Read about 'local distinctiveness'
Facade detail with doorway. Cowick Street 2007
By Sarah Scaife
Rooftop view, St Thomas 2006
Photo by Neil Denham
Some thoughts from 'Common Ground'
By Sue Clifford and Angela King
The Curator of West Exe writes: "Common Ground is an organisation which champions local distinctiveness. They encourage all of us to reflect on our sense of place. The extract below is from a conference on Local Distinctiveness held on September 28th 1993. Visit their website to find out more: www.commonground.org.uk."
Losing our place?
How do we know where we are in time and space? How do we understand ourselves in the world? Common Ground has developed the concept of local distinctiveness. It is instantly recognizable yet difficult to describe; it is simple yet may have profound meaning to us.
Local can mean the neighbourhood, the locality, the parish, the housing estate, the high street, the village, the suburb, perhaps even the street as defined by those who live and work and play there. The area to which people feel they belong, and which belongs to them through familiarity, or which they have chosen and are claiming anew.
Local distinctiveness is essentially about places and our relationship with them. It is as much about the commonplace as about the rare, about the everyday as much as the endangered, and about the ordinary as much as the spectacular.
Local distinctiveness can encompass so many things and affects everyone. In exploring the idea Common Ground has found it useful to work around key words, which allow reinterpretation for every different circumstance: detail, particularity, patina, authenticity. We are talking of quality in the everyday.
Detail
We seem to have a much greater capacity to see than we have to describe. Hence people sense when something has gone from their local scene, but can't articulate it... it could be a change in paving stones or the loss of a tree.
Authenticity
Local distinctiveness is not necessarily about beauty, but it must be about truth. If we leave no room for peeling paint, time before and since, access to the life of the place now, we present a picture which is dishonest and unreal.
Particularity
The commonplace defines identity: the locally abundant plants, the specific wall building methods, the precise ingredients for recipes.
Patina
Age has to be recognised as having been gathered. Local distinctiveness must be about history continuing through the present (not about the past) and it is about creating the future.
The forces of homogenisation rob us of visible and invisible things which have meaning to us, they devalue our longitudinal wisdom and erase the fragments from which to piece together the stories of nature and history through which our humanity is fed.
SC/AK 1993
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