Gloucester wins national Best Bar None award

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Jason I J Smith

Gloucester’s commitment to keeping the city centre’s nightlife safe has resulted in the city being a named as a winner in the national Best Bar None awards.

On the 2nd February 2016 Gloucester won the award for ‘Best New Scheme’ in the national Best Bar None awards.

Pubs, bars and clubs in Gloucester competed with cities across the country to receive national recognition for its commitment to improving the city’s nightlife experience.

Gloucester accredited 15 new premises in its first year of its commitment to improving the city’s night life. As a result of this commitment and the hard work of the NightSafe groups, the city was short listed as a finalist in the ‘Best New Scheme’ category.

The Best Bar None award is a nationally recognised award scheme which aims to reduce alcohol related crime and disorder, help licensed traders to build relationships between themselves, the police and local authorities, and to recognise good practice.

Jennie Dallimore, cabinet member for Communities and Neighbourhoods, said: “We are delighted that Gloucester has been chosen as the winner in the “Best New Scheme” category.

“Both the assessors and the fifteen premises that signed up worked incredibly hard to get set up quickly and achieve such high standards. It highlights the commitment to working together to make Gloucester a safer City.

“Winning this award is great, but the real prize is the outcomes of the Best Bar None initiative. I hope that next year we will attract even more venues to take part. ”

Steve Wood, local community Inspector, said: “Best Bar None is a great national initiative to raise the standards for our night-time economy.

“Gloucester was keen to take part and we are thrilled to be chosen as winners of the “Best New Scheme” award. We are committed to ensuring safer days and nights for all, through our partnership working in the City”

Summary of Chancellor’s long-awaited Spending Review

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Jason I J Smith

UK’s Economic & Fiscal Performance

The Chancellor reiterated the growth of the UK economy and the falling deficit, pointing to the following statistics:

The Office for Budget Responsibility says that since 2010, no advanced economy has grown faster than the UK.
Growth forecasts are 2.4% for this year, 2.4% for next year and 2.5% for 2017.
UK deficit will fall this year and will keep falling until 2019/2020 where a surplus is estimated.
The North has grown quicker than the South and jobs growth in the Midlands been quickest of all regions.
Productivity is growing slowly but still lags behind other advanced economies.

Key Announcements

In addition to the overview of the UK’s economic and fiscal performance, the Chancellor also made the following announcements:

Announcements on the business rates review have been delayed until the 2016 Budget.
Rate relief for small businesses has been extended for another year.
Confirmation of the localisation of business rates, first announced at the Conservative Party Conference.
30% additional reduction to local government budgets.
Tax credit reductions will be scrapped but £12 billion of welfare savings will still be delivered in full.
Devolution of corporation tax to Northern Ireland likely to go ahead following agreement between different parties in Stormont.
No cuts to police budgets and 30% more spending for counter-terrorism.
£12 billion more spending on capital investment.
Sustained funding for some cultural amenities with galleries and museums benefiting but the Department for Culture Media and Sport suffering a cut of 20%.
£6.9 billion investment to build 400,000 affordable homes by the end of this parliament.
37% cut to the budget of Department for Transport
24% cut to HM Treasury
17% cut to the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

2012 – 2014 overall number of overseas visitors to Gloucester increased by 66.6%. Visitor spend over this same period increased by 17.2%.

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Jason I J Smith

The information below comes from the International Passenger Survey (IPS). The IPS is a continuous survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It covers all major air, sea and tunnel ports, providing detailed information on the numbers and types of visits made by people travelling to and from the UK.

Below three tables showing the number of overseas visits to Gloucester, Gloucestershire and the UK, and how much they spent, in the three years from 2012 to 2014. Unfortunately, the sample size from the IPS data at a city level is too small to break down by visit purpose. The figures for the city of Gloucester (Table 1) include visitors travelling for the purpose of study, visiting friends and relatives, business, holiday and other. There is also an unexpected spike in visitor spend in Gloucester in 2013. For this reason we have included the figures from 2012. However, information at a county, regional and UK basis can be reliably used and so the information provided for Gloucestershire (Table 2) and the UK (Table 3) is of overseas visitors travelling to the UK on holiday.

For more information on regional and county statistics on inbound tourism please visit our website: http://www.visitbritain.org/nation-region-county-data

Total inbound visits to Gloucester

Year	Visits	Spend (Million)
2014	70,000	£17
2013	57,000	£47
2012	42,000	£14.5

Between 2012 and 2014 the overall number of overseas visitors to Gloucester increased by 66.6%. Visitor spend over this same period increased by 17.2%.

