Benjamin on Klee

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, 
Theses on the Philosophy of History

People power

Today we launched a project I’ve been working on for two or three years now; a new climate fund for the Northwest that focuses on local, sustainable projects as a viable route to achieve carbon reductions whilst combating fuel poverty. It’s called ‘Foundation’.

Foundation, a climate fund for the Northwest is launching with a modest but significant scale and will deliver £1m per year for local, community based carbon projects. It will also give individuals and businesses the opportunity to donate to local community projects across the region that are helping to combat climate change whilst advancing social justice and tackling problems like fuel poverty. 

Money raised will be spent on carbon reduction projects ranging from insulation, solar panels and wind turbines, to biological carbon sinks like peat bogs. The fund will be managed by Groundwork Northwest, chaired by United Utilities and with an initial investment of £1.6m from the Northwest Regional Development Agency, has a target to raise an additional £3m in donations over the next three years. 

Foundation is as much about social equity as carbon reduction – projects must realise a reduction in carbon, but equally must deliver a wider range of benefits; including supporting families struggling to pay their heating bills, assisting local schools and community groups, investing in ‘green collar’ jobs and ultimately developing the region’s low carbon economy. 

How did we help? Well we led the development of the entire concept (basically to develop a socially-engaged, local offset fund) with the help of a range of partners including Pannone, BDO Stoy Hayward, Arup, Quantum, Vision 21 and a host of others. Once we were into the launch phase, with Groundwork leading, we developed the Foundation name and brand, plus its website, media relations, marketing materials and we managed its launch.

Brand Earth

This year sees the 175th anniversary of a milestone in corporate responsibility. In 1833 we finally made slavery illegal, or at least that was the headline. 

For 30 years or so there’d been a loophole in the law that allowed companies to continue to trade, facing a possible £100 per head fine if they got caught. Or they threw slaves into the sea at the first sign of an approaching Royal Navy vessel.


Whatever, we closed the loophole.

Corporate behaviour being what it is, too often, a further loophole remained. Any slave over the age of six wasn’t freed, they became ‘apprentices’, indentured as before. Years would pass before their shackles were loosened.

Then there was a compensation package of £20 million for slave owners, and exclusions, too: one for the East India Company and one for Ceylon.

It’s an extreme example but an informative one. No matter how heinous the corporation’s behaviour, there always appears to be some wiggle room.

Leap forward to 1970 and a burgeoning social responsibility movement got a hefty thwack around the head from the arch monetarist, Milton Friedman. His now famous essay, required reading for rapacious MBAs worldwide, appeared in the New York Times, stating that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”.

Ethical Corporation magazine - a good read - spoke on his death in 2006 of the service that Friedman did for the world of CSR. He made progressives in business sharpen up their act, add some rigour to their thinking.

They’re probably right and in some ways I may even be with Friedman on this one (at which point my oldest friends and colleagues will no doubt faint), my only major shift would be in what defines the ‘rules of the game’. Friedman’s stricture was legal compliance; mine would be about the corporation’s wider contract with society.

This fast and imperfect trolley dash through the history of corporations is designed to reveal that a) I’m good at looking things up on Wikipedia and b) that when you read the latest news report on ‘green brands’ or ‘ethical consumers’ or ‘fashionistas who wear hemp’ you realise that this is a dialogue that has been ongoing since King Magnus IV of Sweden created the oldest limited company - Stora Kopparberg mining corp - in 1347.

There is nothing new in corporations seeking profit but that pursuit has, from day one, been set against a context of wider social good. As a society we continue to fasten a judgemental eye on the corporation. A GfK NOP poll in May revealed that consumers rank the Northwest’s very own Co-operative Group as the most ethical corporation, retaining the top spot that it held in 2007. Next up come the Body Shop and M&S, with Innocent Drinks and Divine entering the top ten for the first time. Importantly though, the survey reveals some skepticism in the marketplace: just 18% of the 3000 consumers interviewed, compared to 21% in 2007, believed that business ethics have improved in Britain.

Those two new entries into the top ten, Innocent and Divine, are telling. They are brands - and products - that are constructed from the ground up as ‘eco-brands’. They follow a market appetite for sustainable products that has clearly entered the mainstream. They are not alone: ‘I am not a plastic bag’, anyone?

