We are often told about the crisis of towns, retail and money making for example, and how to invigorate our ‘tired’ environment. Less attention is given to the countryside’s issues, usually cloaked by the rural fantasies that most townies still have.

In this article I want to explore what we have and what we might do, and how we can all have a say in what would improve our everyday lives, for ourselves and for other people in our shared spaces, place-making for all.

I have seen many changes in Exmouth since coming here in 1996, having abandoned Oxford which has been transformed from a manageable medieval town into a chaotic mess dominated by one of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary life, cars, tourists and reckless retail development.

One the best changes I have witnessed is the transformation of Strand Gardens, where the dominance of cars has been replaced, despite vested interests at the time, by an open, multi-use and more democratic space, the safe sociability of human life.

This is in sharp contrast to the Magnolia Centre, especially so the ‘new’ south side and the wasteland of carpark and delivery area that is trapped between Strand, Rolle Street and Parade. This all needs to be replaced by an open green square, with relocated shops on a scale that can be used, will be used, not abandoned. Of course this retail ‘space’ is somebody’s assets, and change of use and purpose is made unnecessary difficult. It is strange how compulsory purchase only works for some people.

It is clear to most thinking people that we need more creative space. This requires an imaginative leap to transcend our out of date obsessions with the accumulation of money, where far too much planning, designing and building is reduced to the dominance of asset finance, where simply owning great swathes of land, building (corporate and domestic) equals equity and power, that suits a minority of people and corrupts thinking on other needs. Not the least of issues is the continual trashing of the environment. The look of places, the aesthetics of environment remains a key concern, and the Tesco store near to me is a prime example. That corporate enterprise employed someone to build a passing facsimile of a vernacular market building. It’s okay, but what do Tesco do to repeat their endless concern with brand, competition and money-making, they put big hoardings all over the front restating that this is indeed TESCO. They do have a sign at the entrance, is that not enough? We see this everywhere, all the time, we are told this is an appropriate way of seeing, but it really just clutters up the environment, invariably just more ugliness.

Much has been said over past decades about the lost value of the organic community/neighbourhood, and the attempts to reimagine our physical and mental spaces to ensure opportunities to share space more effectively and fair.

What I mean by organic community is one that has developed over time out of necessity and experience, to deal with the needs of day and beyond. This is a distinctive culture, including symbolic language of course, and with shared values of who and what matters. There is also often a literally conservative, often nostalgic, beauty in the vanishing? Also defensive attitudes towards the State, which does not like freethinking and grassroots democracy, out of its control. Politicians, the custodians of the State apparatus, will tell you differently, but people have tended not to believe them. These ways of life require people to look outwards as well as inwards, to share and collaborate, build social bonds. Wish dreams, utopias, requiring imagination and creativity, and resistance to the rampant consumerism I discussed in my previous article. The growth (not new) of Green politics, in the widest sense, is a positive vision.

We can do better.