At HemingwayDesign, everything we do is driven by people, place, and purpose. Whether we’re creating a cultural festival, or shaping the vision for a town centre, we begin by looking at what’s already there. We were recently invited by SAVE Britain’s Heritage to speak at SAVE’s 50th birthday bash in Norwich, and it was a […]

HemingwayDesign is working with the London Borough of Barnet to co-create their bid to become the London Borough of Culture in 2027. The London Borough of Barnet is embarking on a transformative journey in its London Borough of Culture bid, setting an ambitious course to explore and celebrate its identity like never before. Despite being […]

Great Levelling Up Fund news yesterday for two seafront regeneration projects HemingwayDesign have played a key role in, a project we kick-started some time ago, and for a town we have been working in for a decade. Cleethorpes / North East Lincolnshire will be awarded over £18 million for a transformational regeneration of its seafront and town centre. This […]

This was an interesting one for our team. Between ourselves and our friends at CTConsults, we have plenty of experience in place brands for whole towns or cities. We have experience in creating place brands for places that don’t exist yet, and for places with lengthy histories. We’d worked on heritage projects and Action Zone […]

HemingwayDesign has a long and illustrious history. We are in our fifth decade now but the first Friday in November 2022 will go down as one of our proudest when three independent organisations which were set up when we were in the midst of urban regeneration projects and who we contributed to their inception and […]

The future of retail needs a radical rethink, and fast. High streets need to be multi-purpose, multi-use, reflective of local context and relevant to the way people are now consuming. We believe the future is bright for our town centres, for they are the beating heart of the community. We believe that recent store closures […]

In 2016 HemingwayDesign embarked on a project to produce a Vision for Lowestoft South Beach, with aim to rejuvenate the seafront and help enliven the town’s leisure and tourist attractions. Labelled ‘rundown and dirty’ in a recent article, Wayne Hemingway spoke to BBC Radio Suffolk’s Sarah Lilley about ‘click bait’ culture, the reality of this […]

In 2020, working with NEW Masterplanning, HemingwayDesign completed a Vision and masterplan for Andover town centre. Our team worked closely with Test Valley Borough Council, with extensive consultation with Town Council officers and members, key employers, local retailers, and the local community to secure widespread support for a comprehensive redevelopment focused on four key proposals: […]

In 2016 HemingwayDesign embarked on a project to produce a Vision for Lowestoft South Beach, with aim to rejuvenate the seafront and help enliven the town’s leisure and tourist attractions. With its extensive sandy beach, two levels of promenade, seafront parks and gardens, all flanked by handsome period buildings, it quickly became apparent that Lowestoft […]

I am not an expert on skateboarding, none of my children ever got into it, and if I were to try it I would, for certain, do myself a mischief. But I do love watching skateboarding and recognise it as an important part of youth culture and urban sport; one that’s totally durable. Now it’s […]

This is the second ‘Barrattification of Britain’ article which set HemingwayDesign off on its now two-decade long urban design and housing adventure. It was the Barratification and Wimpeyfication of Britain tirades that resulted in Wayne Hemingway being asked to appear on Newsnight in a debate with national housebuilders. Immediately after that we were approached by […]

Everyone missed festivals and events in summer 2020, but boy did we miss them at HemDes. We’ve established and are involved in 7 cultural festivals across the country, and usually summer for us is those every weekend plus our London-based design-led markets happening around the year, making for a busy events team and a packed […]

With 40 years in the industry, two generations, 100s of projects completed, millions of people involved, engaged and entertained, we felt it was time for a brand refresh that reflects who we are now. The thing is that we’re brand consultants ourselves. We develop brand narratives, we work on values and purpose, we collaborate on […]

A response to Boris Johnson’s “Build Build Build” mantra My (increasingly bushy) eyebrows raised somewhat last week when Boris Johnson stood in front of his podium with his latest three worder “build, build, build” and his promise to cut red tape around infrastructure – and raised even further when the chancellor promised to cut stamp […]

