and constructed a family of concrete dinosaurs on an otherwise unlovely Recreation Ground. Employing their first project worker three years later with grant funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and East Midland Arts, the group rattled full-steam-ahead with their mission, to:
“bring some sort of animation to a little town in the throes of change”
And change was, indeed, afoot. Just three years earlier, writer and social scientist Daniel Bell had coined the term ‘postindustrial’ to describe the characteristics of a society shifting from the production of goods to the production of services. For the communities of north east Derbyshire (encompassing the towns of Bolsover, Shirebrook, Clowne and South Normanton), rooted in the mining industry – which provided not only the centre of local employment but also much of the local housing and social amenities, that shift would be foundational. And it wasn’t the only change in the air. Further afield, civil rights activists were using non-violent protest and civil disobedience to demand change, demonstrating to captivated audiences around the world the power of grassroots activism. The fledgling UK community arts movement was inspired by this activist vigour and mood of social change. It was the early 1970s that saw Jennie Lee, the UK’s first Minister for the Arts, publish the first White Paper for the Arts, setting out her ambition to make the arts “more accessible to as many people as possible”. In 1974, the newly-formed Association of Community Artists used their founding documents to assert “the right of working people to create their own art, rooted in their own experience and culture”. It was into this climate of change, driven by economic forces but shaped by the coming together of people at the grassroots and community level, that Junction 28 was born, and from this political mindset that it set out on its programme of work.
Celebrating 50 years of activity in 2026, Junction 28 (renamed in 1994 as Junction Arts, and referenced as such through the rest of this piece) has been a constant presence alongside the communities of north east Derbyshire through economic, social, demographic and political change. Their evolving programme holds up a mirror to the place and its shifting tides, and simultaneously creates spaces for local communities to explore and interrogate their future. As other local provision has come and gone, sinking under the waves of funding challenges, loss of volunteers and the exhaustion of making good work in difficult conditions, Junction Arts has persisted, thrived. In doing so, its half-century of local activity tells a unique story of the role of creativity in social change, placemaking and community.
Any consideration of the recent history of north east Derbyshire, as for so many comparable communities across the UK, centres around the closures of the local collieries. The violent political clashes of the 1980s were followed by the closure of Bolsover and Shirebook collieries in 1993, and the Coalite Company (making smokeless fuel and other chemicals) followed suit in 2004. Layoffs weren’t confined to these largely male-dominated industries; many Bolsover women worked in local clothing and textile factories, who likewise made significant redundancies throughout the 1990s, and had largely ceased trading by the new millennium.
By 2001, the Census was reporting that Shirebrook, and nearby parts of Chesterfield and north east Derbyshire “display a range of social and economic problems, including high unemployment, poor health, low educational attainment and various forms of deprivation”.
The early 1990s saw Junction Arts throw itself headlong into responding to these economic shifts. The organisation was appointed as the Arts Development Agency for the District of Bolsover and expanded their operations across the whole of the District, asserting confidently in their 1992-93 Annual Report that “in the face of economic decline in our area, it has become increasingly evident that creative activity is of vital importance to people’s lives”. Conscious of the new skills that would be required for the shifting economy, Junction Arts positioned creativity as key to “an education system obsessed with literacy and numeracy”, and creative opportunity as crucial to quality of life. They agreed to focus a new strand of work specifically on the needs of young people, and developed a new “local people, local skills” programme to create work in schools and via a lifelong learning programme with specific social, environmental and educational outcomes.
Alongside equipping people with the skills to navigate their changing social context, Junction Arts took seriously its founding purpose – to create ‘animation’ in and for its communities. This beautifully evocative word is defined as the state of being full of life or vigour; liveliness – a stark contrast with the classic image of post-industrial towns; shuttered shops, abandoned buildings and vacant high streets.