So can all of this be labelled ‘greenwash’? From the corporation that uses the gobbledegook of CSR ‘benchmarking’ or ‘continued improvement matrices’ to the conspicuous consumption that makes us feel better about using more of the Earth’s resources, is this another inflection of the free market capitalism which Friedman so adored and which a massive 82% of us still view with suspicion?

Perhaps. And can any brand or corporation be beyond intense scrutiny and examination in the age of mass communications where a 1,000 blogs can be updated in the blink of an eye? Ted Turner of AOL Time Warner once said that in the Internet Age it could take only seven minutes for your corporate brand to be damaged, globally, if you cocked things up.

If you want to take a more empowered look at what is, or isn’t greenwash then I’d urge you to download the greenwash guide recently published by our good friends at Futerra. As ever it’s pleasing combination of intelligent analysis with a tip-strip you can blue tack to your computer screen.

My closing comment would be this, however:

It’s not just corporations that have a contract with society: we have one too. People drive cars, eat meat, buy cheap shit and do too little to reflect their own value sets in their daily lives. We live in a dissonant fug for too much of the time and yet still reserve the right to judge corporations. If we shift our behavioural patterns then the marketplace changes too. The brightest and the best in the business world know this, they’re not stupid.

We are powerful, but we have to exert that power. We are complicit, and that should be in our frame of reference too. It’s a hippy mantra but Ghandi was right.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Quote me happy

“A new political movement is beginning to emerge. Rooted in protest, its advocates are not bounded by national geography, a shared culture or history, and its members comprise a veritable ragtag of by now millions of NGOs, grassroots movements, campaigning corporations, and individuals.”

Noreena Hertz

“To be truly radical, is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
Raymond Williams

“The bold evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs clearly has its dangers and drawbacks; the jury is still out on whether it was ultimately a good idea. But it has equipped us to avoid or solve the problems we’ve created.”
Amory Lovins

“My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of of vigour and intensity is put into it.”
Bertrand Russell

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”
Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan

“Cast your whole vote, not a slip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”
Henry David Thorough

“My country is the world and my religion is to do good.”
Thomas Paine

Bluecoat goes green

Last year we installed an indoor forest at the Annual General Meeting of the Northwest Regional Development Agency, with eco-films showing amongst the ring of native trees we'd put in place at the Manchester Central Convention Centre. Now Creative Concern has delivered a second tree-based installation, this time outside the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool as part of the city's Capital of Culture year.

The installation is made up of 16 mature maple trees, panels with quotations and reflections from famous writiers and a light and sound installation powered by a giant 'solar' tree which is an integral part of the installation.

Sustainability and climate change, improving the ambience of the streets and even the health benefits of trees in the city will be explored as part of the work, which is in situ until September 14 and which will be there tomorrow as we run our Form>Wood conference on the importance of timber as a building resource.

The project is a partnership between the Forestry Commission, NWDA, Regional Parks Xchange, Groundwork and the Environment Agency.

Form>wood>future

We’re just in the process of finalising the details for a conference in Liverpool called Form>Wood. Its focus is on timber as a sustainable design and construction material and the event is a partnership between the Northwest Forestry Framework (which I chair), the Northwest Development Agency, Forestry Commission, Community Forests Northwest and Capital of Culture. 

We’re aiming for a mix of architects, developers and timber industry representatives, we’ve got Ted Cullinan delivering a keynote address and we’re staging it at the newly re-opened, sublime Bluecoat on 15 May.

The principle aim of the event is a simple one. We want more people commissioning, designing and building with wood, timber and trees at the forefront of their minds.

Why? Because the buildings we live and work in, through their construction and then through the energy we use to heat or light them, account for over a quarter of our region’s carbon emissions. For the residential sector alone, this represents 17 million tonnes of carbon, a figure which the Northwest has committed to reducing by at least 7 million tonnes by 2020.

Trees, woodland and the timber industry can play a pivotal role in helping us tackle climate change head on, whether it is reducing our energy use or helping us adapt to the changes in climate which, no matter what we do, cannot be avoided.

Imagine, for a moment, asking a team of talented engineers to invent a single device that could absorb and then lock up carbon, provide a carbon neutral building material or energy source, help stabilise vulnerable soils, provide a flood management system and offer a source of shade and cooling as the planet’s temperatures begin to rise.

And then imagine asking them to make it a beautiful and inspiring object too, one that created a wildlife habitat and pollution filter, to boot.