Musings on the first lockdown, creativity and the future of public space.  It’s now almost 40 years since we started our design business and perceptions of the creative industries have changed hugely over that time. I grew up in a household where my mum and my nan were always making clothes and my pop was […]

Did you know that twice as much land in the UK is given to golf courses as to housing? Wayne went on Wake Up To Money on BBC Radio 5 Live in July 2019 to talk about the state of housing in Britain, and what we can do to improve communities in the future. You […]

The definitive history of Blackburn is Open and the build up to The National Festival of Making. In 2012, we had the idea to take what Blackburn had – empty shops in prime town centre locations, an open minded Council, unused evocative buildings, strong industrial heritage, successful diaspora – and embrace these assets to start […]

We can tend to be utopian but a divided society serves no-one. Britain is divided in a number of ways and if it continues then everybody will suffer. Between Remainers and Leavers, environmentalists and climate change-deniers, misogynists and feminists, the curious and the ignorant and the haves and have-nots, we’re at risk of tearing ourselves […]

We hate betting shops and the misery they cause.  For the past few years I have been including this image in my urban design talks and arguing that it’s time we either introduce planning legislation that allowed councils to ban betting shops altogether, or restrict them to one per square mile. Initially my views were […]

We have always called for the housing industry to not be dominated by the large / mega-scaled housebuilders like Taylor Wimpey, Barratts and Persimmon.  The housing crash of 2008 devastated the small and medium sized housebuilding sector resulting in today just 26% of new homes being built by this part of the housebuilding industry as […]

Improving equality and life chances for the younger generations have always been hugely important to us. Growing up in the 60s and the 70s my guess is that most young people in normal working class communities like the ones Gerardine and I came from in North East Lancashire had the belief that if they rolled […]

We started 2016 campaigning as we always do. The front page headline on the New Year’s Eve edition of the Guardian last week was:“Revealed: house builders sitting on 600,000 plots of land.“ This is part of the sorry UK house building situation that has been a contributing factor to housing un-affordability and shortages for the […]

Crap architects get a mouthful in this blog from 2015. When it comes to working out the value of the creative industries, much to the chagrin of some architects, the value of the work coming out of architectural practices is not included. My hobby is running (often with my dog Minnie) and when I am […]

A decade and a half after we started to bemoan the state of new build housing in the UK, there is still a need to be noisy on this subject matter. It’s over 15 years ago since I coined the phrase the “Wimpeyfication and Barrattification of Britain” and started to publically criticise Britain’s mass housebuilding industry for […]

We opened our mouths on societal issues in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and carried on right through the 2010s.  “Corbyn wants to take us back to the 70s of strikes and rubbish piled in the streets”, has been one the hysterical cries from the bullying Sun and other gutter press who seem intent on trying […]

No fence sitting here at HemDes. It seems to be that almost every newspaper and every radio commentator is saying that the V&A are wrong for declining to accept and show Margaret Thatcher’s clothing on the grounds that it was not art, craft or of sufficient design quality. The argument for displaying her stuff at […]

The story of the creation of the Festival of Thrift which turns 10 years old in 2022  In 2011 Gerardine and I were introduced to a chap called John Orchard. He was part of a group of investors who had taken on the enormous, 2 million square foot, Paton & Baldwin’s knitting yarn factory in […]

We’ll take any chance to pop back to one of our favourite projects. I popped into our first housing development The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead in early October 2015, almost 15 years after we first started to design it. Gerardine and I have often wondered if it is the highlight of our careers. Not […]

In 2015, we were just about to launch our Transport for London staff uniform. At HemingwayDesign when we started designing the new London Transport uniform to a brief of “make the team more recognisable on platform, on concourses, in ticket offices, and for the uniform and wearer to take pride in an internationally recognisable brand but […]

But so much more yet to come… After 4 years of working on the Dreamland Margate project, after so many false starts and times when we thought that some of the enormous obstacles that presented themselves could in fact be insurmountable, the first phase of this amazing community instigated project is open. The June 2015 […]