Total inbound holiday visits to Gloucestershire

Year	Visits	Spend (Million)
2014	118,147	£41.86
2013	95,932	£38.34
2012	68,795	£30.05

Between 2012 and 2014 the number of overseas visitors on holiday to Gloucestershire increased by 72%. Holiday visitor spend over this same period increased by 36.4%.

Total inbound holiday visits to UK

Year	Visits (Million)	Spend (Billion)
2014	13.58	£8.65
2013	12.66	£8.44
2012	11.96	£7.46

Between 2012 and 2014 the number of overseas visitors on holiday to UK increased by 13.5%. Holiday visitor spend over this same period increased by 16%.

Can the arts drive regeneration?

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Jason I J Smith

Take a walk around the Old Town of Folkestone and, if you look closely, just over the road from the buddleia-strewn bombsite that is still left over from World War I, you will find what appears to be a tiny pink baby’s sock lying on the pavement as if dropped from a passing pushchair. It is actually a diminutive Tracey Emin bronze sculpture, painted to look like the real thing. The antithesis of monumental art, it is part of the legacy of the first Folkestone Triennial of contemporary art, held in 2008. Look up, past Stirling Prizewinner Alison Brooks’ Quarterhouse arts centre and you will see Nathan Coley’s fairground lights on a scaffold spelling out ‘Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens’. Across the way, sprawling up the side of the valley, innovative architecture/art practice has carried out an almost miraculous reimagining of the formerly derelict escarpment as an urban park crammed with interest, wit and fun. And at the top of the hill Banksy made his own uninvited contribution to the just completed 2014 Triennial and to a creative regeneration project that is attracting international attention.

It is through the proliferation of small-scale, local activity that the project has sunk deep roots, spread branches and flourished

The Folkestone Triennial is just one component of an ambitious joined-up approach to arts-led regeneration that has been unfolding in this deprived Kent coastal town since 2001. Other elements include far-reaching educational reforms, the establishment of a sustainable creative quarter where 90 buildings have been renovated and placed in the hands of an arts charity, university research into the links between arts and health, support for the creative industries, and large-scale infrastructure projects including decommissioning an old railway line and redeveloping the historic harbour. The overall programme sets out to engage the whole town in creativity, and it is through the proliferation of small-scale, local activity that the project has sunk deep roots, spread branches and flourished.

Yoko Ono was one of the star turns of an al fresco art show that pushed determinedly beyond the confines of the conventional white cube gallery. Now the grande dame of peace activism and contemporary art has fallen in love with the town and its people. She says: “Folkestone is a town that wants the world to know that it likes art, that it is sensitive to art. I thought I was coming to a sleepy little town, but I found this amazing energy – so much activity – a kind of spiritual rising. I went there to give energy and it was the other way round. Visit Folkestone – it could cleanse your spirit.”

It is a tough job to square spiritual cleansing with more traditional metrics of regeneration, such as economic growth or the numbers of jobs created and dilapidated properties renovated. But a few months ago, the BBC’s Economics Editor Robert Peston told an assembled audience at a ‘provocation’ event for the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value that trying to measure the impact of the arts on the economy is a “category error”, that “engagement in the arts is pretty shallow” and that subsidising white middle-class people to attend arts events is “in a fundamental sense regressive”. As the squeeze on public finances grows ever tighter, the need for new forms of evidence of impact for public spending on culture is becoming pressing – and the case for a paradigm shift in funding priorities is growing.

Architect and urbanist Sir Terry Farrell recently published the Government’s national review of architecture and the built environment. Visiting Folkestone during the Triennial for a conference on art and regeneration entitled Imagined Cities, he told me: “In the 1960s and 1970s the city was seen as a bad place. Cities were run down on purpose – there was a sense you had to start again. Now there’s been a rethink about valuing what we’ve got. It all began with Covent Garden when local residents, architects and artists argued for it to be kept. Credit for remaking towns should flow like film titles because there are so many hands involved. Art is increasingly very broadly interpreted. A clever masterplan is an artistic activity. Architecture used to be conjoined with art. Now artists are taking over again.”