It’s a simple and powerful proposition. Trees and timber offer a sustainable and immediate solution to a host of climate-related challenges. Using wood as a building material, from timber frames or cladding through to entire constructions made from wood, has to be a priority for architects, engineers and developers who want to take climate change seriously.

The low energy solution

How much could this save? A significant amount. Replacing a single cubic metre of concrete or red brick with the same volume of timber can save around one tonne of carbon dioxide. Concrete uses five times as much energy to produce as wood; steel uses six times as much. If you expand this out to an average two-storey dwelling, using a timber frame alone could save four tonnes of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving 14,000 miles by car. If the 26,000 additional households forecast for the Northwest by 2026 were all built in this way, we could save over 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, through timber frames alone.

The switch from materials with a high level of ‘embodied’ energy such as steel or concrete is just one way in which wood can help reduce the carbon footprint of our building stock, but wood is also a good insulator, too, whether used for frames, windows or cladding. Timber’s natural insulation properties mean that double-glazed or even triple-glazed windows for example can achieve the highest energy window ratings, beating alternatives such as PVC or aluminium.

Europe’s great carbon ‘sink’

Using wood as a construction material also increases the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by Europe’s standing forest, this is because more than 99 per cent of the timber used in the UK is softwood from European forests and as these forests are managed sustainably, we plant more new trees every time we extract timber destined for sawmills and processing plants right across the continent. In fact, European forest cover is increasing by over 9,000 square kilometres every single year.

Add to the product mix the other environmental benefits of wood: it is organic, enhances biodiversity, can be easily recycled and avoids the need for quarrying and the extraction of aggregates, and you have an unbeatable case for timber as a truly sustainable construction material.

A growing market

The market is starting to see the value in wood. Timber frame housing increased by 15 per cent in 2005, for example, while other types of construction actually saw their markets decline. Timber framed housing now represents 20 per cent of new build and the projections for 2008 are that one in every four homes built will be timber framed, but we could do much, much more. Globally around 70 per cent of homes are built, often entirely, from wood and as close to home as Scotland, the market share for timber framed housing is a much healthier 73 per cent. We have ample scope for improvement.

We can do more with timber today, too. Traditionally timber framed houses could reach two or three storeys at most but these levels are increasing to five, six or seven stories and with engineering performance increasing all the time, the industry research body TRADA expects these performance levels to increase still further. The construction times for a timber framed building are shorter, too and they offer a safer, more efficient construction site with a typical house being weather tight in less than five days.

The beauty of wood

The materials are available, the environmental credentials are strong and the research shows that wood can perform when compared to the heavier, less sustainable alternatives. The challenge now is to achieve a significant ‘step change’ in the commissioning, designing and building of homes and workplaces that are made all or in part, from wood. Wood is certainly getting some good press. Ted Cullinan, keynote speaker at the Northwest Forestry Framework’s ‘Form>Wood’ event and RIBA Gold Medal winner this year is known for his timber constructions, in particular the Downland Gridshell in West Sussex.

Architects like Sheppard Robson are developing affordable new housing forms - such as the Lighthouse - out of wood and in the Northwest region have shown how spectacular wood can be through their proposed wood cladding of a car park in Penrith. Wooden buildings in the Northwest are also winning awards, with the Feilden Bradley Clegg-designed Formby Pool collecting a RIBA award in 2007.

And I used to live in an award-winning wooden building myself until we decided to start crazily renovating crumbling piles of brick as I was one of the first buyers to sign up for Stephenson-Bell’s superb Chorlton Park flats complex. Just along from our offices in the Northern Quarter, BDP’s new HQ is close to completion and is beautifully clad in wood.

What these great, innovative designs reveal is that building from wood offers a real opportunity from public buildings and cultural venues through to the new houses we know we will have to construct as our demand increases for new homes regionally and nationally. The beauty of wood - aside from its obvious aesthetic credentials - is that it offers a more sustainable future for developments both large and small.

The form really should be wood.

Green spot

The latest natural media installation from Creative Concern took shape this week at the Northwest Regional Development Agency’s (NWDA) Annual Conference and General Meeting (Thursday, October 18) where we treated delegates to a wooded wonderland that celebrates the environmental renaissance of England’s Northwest.

