50 Ideas For Worthing

In 2011, Revolutionary Arts turned the annual Made In Worthing festival into a pop up thinktank and invited artists and academics, community organisers and creative businesses to get together, walk the town and think about a different future. The ideas were an antidote to what Jane Jacobs called ‘the doctrine of salvation by brick’, and focused not on big building projects but on small interventions to knit the town together. Guerilla urbanism. Here are the 50 best ideas from that event.

1. Create a two-lane 100m track on Worthing promenade
2. Add the #worthingstuff hashtag to all ‘Welcome to Worthing’ signs to encourage more social media discussion, and use themed hashtags on roadsigns, like #worthingart and #worthingfood
3. Invite Martin Parr to stay for a week
4. Promote the real ale and independent pubs in town as social spaces
5. Create a beach hut festival
6. Set up a zocalo day, where neighbours sit outside and meet the neighbours
7. Build a website to promote walking tours around Worthing, and let people upload their own walks
8. Create a ‘Made In Worthing’ brand for local, independent shops to use
9. Paint walking lines from the station to key places in the town, like Coventry’s Blue Line
10. Set up a Likemind group
11. Make signs lead to Splash Point, as the new centre of Worthing seafront
12. Hang up bunting everywhere
13. Celebrate the town’s Art Deco architecture
14. Support the On Location Film Festival, and arrange more ‘secret cinema’ screenings
15. Paint all the railings blue
16. Hold a ‘cap doffing’ day, where people wear hats and doff them to each other as they pass
17. Photoshop Worthing’s landmark buildings in more colourful paintschemes
18. Set up a seafront arts and crafts market, with handcarts
19. Encourage idling in deck-chairs and along the prom
20. Invite travel bloggers to visit, and show them around the town
21. Have a tea party on the beach
22. Invite a steam fun fair to visit the town
23. Create an inflatable shop to open on the seafront in the summer season
24. Restore the Pier Amusement’s Monkey Band
25. Cut the grass in Steyne Gardens into a map of the town
26. Build an indoor skatepark
27. Give start-up shops a business rates break
28. Create a trail to celebrate Worthing’s film and theatre history
29. Make Pier Day an annual event
30. Improve signs at East Beach, to highlight the studios and sand courts
31. Get Gok Wan tin to set up a ‘Face of Worthing’ competition
32. Invite artists to build sets for the mini golf course
33. Promote Worthing beach as child-friendly, as it has a shallower slope than nearby beaches like Brighton
34. Create a temporary park at Teville Gate
35. Create a community task force, to hold regular clean ups and make a difference to the urban environment
36. Develop a younger, more dynamic tourism brand for the town
37. Remove some areas of paving and give the space over to guerrilla gardening
38. Grow grape vines in Steyne Gardens
39. Collectively buy advertising in local papers and give it to small businesses
40. Encourage tea-drinking in public
41. Redesign the Chatsworth Road entrance to the Guildbourne Centre, and create a public space from the access roads
42. Build more beach huts, as an international architecture competition
43. Add more affordable and accessible public housing to the town centre
44. Put more water features on the promenade
45. Hold more seasonal sports events on the beach, including kitesurfing and skateboarding
46. Set up a kayak hire shack
47. Use flags on the seafront during the summer months
48. QR code everything
49. Get Fresh Egg to start an annual Tech Festival to get Worthing working
50. Hold a regular thinktank in a coffee shop

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Tags: guerilla urbanism, made in worthing, urbanism, worthing