In the heyday of the capital arts lottery in the 1990s, culture-led regeneration sometimes became confused with the idea of glitzy starchitect-designed cultural palaces popping up in forlorn city centres. It is easy to understand why. Farrell believes: “There’s a certain fraud in politicians – we all know that, we all laugh at it, but we shouldn’t feed it. They opened new galleries in rundown places but you could tell they didn’t want it to be in the town – they wanted it to be somewhere else.”

Also at the Imagined Cities conference was Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre and founder and Chair of Metal. For Kelly, “Buildings aren’t regeneration. I believe in the power of place more than the power of buildings. Regeneration comes when we make a commitment to change. Nobody should work in the area of regeneration unless they’re on a journey of spirit and humility. Do you think other humans have an equal right to health, education and opportunity? If you do, commit to regeneration.”

Kelly told me: “Culture doesn’t sit in a bubble – it’s related to education, health and regeneration. But arts councils can’t fund everything – they’re doing more all the time and getting more confident about positioning the arts in a social context, without the arts just being used as a tool.”

The Folkestone model shows how art can play a critically important role in regenerating places if strong local and regional partnerships strike the right balance between artistic excellence and community engagement. On the last day of the Triennial, the Banksy was cut out of the wall it had been stencilled on to. This was so it could be sold at auction, sparking a furious reaction from residents and a front page ‘Save our Banksy’ campaign in the local press. Meanwhile, the bronze sock quietly pays tribute to Folkestone’s unusually high proportion of teenage mothers and, at the same time, acts as a wistful reflection on Tracey Emin’s own adolescence in nearby Margate. This is the art of regeneration, combining personal truth with social insight to tell us a powerful new story about a place we thought we knew.

Four Ways to make the Q&A Session more effective

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Jason I J Smith

Most Q&A sessions are mediocre experiences at best: an instantly forgettable interlude before the coffee break. The very format, I’d argue, is a dysfunctional relic of the past, unthinkingly added to agendas everywhere, and I believe we need to rethink it.To be clear, it’s not that the intention of having a Q&A session is bad. For better or worse, most conferences leave the audience in “listening mode” most of the time, so it can make perfect sense to give the participants a voice and allow for some unscripted interaction with the speakers. But in reality, nine times out of ten, the Q&A sessions end up being the weakest part of the event.

There are many reasons for this, including the fact that not all speakers are good at handling questions, but the fundamental issue comes down to two things: audience inactivity and the quality of the incoming questions. In my experience, about a third of the people who grab the microphone will ask interesting questions. Another third will either ramble or pose a narrow question that is really only relevant to the person asking it. And the final third don’t have a question — they just want to say something, which can be fine, only the Q&A format somehow makes that awkward. Meanwhile, 95 percent of the audience is still stuck in passive listening mode.

Some solutions to the Q&A dysfunction already exist. Some hire a professional moderator or use software tools to crowdsource the questions. Others experiment with radically new ways to run events, such as the unconference movement. However, those solutions are often expensive or time-consuming to deploy, making them infeasible for many types of events. Here are four techniques that I’ve used with great results, and that can be deployed without any kind of preparation:

Do an inverse Q&A. An inverse Q&A is when I (the speaker) pose a question to the audience, asking them to discuss it with the person sitting next to them. A good question is, “For you, what was a key take-away from this session? What might you do differently going forward?” People love the opportunity to voice their thoughts to someone and unlike the traditional Q&A, this approach allows everybody to have their say. It also helps them network with each other in a natural manner, which is something many conferences don’t really cater to.
Ask for reactions, not just questions. When you debrief on the small-group discussion, insisting on the question format makes it awkward for the people who just want to share something. As you open the floor, specifically say “What are your reactions to all this? Questions are great, but you are also welcome to just share an observation, it doesn’t have to be in the form of a question.”
Have people vet the questions in groups. An alternative to the inverse Q&A is to ask people to find good questions in groups. Simply say, “Please spend a minute or two in small groups, and try to find a good question or a reflection you think is relevant for everybody.” Then walk around the room and listen as people talk. If you hear an interesting reflection, ask them to bring it up during the joint discussion, or bring it up yourself.
Share a final story after the Q&A. Given that even the best-run Q&A session is unpredictable, it is best to have the Q&A as the second-to-last element. I always stop the Q&A part a few minutes before the end, so I have time to share one final example before getting off the stage. That way, even if the Q&A part falls flat, you can still end your session with a bang instead of a fizzle.

The above methods can help you turn any keynote into a better experience. What other techniques — ideally simple ones — have you seen or used?