A native forest of six-metre high beeches, elders and silver birches illuminated with low-energy LED lights was installed in the exhibition space of the AGM to form part of a ‘Green Spot’ exhibition. Three 42-inch plasma screens were set amongst the circle of trees to show a series of short films about the environmental land regeneration programmes and green schemes taking place across the region. The films highlight the work of the NWDA and the other Green Spot partners, all of which are working for the sustainable development of England's Northwest.

Partners in the exhibition included the Forestry Commission, Mersey Waterfront, Groundwork, Natural Economy Northwest, ENWORKS, Environment Connect and the Mersey Basin Campaign.

Helping us pull off the Green Spot were our partners at The Potting Sheds (who sourced and installed Green Spot), Mayhood Brothers of Burscough (tree suppliers) and Steve Massam and Peter Grimshaw Tree Surgeons (for wood and bark used in the installation.

Homo ethicus - beyond booze and fags

We now spend more on ethical products than we do on booze and fags, according to the Co-operative Bank’s last Ethical Consumerism report.

There are organic clothes at ASDA. Virgin’s positioning is all about climate change. Coffee is fairtrade at Starbucks, with the option of frothy soya milk. You can even buy ethical erotica - whatever that might entail - from Anita Roddick’s daughter, Sam. And here in Manchester we’ve seen Tesco invest £25 million in a new Centre for Sustainable Consumption at the University of Manchester.

The high street, not to mention online retailers or out-of-town stores, is witnessing a seismic shift amongst shoppers. We have moved into a new era for retailing. The age of the ethical consumer has arrived.

Now none of this is news to those of us who were buying fairtrade Guatemalan body putty and veganic sausages back in the late 80s and early 90s, but this is totally mainstreamed activity now. We are witnessing a permanent change in the way that people make key purchasing decisions.
In other words, this is no consumer fad. The ground rules have changed.

So back to that market data. In 2005 the sales of ethical products in the UK for the first time exceeded the amount we spent as a nation on alcohol and tobacco, which netted £28 billion while the market for ethical goods, which reached £29 billion, up 11 per cent on the previous year. As you might imagine, within the detail of the report some fascinating trends are revealed. Ethical shareholding grew by 15 per cent over the year; we spent a quarter more on ethical clothing; our spend on green energy supplies grew by 42 per cent; and our appetite for organic food grew by 30 per cent. Remarkable growth, all in one year. In total the ethical market growth of 11 per cent was almost ten times greater than the rise in household expenditure.

It also contrasts with the annual rise in retail sales charted by the British Retail Consortium, which stood at 3.9 per cent in March of this year.

From cars, to cashpoints, to cotton, there is an ever-growing army of consumers out there switching allegiance to products that differentiate themselves in the marketplace not through price or celebrity endorsement but simply because they do less harm.

‘Buy different’

So how should we describe this new era? I’d borrow from the ‘Think Different’ campaign run by Apple Computer in the 1990s and suggest that what we have on our hands now is the ‘Buy Different’ generation.

Buy different. They want to change the way they shop. They want to balance affordability, desirability and sustainability. They also want the full story behind the brand, warts and all. They want connection.

Buy different. They want different kinds of products that are designed from the ground up. Like the CIS Sustainable Leaders Trust investment fund, the first ever green trust to top the UK All Companies sector. Or the Dyson, or the Prius, or the Innocent Smoothie. The motto is to ‘differentiate’.

Buy different. They want to know that the companies they engage with are different in the suppliers they use and the way they catalyse positive global trade. Are you greening the supply chain? They will ask. Do you respect union rights? Are you implicated in corrupt regimes? Are children involved in manufacturing your products?

Buy different. The new consumers want products and companies that reflect who they are and what they believe in.

In fact it looks as if the barcode - celebrating its 60th anniversary next year by the way - needs to be redesigned from black to green, and that we need to add a new set of lines and spaces to tell consumers the true cost of the products in their basket. We need to redefine the barcode, just as consumers are redefining our global patterns of consumption.

For corporations getting their head around the ‘Buy Different’ drivers covering new types of shopping and differentiated products there is still the third and most important driver: trust. You can’t sell a green product for example and expect to get away with the  remaining 80 per cent of your portfolio having a poor impact on the environment or local communities. There is no place in the new retail era for tokenism, you will get rumbled. You can’t go ‘beyond petroleum’ and yet still make a fortune piping gas and oil across Kazahkstan. It won’t wash.

