Together with partners, Kirklees Council’s Culture and Tourism services have developed a place-based approach to transform Huddersfield’s town centre into Kirklees’ Cultural Heart – a designated cultural quarter featuring a new art gallery and museum and the re-development of Queensgate Market.
The challenge
The Queensgate area, comprising Queensgate Market, the Piazza Shopping Centre and Huddersfield Library, is at the centre of Huddersfield town centre. It is the chosen location for Kirklees’ Cultural Heart, as proposed in the £250 million Huddersfield Blueprint plans, a 10 year vision to create a thriving modern-day town centre.
The enabling works for the first stage of the Cultural Heart’s regeneration programme, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, had a significant impact on the market, retail space and cultural offer in the Queensgate area, with a reduction in footfall and spend resulting in businesses closing and retail units becoming vacant – creative industry businesses did not escape this challenge.
Covid-19 also changed the way residents engaged with culture. Lockdown restrictions meant that Huddersfield Library and the Art Gallery housed on its first floor had to close and people who would normally use cultural spaces to interact with others could not do so anymore.
Covid-19 increased the need to animate Queensgate, which was already dealing with the difficulties presented by regeneration and change. Our challenge was to figure out how to engage residents and businesses in the transformation of the area whilst maintaining business activity, offering new experiences and rebuilding high street footfall.
We decided that a place-based approach to cultural development, celebrating the unique identity of the town, would be the solution.
The solution
Kirklees Council’s Culture and Tourism services delivered initiatives to address cultural development and economic demands in Queensgate.
Queensgate Market was the first location for Temporary Contemporary, a cultural partnership project between the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield and the Council’s Creative Development and Market teams. Temporary Contemporary has grown from utilising the empty stalls inside Queensgate Market to occupying the vacant retail units of the adjacent Piazza Shopping Centre. There are exhibitions, making-workshops, activities for children and a theatre company for adults with learning disabilities, all on view to the public.
The Art Gallery relocated to an empty retail unit in the Piazza Shopping Centre due to capital works Cultural Heart. Huddersfield Art Gallery: Unit 7 has been in operation since 2021 attracting 5,287 visitors in the first eight months of opening, which compares favourably with pre-Covid figures, and spend per visitor has increased 147 per cent to date.
Unit 7 and neighbouring former retail units which now house cultural organisations like West Yorkshire Print Workshop, West Yorkshire Archives and Children’s Art School contributed to the town centre’s recovery by providing a space where residents could go and experience culture. This effort was supported by Covid-19 recovery initiatives like #HEARTyourtown, which invested in local artists to bring colour and creativity to Kirklees town centre outdoor spaces.
In addition, our market services partnered with Kirklees College to support traders to employ and develop 10 apprentices, some of whom are now running their own market stall or working in shops nearby. Twenty traders benefited from tailored workshops and one-to-one tuition on the role of digital marketing and social media in driving business delivered in partnership with Google. This was complimented by ‘Click and Collect’ and home deliveries, which provided a lifeline to traders and communities.
The impact
The council’s culture and tourism services and our partners’ approach to cultural production has been to test and further understand place-based cultural practice and its ability to act as a driver for local economic development which has created unique opportunities in Queensgate.
When Covid restrictions were eased, all Temporary Contemporary spaces on the Piazza reopened to encourage more visitors into the town, increase secondary spend and create more opportunities for creative people and organisations to showcase their work. Weekly Piazza footfall figures increased from an average of 39,550 in 2021 to 45,314 this year.
After its initial focus on the Market and Piazza, the Temporary Contemporary project expanded to include other temporary spaces in Huddersfield which were advertised via the Hello Huddersfield web-platform hosted by the Huddersfield Business Improvement District.
Temporary Contemporary has benefited both the University and the council. The School of Art submitted this project as an impact case study to the assessment process determining future research funding in UK Higher Education.
The markets service’s partnership with Kirklees College has become an important route to introduce young people to their work beyond Queensgate market, including engaging them in redevelopment plans for Dewsbury Market and the town centre. Staff believe working with the college has already helped them bring more young people into the market and ensure its redevelopment appeals to them.
How is the new approach being sustained?
We are sustaining momentum and progress through partnerships seeking collaborative opportunities across the culture and tourism services and the council more widely, as well as with external organisations and individuals.
Our partners remain committed to developing the programmes of activity in the space and trialling in other Kirklees’ towns. We continue to support Kirklees district-wide creative and cultural people, businesses and organisations.
In collaboration with the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield and Temporary Contemporary, we supported Cultures of Place, a new festival programme which ran from 24 June - 4 July 2022.
The festival introduces a range of range of events drawing on research from across the school including art, architecture, creative writing, cultural studies, design, English literature, fashion, film, history, media, music, performance and textiles.
Hosted across three sites - Queensgate campus (University of Huddersfield), Queensgate Indoor Market and The Piazza - this programme of activities presents many different exchanges and engagements with local arts and cultural organisations, community groups, existing cultural institutions in Huddersfield and place-based initiatives like Temporary Contemporary, Year of Music 2023, WOVEN in Kirklees, Huddersfield Literature Festival, and Children’s Biennale. Early estimates show that over 1,000 people have accessed the festival and nearly 400 people visited Unit 7 during that time.
A FutureLearn MOOC module on Cultures of Place led by the University of Huddersfield will go live in January 2023, giving wider access to the festival and work on place.
Lessons learned
From our experiences, we understand that a collaborative, place-based approach generates opportunity and energy for mutually beneficial cultural initiatives.
The Cultural Heart is the key driver for maintaining activity in Queensgate and provides a strategic focus to all decisions made for the area. Importantly, the learnings from our partnership work and meanwhile initiatives at Queensgate will help shape the significant investment into culture in Huddersfield through the Cultural Heart and will guide our cultural development activity across Kirklees.
Temporary Contemporary showed that access to space can help provide the test bed for innovation and the freedom needed to develop, grow and experiment. Access to meanwhile space provided opportunity for conversations with existing and new audiences, customers and users. Moreover, the initiative has created a space that can facilitate engagement with a wide range of groups, individuals and organisations.
It has been a positive experience supporting and growing Unit 7 and Temporary Contemporary, as a way of encouraging everyday familiarity with visual arts and culture. Visitors have interacted with Unit 7 as a base to find out more about the Cultural Heart developments centred around the Piazza, and this has given early and tangible momentum to the project and will help build audiences for the new Huddersfield Art Gallery. Artists have also outlined how there are few opportunities to exhibit in such a large and accessible space.
The Cultural Heart public consultation space, located in the Piazza, gives residents the opportunity to actively engage with our regeneration plans for the area and shape them.
It sits alongside public services, cultural organisations, retailers and traders that otherwise wouldn’t coexist.
Contact
Richard D. Smith, Strategic Creative Development Manager – Culture & Visitor Economy, Kirklees Council
Email: [email protected]