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 […]

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 […]

Disposable fashion is an awful concept. By the time you read this the UK will have been under lockdown for roughly one week, and our lives as we know them have been drastically changed. We don’t know how long it will last before these restrictions start to ease off, but it has me wondering whether […]

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 […]

Beto O’Rourke has made headlines this week by announcing his intention to run as Democratic Presidential candidate in 2020, and then smashing records by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign. What’s interesting to me about this is that Beto is a so-called ‘ex punk’ who used to play bass in […]

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 are all for localism when it truly serves the best interests of the local community. I recently read that Preston has been named as the UK’s most improved urban area in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and think-tank Demos and was cheered by the fact that a town I know and love is doing well. […]

The opportunity to design a housing development in Blackburn was something that energised Gerardine and Wayne. I often get asked for my career highlight and my answer for the past decade or so has been The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead, our first housing development. It was one of those rare projects that, despite the […]

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 […]

A blog about how affordable rents helped us get started and how through the markets we curate we are, in a small way, helping start-ups “have a go” by providing low cost opportunities.  I grew up in modest background to the sound of whirring sewing machines and with a mum and a nan who always […]

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 […]

A young Kate Moss and low cost housing all in one blog. A couple of weeks ago we posted the above photo on the HemingwayDesign Facebook page of a housing development, The Bridge Dartford that we led the design and master planning of a decade or so ago. The comment posted by user Paul Read […]

As Wayne hit 55 in 2016 he wrote about how “oldies” don’t go stale. When you get to my age (55) you start to hear about friends and family of a similar age “slowing down”, going part time or taking early retirement. I have been in situations where people have indirectly accused me of being […]

Universal Basic Income and the passing of David Bowie in one blog? You bet. This weekend I was getting myself in a mood about how difficult it seems for young people to start up with the carefree abandon that Gerardine and I had when we set out on our journey at the turn of the […]

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 […]

At HemingwayDesign we work in a number of towns and cities that have suffered economically and socially over the past decades and I occasionally attend round table discussions or conferences in these towns that focus on regeneration. There is no fairy dust (as Oliver Wainwright said about what we do, possibly snidely, see here) to be sprinkled, […]

We all have “People Power” if we get together and campaign.  One of my favourite slabs of 7” vinyl in my record box is People Power by Billy Paul. I believe that active and vocal communities can bring a sense of empowerment to the wider community and can engender positive change and make things happen that […]

We have been known to dream… There are have been some wonderful life enhancing tech start-ups over the past few years. Airbnb and Uber have changed, for the better, the way I consume travel and getting about. But there is one that every time I go running in a town or city gets me thinking. […]

I keep seeing those “rent to own” shops selling boring furniture and sparkly electronics on our High Streets and am intrigued and worried by this return to a retail concept led by Radio Rentals and Granada (sing along now, “Great service, great sets, that what you get…at Granada” that seemed to suffer a slow death in the […]

We are excited about Margate as Dreamland, the project we led on, is about to open. Last year I wrote about some words about Margate that were published on the Design Council website.  Margate  A seaside town that the press often depicts as a bit of a basket case. I have one word for it: […]