Junction Arts positioned creativity as a way to realise a vibrant, optimistic future for Bolsover. A flagship public art sculpture, Bolsover Gateway – by artist Liz Lemon, was commissioned by Junction Arts, welcoming folk to Bolsover with the slogan “the past we inherit, the future we create”. This vision of a positive, ambitious future needed high-profile moments of togetherness, an opportunity for the people of Bolsover to see the place as somewhere that things happen, and a place with a future that could be created collaboratively. Bolsover lantern parade, founded in 1994 and celebrating its 32nd edition this year, offered a way to realise that vision. Created each year from scratch by hundreds of local participants supported by community artists, the lantern parade is a highlight of the town’s annual calendar, drawing in visitors from across the region, as well as creating a real sense of pride for local families – many of whom have now taken part across multiple generations. The willow and tissue-paper creations grow more elaborate each year, the resulting parade representing the glorious diversity of the town’s community groups, schools, passions, interests and creative inspiration. Embracing everything from Buzz Lightyear to steam trains, smoke-breathing dragons and astronauts, this is a place where all ideas are enthusiastically embraced into a noisy, joyous celebration of local creativity.
Whilst the end of mining in Bolsover marked the end of one era, new jobs brought their own challenges and opportunities, and made their own mark on the shape of this community. The turn of the century saw Bolsover looking ahead to its post-industrial future, under a new Labour government promising “new life for Britain”. A new local motorway junction opened in 2008, serving the new Markham Vale Business Park, and major employers were courted to the region by local and national incentives. Most prominent amongst those new employers was Sports Direct, whose headquarters and warehouse distribution centre opened in Shirebook in 2013. Bringing 4,000 new jobs, the new opportunities also attracted some 1,500 people to move to Shirebrook, many of them travelling to the UK from Poland, Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria. A 2016 parliamentary report found that many of the new Sports Direct workers were offered zero hours contracts, for low pay and in frequently exploitative conditions, presenting “a disturbing picture” of “appalling working conditions and practices”.
For Junction Arts, the arrival of new people and demographics required a new approach to bringing people together, celebrating shared interests and working from a central idea of the inherent possibilities of community. A refresh of strategic priorities in 2001 under new Chair Sue Dodsworth identified community cohesion as a key focus for Junction Arts, with projects “designed to tackle the problems we face of social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal, and cultural diversity”. For community artists, working with the diversity of stories within and between communities is nothing new. The community arts movement had grown from a desire to tell the less-told stories of those excluded from dominant narratives, and from its earliest days Junction Arts developed projects to reflect the ‘special needs’ of women (founding a vibrant women’s choir and printmaking group), and for disabled people and teenage parents.
Today, projects similarly showcase the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people, celebrate the thriving creative groups led by the area’s diverse ethnic communities, and create space for people from all kinds of backgrounds to navigate difference, engage constructively with a range of ideas about our past and future, and build thriving relationships across the broad diversity of our communities.
Growing steadily from ‘a bit of an idea’ into one of the UK’s longest-standing community arts organisations, Junction Arts has seen increasing recognition and status over its 50-year tenure. Named as a flagship participatory arts programme by Arts Council England’s East Midlands region in 2002, a decade later Junction Arts was awarded National Portfolio Organisation status, offering regular funding designed to “help communities everywhere to enjoy the best creativity and culture”. Over its half century of experience, it has occupied a space of constant flexibility – responding to the landscape in which it is rooted, whilst simultaneously working to actively create the space for imagining the future. It’s a place where social change is noticed, considered and explored, and done so collectively. And through those processes, matured over 50 years, you get a place and an organisation that are inherently of one-another. Junction Arts would not be the same if it had begun somewhere else, but it’s also true that Bolsover would not be the place it is today without the constant presence and gentle creative provocations of Junction Arts. Whilst it may be true that the only constant is change, the consistency, stability and longstanding experience of one of the UK’s oldest and most established community arts organisations positions Bolsover strongly to be able to navigate change – past, present and future, together.