Review by Nick Spurrier

On presenting Roger De Haan with a medal for Arts Philanthropy in 2008, Prince Charles said: "Most philanthropists will content themselves with supporting a handful of carefully selected institutions. Roger De Haan is a bit different: he is attempting to regenerate an entire town."

So while attention inevitably focuses on De Haan’s plans for the development of the seafront and his charitable support for the Creative Quarter in Tontine Street and the Old High Street, Nick Ewbank’s book, “Adventures in Regeneration: Folkestone New tide”, rightly moves beyond that to include the Folkestone Academy, the Sidney De Haan Research Centre, the University Centre Folkestone, Kent Adult Education, as well as the Folkestone Triennial and other festivals, showing that Prince Charles was not exaggerating.

But what also can be included, though they are beyond the scope of Ewbank’s book, is the funding given to help the renewal of Folkestone Rugby Club pitch and clubroom, the £7million Cheriton Road Sports Ground project which will include a new pavilion, sports hall, two cricket pitches and two hockey surfaces as well as a "MUGA" (multi use games area) and support for the Folkestone Youth Project, a charitable endeavour based in former warehouse premises on the Folkestone seafront.

De Haan has also supported the development of recreation areas in locations across Folkestone and Shepway, often working together with schools, residents groups and local residents. So De Haan’s project covers education, health sports and youth work as well as regeneration through the arts. However as Nick Ewbank was initially brought in to revive the fading Metropole Arts Centre, that is where the story begins.

The heady sixties days, with exhibitions in the gallery of Roy Lichtenstein, Epstein, Turner, Picasso and Yoko Ono, were well over, and Arts Council England, feeling the centre had lost direction, had withdrawn its funding. Initially De Haan gave support but rapidly concluded, after seeking advice, that the Arts Council had been right. However he agreed to take over as head of the board and Nick Ewbank was employed to “review options for expanding the Arts Centre, obtain funding and manage the project”.

Nick Ewbank had a background in regeneration through the arts and fairly soon proposals to update the Metropole as a major arts centre or build another gallery gave way to his vision for the creation of an arts quarter in run down East Folkestone.

With permission from the Heritage Lottery Fund, £50,000 left over from a terminated consultation was used to pay for a report on the idea. However not a person to sit around De Haan said they should get on with it before the consultation was completed. Nick Ewbank suggested persuading the shop owners to allow artists and creative businesses into their premises at low rents, but pointed out that if this succeeded in lifting the area rents would inevitably rise - the “Hoxton Effect”. “That’s easy, Nick”, De Haan said, “We’ll buy the buildings and then we can control the rents for the long term”.

Some will be unhappy with Ewbank’s descriptions of East Folkestone but at the same time the embryo Go Folkestone, which would become one of the Creative Quarter’s main backers, had sent out a leaflet which asked “Is Folkestone dying?” in an attempt to bring people’s attention to the state of the town and try and reverse its decline.

And the facts are there: “The Folkestone Harvey Central ward where the Old Town is situated [was in 2003] the worst in Kent for health deprivation and the worst in the South East of England for unemployment, putting it into the bottom 0.4%. most deprived parts of the UK. A startling 34% of the working-age population was in long-term unemployment and had no formal qualifications”. Many locals considered the area dangerous and never ventured beyond Rendezvous Street.

If the external appearance of the area was bad what was revealed internally when the renovation of the first buildings purchased started was worse.

Years of shoddy repairs and papering over the cracks were revealed. Robert Green, now director of property and operations for the Creative Foundation, and his team of builders found fungus, rising damp, a bakery with four inches of grease around the cooker, supporting walls and chimney breasts taken out without support, a beam rooted at both ends so the ceiling had dropped six inches, a floor so sloping that you could have skied down it and the a top of a door sliced off at a 20 degree angle so that it could be shut after the side of the property had slumped.

One of the jobs of Niamh Sullivan, the second person to join the Creative Foundation team, was to go round emptying the buckets from all the leaking roofs. Slums would not be too a harsh word to apply. In one property seven people were living in a two bed roomed flat with the grandfather sleeping in the corridor. The Creative Foundation has had an almost overwhelming task putting right these years of neglect and of course gutting and rebuilding a property takes far longer than building from scratch.

Early on it was realised that if the Creative Foundation sought capital funding from the public sector to buy and renovate sufficient properties to turn the area round they would have a very long wait. Again the solution came from the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, which agreed to purchase the buildings, finance their renovation and then hand them over to the Creative Foundation on 125 year leases at a peppercorn rent.

The Creative Foundation now has 84 properties spread over 60 different addresses. As the project progresses, the money accumulating from rents will be used to fund further arts programmes and festivals in the town.

In this short article it has only been possible to cover the first fifty pages of the book that describe the genesis of the Creative Quarter. The rest covers education, the seafront development, the development of Quarterhouse – the performing art centre and the programme of festivals and exhibitions, including the Triennial.

There is no room to write of the groundbreaking work of The Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health or the Folkestone Academy, which, replacing the Channel School - the fifth worst performing secondary school in the country - had last year 676 applications for 240 places and is worthy of an article in its own right.

The book is full of facts, figures and personalities. It is an utterly engaging read for anyone who has an interest in Folkestone or urban regeneration as a whole.

Some complain of the time that the regeneration is taking but it is difficult to halt and turn round 50 years of decline in a few years.

There is no magic wand. As Lord Radnor says “People nowadays demand instant gratification but it does take time. In Folkestone now it’s really building up a head of steam. Over the next five to ten years we’ll see the rewards of a lot of hard work and the joined-up vision will prove to be the correct model”

So Folkestone is lucky to have a man who is going to see the job through however long it takes. As Nick Ewbank says, though Roger De Haan is by his own admission ““a man in a tearing hurry”, he is also one whose greatest insight is to take the long view.

“Adventures in Regeneration: Folkestone’s New tide” by Nick Ewbank. NEA Publishing. 2011. Illustrations. pp134. £14.95. Obtainable from Waterstones and the Triennial visitor’s centre or free download from http://www.nickewbank.co.uk

This article is from the December issue of Go Folkestone Magazine, free copies of which can be found at cafes, restaurants and retail outlets around the town. If you would like an electronic copy of the magazine e-mail Nick Spurrier at Spurrier@btconnect.com
 

Hawkinge Gazette and Channel Coast News 2011©