There’s a tendency to think of placemaking as something momentary. A festival, a weekend intervention, a spark of activity that briefly animates a space before fading. But the most meaningful placemaking lingers, reshapes perceptions, and quietly influences how people connect with a place long after the event itself has passed.
At HemingwayDesign, events are never conceived as standalone moments. They are part of a broader, narrative-driven placemaking approach, one that recognises the long-term impact that thoughtful programming can have on communities, place, and local economies
Across placemaking initiatives that have spun out of HemingwayDesign projects, or that we have co-founded, such as First Light Festival (Lowestoft), the Festival of Thrift (Teesside) and the National Festival of Making (Blackburn), We Invented the Weekend (Salford), the ambition has always been to positively shift perceptions, making people feel proud of where they live and work. It is at activations such as these that a flagship event becomes the catalyst, not the conclusion, supported by schools programmes, community engagement, partnerships and year-round cultural activation that embed placemaking into the everyday life of a town, space or place. Well-considered placemaking helps shape and elevate social infrastructure, from public spaces to cultural venues.
Economic Value & Measuring Impact
There is also a clear and growing need to quantify this value. Placemaking is not just cultural, it is economic. Over time, our placemaking projects have helped unlock significant investment, including Levelling Up and Towns Fund support across places such as Lowestoft, Blackburn, and Morecambe. In Lowestoft, the success of First Light Festival has been recognised by the local authority as part of the wider story that supported major infrastructure investment, including the event’s success helping to raise funding for a major new piece of highways infrastructure.
This is where “adding it all up” becomes a powerful tool for levelling up, securing funding and building something that really lasts.
Putting figures to placemaking initiatives brings to light the true long-term economic value these initiatives spark. From government funding to established partnerships, money talks!
Economic impact can be measured in funding secured, but also in jobs created, businesses supported, visitor numbers increased and the volume of people travelling into a place and, crucially, returning to it. More often than not, it is the funding secured that enables the latter four impacts.
For example, in 2025, First Light Festival received £101,178 from sponsorship and £295,498 from external investments. But the impact of a festival like First Light isn’t confined to a single weekend in June. Its community arts projects run year-round from East Point Pavilion and through the Place Partnership project The Battery of Ideas, and its New Dawn strand is a year-round career development programme for young creatives, offering performance, broadcast and regional venue opportunities well beyond a festival slot. And the proof is in the people who cycle back through it: New Dawn act Lottie Gray went on to a Creative Retreat with Britten Pears Arts and a Latitude performance, alumni Retro Firefly returned to play Moonlit Soundscapes, and former participant JULIET came back to co-host the New Dawn stage with BBC Introducing.
That engagement runs deep long before the festival opens. In 2025, 740 people from local community groups and schools took part in lead-in activity, and the creative pipeline sustains itself year on year: New Dawn’s open callout drew 106 applications from 14 to 25 year-olds (up from 82 in 2024). Places that people feel connected to are more likely to be talked about, recommended and shared, because these places entice people, adding context and meaning, creating an environment that people don’t just visit once. They return to it, invest in it, and help it tell its story all year round.
The knock-on effect
Placemaking also builds confidence (civic, cultural and commercial) and helps future-proof places creating environments that are more resilient, not just economically, but socially and environmentally too.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Blackburn, where the National Festival of Making sits within a much deeper and longer-term narrative about the town’s identity. Built on the phrase “Arte et Labore” -meaning “by skill and hard work”, a phrase inscribed in the Town Hall itself and on the badge of Blackburn Rovers. The festival doesn’t impose a story, it reveals one, and one that continues to evolve.
Blackburn’s story…
Blackburn’s manufacturing heritage is something still being actively lived. The town’s Asian community, many of whose families originally came to work in the textile mills, now play a central role in sustaining and growing its industrial base. Businesses such as Accrol Group and Star Tissue UK, alongside a wide network of family-run enterprises across furniture, food production and specialist manufacturing, demonstrate how this legacy has been carried forward and redefined.
Many of these companies have grown from small, family-run operations into major regional employers; many are breathing new life into manufacturing businesses that may have been lost without their entrepreneurial spirit, while others are driving regeneration through the reuse of historic mill buildings, bringing industry, employment and purpose back into the heart of the town.
The festival makes this living heritage visible through its Art in Manufacturing programme, which places artists directly inside working Lancashire factories. Since 2016 it has commissioned more than 35 artists to work with over 20 factories, with hundreds of the workforce sharing their time and skill to co-create everything from sculpture to film and choreography. The results turn the everyday culture of making into something to be experienced anew: Margo Selby’s Breathing Colour, a 160-metre suspended textile work celebrating Standfast & Barracks’ centenary in a colour palette chosen by the factory’s own workforce and an eight-year creative partnership with the Cardboard Box Company that began with a single commission. In doing so, the programme reframes who gets to make art and who gets to experience it, with the workforce cast as creators alongside the artists.
Through its year-round schools and community programmes, the National Festival of Making connects this industrial story to future generations, creating pathways between education, creativity and employment, and ensuring that “making” is not just heritage, but opportunity.
It’s also worth noting how far the cultural landscape has shifted. Where there were once no Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations in Blackburn, there are now several; a sign of growing cultural infrastructure, confidence and recognition.
All of this points to a more expansive understanding of placemaking. Not as a moment, but as a continuous process One that brings together people, place, culture and industry, sustaining them over time. This is the legacy of year-round placemaking. Not just spaces that come alive for a weekend or a day, but places that continue to evolve, thrive and tell their story year-round
“The Festival of Making has engaged more than 3000 students in the past few years.”