Ulverston
Who remembers the Civic Trust? Not the local societies, but the national body that was one of the five “amenity societies” enshrined in law, now sadly no longer extant.
My first job in regeneration came in 1990 from the Civic Trust’s market towns initiative, largely focused on deprived areas of the North of England.
Ulverston is a largely unspoilt Lakeland town with only five post-war buildings in the town centre, and a Glaxo factory providing employment. So, not a prime candidate for regeneration, you might think, but a Civic Trust study had found a number of things to work on, and so I was employed (part-time) fresh from my postgraduate studies in Heritage Management at the Ironbridge Institute in Shropshire.
Much of my own contribution was about helping to put Ulverston on the map – brown tourism signs to major attractions such as the country’s only Laurel & Hardy Museum, pedestrian signposting, town trails, and a new heritage centre in an old warehouse.
Ulverston town leaflet 1991
A Tourism Development Action Plan began in Ulverston shortly before I left, and “Ulverston 2000” carried on the good work of refurbishing local alleways and ginnels. Ulverston has now reinvented itself as a festival town, and is well worth a visit.
One of the projects I was thinking about but could never quite get off the ground was a walkers hostel to fill the acknowledged gap in the local YHA network. Seven years after I left, a privately-run hostel duly opened – reinforcing my belief that everything has its time!