Ref 2021 Portfolio: Community Maker and The Portland Inn Project.

The Community Maker project focused on the Portland Street area of Stoke-on-Trent, where 33 houses were famously refurbished and sold for £1 each as part of a long-term process of social and urban redevelopment led by Stoke-on-Trent City Council. The project formed part of the cultural sector’s response to place-making for the area. It brought long-term residents together with new arrivals to build an active and engaged community. Artist and researcher (and £1 home owner) Anna Francis approached the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) to work with local people to explore personal histories, ambitions, and ideas through arts practice, which included making and sharing food and collaboratively designing and making ceramic objects, to then identify priorities for positive social and community change. The project was initially funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, later gaining additional funding from Arts Council England.

The findings led to the formation of The Portland Inn Project, a collaborative research project led by Francis and Rebecca Davies, which moves on from Community Maker to deliver community-led change based on the identified priorities.
The insights provided by the project have been discussed and disseminated via a public programme of events, workshops and displays on a public green space (Century Street, Stoke-on-Trent) and via exhibition displays at the BCB in 2015 and 2017, AirSpace Gallery, and The Potteries Museum Stoke-on-Trent (2018) as well as being shared at conferences and events in the UK and Estonia.

The research was featured in a Guardian online documentary on deprivation and renewal in Stoke-on-Trent, and The Portland Inn Project was used as a case study by Francois Matarasso in his book on Participatory Art, ‘A Restless Art’ (2019).

This portfolio was prepared to support the submission of Rethinking the Brownfield for the Ref 2021 exercise.