You can’t talk the talk without walking the walk.

The Co-operative Bank - one of Creative Concern’s clients - knows this. That’s why they’ve been publishing independently-verified sustainability reports now for almost a decade. Their reports examine in detail ecological and social responsibility, as well as performance in delivering value. The 2002 report for the Co-operative Bank was rated by the United Nations Environment Programme as the world’s best. They have won the European Sustainability Reporting Awards twice, in 2002 and 2004.

This is not a plastic bag.

As the round-the-corner queues for the celebrity-endorsed ‘This is not a plastic bag’ have shown, ethical consumerism is now a dominating force.

The rules have changed.

Ted Turner, the CEO of AOL Time Warner has gone on record as saying that in the new hyperlinked, globalised world  of email, blogs and websites you could see even the largest global brands taken apart in as little as seven minutes due to an ethical slip of one sort or another.
Seven minutes, the time it would take to destroy brands built across decades.

We have entered a new era for retailing, the Buy Different generation is calling the shots. We have entered the age of the homo ethicus and there’s no turning back. Homo ethicus. A Prius-driving, American Apparel-wearing, turbine-touting new breed of consumer that will rock the retail world.

The Field

Connect. Illuminate. Energise. What more could you ask for than a field full of fluorescent tubes drawing their power from overhead transmission lines? I went tonight to see Richard  Box’s installation called ‘The Field’, an arrangement of several hundred regular flourescent tubes that draw their energy from the electro-magnetic field (EMF) generated by the overhead powerlines.

Richard Box was in attendance and after we’d stumbled through a darkened field along the banks of the River Goyt to get to the installation, he proved enthusiastic about the project which had nonetheless presented a bunch of technical challenges including the fact that the energy company had reduced the power running through the overhead lines. Anyone would think that they’d done it intentionally, to downplay the rather erie impact that the installation has on you when you realise the extent and power of EMFs.

The project itself is part of Stockport/Sustrans collaboration called ‘Connect 2’ which is bidding for Lottery money to extend part of the National Cycle Network.

Greening the Northwest

Today (Monday 1 October) I’m chairing a Forum taking a good old peak and a poke at the Northwest’s Forestry Framework - the strategy for woodlands and forestry across England’s Northwest. It’s been in operational ‘mode’ for around a year now and I’m dead pleased that there’s been some progress made (though a good few challenges remain).

There is co-ordinated activity across the region taking forward a host of actions set out in our ‘Agenda for Growth’. Of the 47 actions in our plan, 43 are underway and the remainder will almost all be coming onstream in the coming year.

So across our six areas of action we are genuinely helping to bring the businesses working in woodlands and forestry together more closely into a recognisable sector; we are enhancing our region’s image through greenspace development and we have plans for the  transformation of gateway sites; we are supporting ‘greener’ farming and seeing the restoration of natural areas; we are making good links with the health sector, with education and with the prison service; we are putting efforts into developing biomass as a sustainable energy source within the region; and we are staying focused, in our sixth action area, on how we can keep improving our performance as a sector not least with the launch of a new Rural Development Programme for England.

And I am particularly pleased that we are planning a few, signature projects out of the Forestry Framework ‘stable’ that hit a number of our targets across differing action areas.

These include a plan for a conference and PR campaign called ‘Form>Wood’ which will target the architecture, design and urban development sectors with the message that wood is the sustainable and contemporary material of choice. We are also launching a programme to really get to the heart of whether our urban tree cover is as healthy as we think it is or should be and will use the results of our surveying work to raise the game of our local authorities, in particular.

So there is plenty of progress in greening the region and supporting the sector, but there are many, many challenges that remain.

We must continue to expand our partnerships beyond the usual suspects. We need to develop more joint projects like the recent Land Remediation Network we’ve established with Envirolink and we seriously need to improve our linkages to the private sector.

We need to ask ourselves, honestly, if we are trying to do too much or if the Framework is adding enough value to the region’s endeavours in our area. We must ensure we are the very opposite of a talking shop: we must be a source of action, activity and transformation.

We have to reach out and ensure that a much wider audience hears of our progress and finds out what they can do to partner up with us and help deliver our programme. We must create more of a ‘buzz’ now that our projects and activities are taking form.

And we have to improve the entire sector’s performance in a few key areas.

