In April 2023, a cultural strategy for West Cumbria was launched under the aegis of the new Cumberland council. To mark the creation of the new local authority, we organised a ‘walking and talking’ coach trip and workshop in June 2023, which visited two places at opposite ends of the River Derwent that could be taken to represent different facets of the new Cumberland.
This event was originally intended to stimulate conversation on two contrasting places within the bounds of the new Cumberland Council, if not to think about what the naming of the new council as ‘Cumberland’ might change about the region and, more specifically, the role of culture and the arts in the new local government configuration. We asked people with an interest or stake in the culture of the region to join us to reflect on how the reality of place, and our ideas and images of place, informs our work.
At the time of the trip the two destinations remained unknown to the participants. As a means of facilitating a form of democratic exchange, the use of a coach trip as a means of engaging with people and place has become an ad hoc kind of methodology developed over several years that relies wholly on the interaction of people with other participants that they may or may not know, who may come from entirely separate spheres of life and work, and the encounter with places that these kinds of trips permit.
We distributed notebooks and pencils and without wanting to direct those along for the trip into thinking in specific terms about how they might record their thoughts and ideas — about the places they visited, about their conversations with others — we said that there would be an outcome for all this effort at some point, although what form it would take we did not know at the time.
The main idea at the outset of the trip was simply for people to get out of their normal thinking and working situations, to come together and share the experience with others whose interests and insights might help or challenge the way we all worked in our own particular areas and fields of expertise. It is a form of networking taken down to the most informal and pleasurable level in the hope that out of the encounter with people and place new revelations can be brought forth.
One result of this event was the publication Spirits of Place, edited by John Scanlan and Katie Milestone, which featured contributions from many of the participants in the workshop.