We have to get better at influencing regional strategies and helping shape our region’s future; a new Regional Economic Strategy is being developed and we have on the horizon the prospect of an Integrated Regional Strategy which should have woodlands, forestry and greenspace as a key component; the true ‘setting’ for prosperity and growth.

We must do our part to deliver against the region’s Climate Change Action Plan, particularly in the adaptation to climate change impacts where woodlands forestry has the power seriously help to improve the resilience of both our rural and urban areas.

Finally we need to strive for ever better levels of design and delivery. If we are given the incredible opportunity of programmes like Newlands we must create spaces and places that inspire and transform communities; that rival anything, anywhere in the world; that make England’s Northwest a region that attracts talent, investment and trade.

In 2008 we will be working to freshen up our Action Plan in the face of new national and regional developments but there will be no new strategies or visions or frameworks in the next few years; we have our plan, our stakeholders have agreed it and we will be sticking at it until all of our actions are delivered and all of our promises are made good.

Alongside a few other key areas of regional endeavour, such as the knowledge economy, climate change and work to achieve greater levels of community cohesion; our sector - woodlands and forestry - has pivotal role to play in delivering a more sustainable region for the future, a greener future for England’s Northwest.

The future is Pennine Lancashire, the legacy is Tony Wilson’s.

This week we formally launched a new brand for Pennine Lancashire, which we developed with our good friend and collaborator Peter Saville and Livesey Wilson Associates. The brand has been commissioned by Elevate, Pennine Lancashire’s Housing Market Renewal pathfinder and will be used both as a ‘flag’ under which regeneration projects will be taken forward and as a more conventional destination brand for the area.

The launch took place at Stanley House in the hills above Blackburn and included a string of tributes to Anthony H Wilson, whose vision of a ‘Seattle-style’ revinvention of the area has already launched a host of projects and brought in new energy and new ideas. We raised a flag, too.

The new brand is made up of a new graphic device called ‘Contour’ and a type treatment for ‘Pennine Lancashire’ that will be used by a host of partners across the areas of Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Ribble Valley, Hyndburn, Pendle and Rossendale.

The project was first conceived in the 2005 report ‘Dreaming of Pennine Lancashire’ which was written by tony and his partner Yvette Livesey, both of whom played a central part in the creation of the new ‘Contour’ brand.

For us, this is the latest in a line of place branding projects that have been strongly related to our region’s stunning natural environment.

The important thing for us - and I’ve said it before on this blog - is that a place brand has to represent the truth of environmental and social connections that the individual will make when arriving or experiencing place. For locals, they need to feel pride in a brand and recognise it as a faithful representation of their area; for visitors, they need to recognise the brand when they arrive and not feel that they have been duped or lied too as that is no way to build long term brand loyalty. In short, your brand is what you’re known for and should be a faithful response to the place in question.

Our new brand for Elevate and the partners across Pennine Lancashire has primarily been designed to inspire, engage and empower the people of the area to continue their work towards an economic and social renaissance. It is as much about pride as it is tourism.

The graphic device conceived by our design team is called ‘Contour’, a panoramic fusion of multi-coloured contour lines that does more than just replay the landscape of the Pennines that represents such an important framing element for communities across Rossendale, Burnley or Blackburn... it also suggests other important dimensions of Pennine Lancashire such as weaving, canals and rooftops. The lines of Contour are not static. They form a range of shapes to become suggestive of an urban landscape, for example, or of a lowland area bounded by canals or waterways.

The ribbon-like shape of the graphic helps to inform its deployment and suggests a variety of uses from panoramic boundary signs to illuminated fascias, gatefolded print and 16:9 screenshots.

The new Pennine Lancashire brand also includes a type treatment based on Res Publica Medium, a face that was selected as a modern take on the traditional serif and that would prove bold, robust and readable when used across a very wide variety of environments. It also provides a strong and solid anchor point for the more lyrical and dextrous graphic element of the brand.

And even though we’re terribly proud of the new brand we;ve created, there was much more on offer at the launch this week. The launch also included the unveiling of plans for ‘Weave’, an iconic multi-use redevelopment of a historic mill in the Weavers’ Triangle, Burnley that is being developed by Ralph Ardill of the Brand Experience Consultancy.

There was also an update on other key projects such as Chic Sheds, Sound Investments and Pennine Lancashire Squared.

Anyway, back to the new brand! Our recommendations are that it will have three key areas of use.

The first use of the brand will be a as a ‘flag under which we rally’ and builds on the words of Livesey Wilson Associates who wrote that “the disparate elements of East Lancashire need a flag to march behind, a unifying symbol to lead them to top of the mountain known as ‘successful regeneration’.

The second use of the brand will be as a more traditional ‘destination’ brand for promotions that will attract visitors or investors to the area or that will mark out your entry into, or experience of, Pennine Lancashire. Walking or cycling guides, targeted promotion at gateways, boundary markers or themed events are all good examples of where the use of the Pennine Lancashire brand will be considered.

Here the Pennine Lancashire brand has been designed to consciously connect to a ‘drivetime’ audience that is aspirational, creative and upmarket; the ‘creative class’ set out in the original Livesey Wilson report in 2005. It speaks to professionals in Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and Leeds and has the potential to unlock a day visitor market that could in time translate into new residents, new business start-ups and new investments in the area.

The third and final use will be as an endorsement or ‘kite mark’ for other projects denoting their shared lineage and set of aspirations.

We’re proud to have worked on it and proud to have worked with Anthony H Wilson.

The world's first living advert

Creative Concern (celebrating five years in business this year by the way) has launched a new concept that is set to change the face of billboard advertising, with an installation in Merseyside that replaces carbon-intensive materials with a living hedge of native willow trees. 

Here’s our press release about it: The Green Billboard is a sustainable advertising medium made entirely from willow trees with a range of environmental benefits conventional hoardings cannot offer – reduction of noise pollution, increase in tree coverage and a natural screen for unsightly developments.

And socially and economically a green billboard can also represent a long-term investment in the landscape with its fresh and unusual organic materials that make for a visual high point for local communities.

The first installation of the willow billboard is already in place and can be seen from the M53, situated on a new woodland development in Merseyside at Bidston Moss and follows months of meticulous planning by the ethical agency in partnership with Cheviot Trees and fellow design agency, Modern Designers.

Questioning the corporate responsibilities of the advertising industry to become more sustainable in their practices, Steve Connor, managing director of Creative Concern said:

“Our urban environments, which are predominately those areas where we see the biggest collections of hoarding are set to suffer a ‘heat island effect’ due to climate change. The green billboard goes some way to respond to this challenge as well as addresses the problems of air and traffic pollution by utilising trees as a natural filter.

“Finally green hoardings help bring a little bit of nature into the urban realm and offer an antidote to the modern architectural venacular of concrete and steel upon which any kind of advertising or art installation can be mounted.”

The natural medium offers the creative community a new challenge, too, according to Modern Designers' Mat Bend:

"For the Bidston Moss design, which celebrates the greening of the Northwest, we've created a billboard that literally allows the leaves of the trees to grow through it, fusing a dramatic and powerful message with the very same medium that is carrying it; green billboards have great potential for innovative design responses, particularly as part of regeneration schemes like this one."

Measuring 30m by 2.5m the only sustainable outdoor advertisement in this world was delivered on behalf of the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) and the Forestry Commission (FC), and displays the partnership’s message ‘ One Tree Is Planted Every Ten Seconds In This Region’. The billboard has been established on a new community woodland area at Bidston Moss on the Wirral Peninsula, one of a number of derelict or under-used sites being reclaimed as part of the Northwest's £70 million Newlands programme.

By utilising hand-cut letters fixed onto the hoarding, the organic nature of the NWDA and FC’s advertisement will be able to evolve, allowing the branches of the growing willow to show through, becoming an integral part of the green billboard.

And unlike traditional outdoor advertising mediums, including digital and mobile street furniture, the green billboard offers a fresh and innovative communication channel that demonstrates real social and environmental commitment to their customers.

More photographs? Click here.

Branding places, loving spaces

Creative Concern is busy working with Peter Saville on a new brand for Pennine Lancashire. The process has involved discussion ‘place brands’ afresh with a whole host of local stakeholders, agencies and politicians. The launch of the brand is on 17 September and we hope it will be a fitting tribute to Anthony Wilson, a good friend whose vision we are working to in this project.

For us, branding spaces and places is a creative activity that stands well apart from the creation of logotypes and graphic banners for consumer goods, service companies or fashion labels. The first and most obvious distinction is that the brand has to be true to the experience of the place itself, both for the indigenous population and for the visitor.

As Peter Saville says: “Your brand is what you’re known for.”

A place brand has to represent the truth of environmental and social connections that the
individual will make when there. Put most simply, your brand is ‘what you are known for’ and to
overlay that knowledge with anything other than a faithful creative response is misguided and ultimately flawed. If you promise sylvan wonderlands, polished palaces of alabaster or streets paved with gold then the reality had better meet that promise, or visitors and residents alike will lose faith in the brand immediately.

Another vital distinction is that its brand is not simply a slogan or a strapline with a colourful badge attached to it, designed to attract and secure a notional horde of peripatetic tourists or international investors who may, or may not exist. Too often when towns or cities create a new logo or strapline it is more of a civic cry for help than a call for the partners to rally around a shared vision of the future.

This latter mission, a rallying call, is the intention of the Pennine Lancashire brand. It is much better to describe this brand for Pennine Lancashire as a banner under which partnerships come together to achieve great things.

And if that banner attracts visitors, too, then all  the better.

Topophilia

We’ve had the good fortune to work on a number of place brands recently, including brands for Wirral, Sefton, Manchester, Salford and now, Pennine Lancashire. One piece of pure, raw inspiration for this work is the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan whose thoughts on ‘psychogeograpy’ and what he calls ‘topophilia’ are really powerful.

Our work with Peter Saville on the brand for Pennine Lancashire has developed a wide range of visual themes exploring landscape, connectivity and diversity. As a starting point for their deliberation, the design team here at Creative Concern were embracing this concept of ‘topophilia’, a phrase coined by the Yi-Fu Tuan in his 1973 book of the same name.

Literally meaning ‘Love of Place’, topophilia moves beyond what has become known as ‘sense of place’ branding or ‘placemaking’ and reaffirms the need for place branding to be more about emotional connection, knowledge and belonging. As an approach it helps to strengthen ownership of a brand and as a result leads to a more robust and longer-lasting brand that draws people and organisations toward it; it helps creatives to develop a brand that acts as a rallying point or focus of shared attention.

Here are some words from his book of the same name:

“The word ‘topophilia’ is a neologism, useful in that it can be defined broadly to include all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment. These differ greatly in intensity, subtlety and mode of expression. The response to environment may be primarily aesthetic: it may then vary from the fleeting pleasure one gets from a view to the equally fleeting but far more intense sense of beauty that is suddenly revealed. The response may be tactile, a delight in the feel of air, water, earth. More permanent and less easy to express are feelings that one has toward a place because it is home, the locus of memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood.” Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia

The banal destroyer

Jeffrey Sach’s recent Reith Lectures series kicked off with a timely reference to the concept of the Anthropocene as created by Paul Crutzen. The concept is pretty simple if sobering - that we are now in a period of Earth’s history where humankind’s activities are having a permanent and marked impact on the biosphere.

Sach’s second lecture, Survival in the Anthropocene, is totally worth a listen.

The Crutzen reference got me thinking about the phrase that Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita as they tested the first atomic weapon at Los Alamos in the States. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he pondered as the mushroom cloud ascended.

The Oppenheimer moment triggered off a further thought.

As a generation x-er I grew up with a mortal fear of Oppenheimer’s creation and considered Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to be a world-crushing threat that hung over us each and every day. A couple of decades on and the CND badge (perhaps sadly) is no longer on my lapel but I work now on behavioural change campaigns to help save our small blue planet, developing strategies for jamming the moments of dissonance where we commit those small, incremental acts of ecocide, such as leaving the lights on or trashing the paper rather than recycling it.

And it got me to a final conclusion that one of the great tragedies about the Anthropocene and our unsustainable slide towards environmental collapse is how banal our planetary destruction is. There is none of the bleak and chilling heroism of an actor-president and a vodka soaked comrade with their fingers poised over nuclear arsenals that have the megaton-power to pulverise the planet thirteen times over. A big bang, and no tomorrow.

Instead our collapse could be a traced along a trail of SUV brochures and disposable nappies and pissed-up cheap flights to Marbella; of new TVs and second cars and lazy school runs; of badly designed plywood palaces and of pointless trolley-dashes around out-of-town mega-malls just to fill the aching chasm within.

What a way to go out. At least nuclear oblivion had a certain level of grim panache, whereas environmental collapse, when you think about it, is just embarrassing and sloppy.

So here’s our new reason to save the planet: humankind deserves a much better epitaph.