Castleford Project & Place

Review of Art & Architecture in the Project

David Barrie, May 2005

“The city in its totality and beauty is made up of numerous different

moments of formation; the unity of these moments is the urban unity as
a whole.” – Architect Aldo Rossi, 1966

“Passaic seems full of ‘holes’ compared to New York City…monumental

vacancies that define the memory-traces of an abandoned set of
futures.” – Artist Robert Smithson, 1967

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Introduction

In a global market, the local is often sacrificed to the ‘national good’ and
‘interstitial’ places like the interiors of aircraft play a more prominent part
in people’s lives. We also live in an age dominated by narcissism and
privacy, exemplified by the gated community.

However, towns and cities remain a unifying landmark and generate an

amenity - which is why we like to live there. There is strong demand for
places that serve our shared but private needs - shopping malls, markets
and beaches - but there is also strong demand for places that we share with
others on purpose, by virtue of sharing citizenship – town squares, town
halls. Public places such as coffee houses and cinemas, online communities
and collective ideas like neighbourhood and ‘Ibiza’ still resonate.

It is this basic appreciation of the popularity of ‘place’ that inspires The

Castleford Project and binds its creative activity.

Project Direction

When I first visited Castleford in December 2002, it was a rainy, overcast

day and I was struck by a landscape of vacant, windswept plots totally
lacking in incident. Not here, the relics of industrial archaeology,
morphology of natural landforms or a personality shaped by architecture.
Not here, shadows on the wall, real or imagined, that represent ‘there-
ness’. Not here, either surface or sign as expression.

I know life through moments lived and, like many expect towns and cities to
declare equivalent moments, in what American architects Colin Rowe and
Fred Koetter once described as a “collage city”. I think that the
momentous-ness of urban environments is episodic. We treat it like
watching a film, editing out the bits that we don’t wish to see. Sometimes,
the moment is a profoundly human one, perhaps a place where divisive
boundaries are crossed. At other times, it is a pompous and brilliantly
superficial, like the over-formal presentation of haute couture: “The Chanel
bag with the inlaid silver chain”. Sometimes it is found. At other times, it is
constructed: a scene painted by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch.
Sometimes, it is a natural expression. At other times, the result of artistic
intervention, such as artist Robert Smithson inserting mirrors in to the
surface of a desert plain.

In his book The Concise Townscape, writer Gordon Cullen viewed ‘place’ as
an issue of the position of our body in its environment, an art of relationship
that “When you go into a room you utter to yourself the unspoken words “I
am outside IT, I am entering IT, I am in the middle of IT.”…no sooner do we
postulate a HERE than automatically we must create a THERE.”

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When developers Chris Brown and Roger Zogolovitch, regeneration and
design advisors to The Castleford Project first joined me in the town, they
noticed that there were key connections in the town that were severed, for
instance between the town and its waterfront. These connections were
manifest in intersections left to rack and ruin or soulless, poorly landscaped
public realm with no relation to surrounding buildings – ‘Space Left Over
After Planning’. To make or remake these spaces would be to improve the
town’s quality of life and begin to extract value from some of the town’s
underlying assets, such as its location close to a regional capital. It would
also begin to help the town have edited highlights. It might begin to
encourage a sense of HERE and THERE.

We were aware of the rise of the idea of landscape as urbanism, of the role
of open spaces in redefining the modern city; the frustration and lack of
delivery associated with development programmes led by master plans; the
linkage between revaluing and reprogramming public space and economic
revitalization; and the fact that “Nearly every significant new landscape
designed in recent years occupies a site that has been reinvented or
reclaimed from obsolescence or degradation, as cities in the post-industrial
era remake and redefine their outdoor spaces.” Some of these spaces are
existing civic ones, like town squares. Others are abused, polluted or
exhausted sites. Some are topographies, newly sculpted. Others are
rationalised pre-industrial commons, where residents play or cultivate crops
on urban/semi-urban landscapes. Many are at junction points in the town,
places of passage and encounter.

In two previous, television-related Projects, I had explored the

opportunities of places like this, be it the underside of Spaghetti Junction in
the West Midlands or a decommissioning nuclear power station in
Snowdonia. In these Projects, I invited architects, engineers and others to
come up with new blue-skies concepts for ‘dead’ spaces, be it architect Will
Alsop, American environmental designers SITE, engineers Ove Arup &
Partners or music composer Gavin Bryars.

My initial interest in public space had been inspired by artists like Mark
Rothko, Giorgio de Chirico and Piero della Francesca. Then I discovered
American sociologist and filmmaker William H. Whyte and his investigations
in to why some small urban spaces work for people, and some do not. Then
the thought of Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss designer of Parc de la Villette in
Paris, that “Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as
the enclosure of its walls.”

With Zogolovitch and Brown, I conceived of a process that placed the

improvement of public space at the start, rather than be an end-product of
the development of major sites. We decided to take multiple sites to realise
multiple ideas, not a single thought – what architect Deborah Saunt
describes as “a constellation of spaces that creates a big vision of small
stars.” This was scoped by Zogolovitch and his team at AZ Urban Studio.
Brown wrote an informal regeneration strategy for the town.

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The project team prioritised design excellence, a key emphasis of the
executive team at City of Wakefield. We worked on the principal that no
one knows the detail and aspirations of communities better than the
inhabitants themselves and devised ways in local people could become
intrinsically involved in the process. We also emphasised multi-disciplinary
professional engagement to mirror the multi-faceted nature of
contemporary urban problems.

A populist ‘boutique intervention’ was born, to use the words of architect

Deborah Saunt, seeking to create new landscapes but also look at a place
with new eyes and thereby act as a catalyst to change. The idea was to
create an opportunity for revolutionary and incremental intervention, rather
than revolutionary development and a scorched earth approach.

Two years on, as a result of the support of the community and commitment
of City of Wakefield to the Project, the following has been achieved:

• Five Projects on site, with a total of eleven to be completed by the close

of 2005
• a £10m development programme including leading architects and
landscape designers and planner from the U.K., Europe and United States
• £190m of new investment in the town's retailing, housing and cultural
life, including a new public library and transport interchange
• the release of over 150ha of 'brown' land for redevelopment, with the
closure of two large chemical plants
• a programme of popular events that has involved 8000 local people in
the renewal of their community, including special curriculum Projects in
primary and secondary schools
• a cultural programme that includes newly commissioned installation art
by top-class artists from Cuba and mainland Europe

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Improving Castleford as a Place

In October 2003, after running an extensive programme of public

consultation and advertising for expressions of interest from architectural
and landscape designers, the Project ran a design ideas competition. The
design brief was the first expression of the Project and its relationship to
Castleford as a place, setting the designers an agenda of helping “the
people of Cas see their whole town in the way that it generated itself
during the Industrial Revolution.”

1 Animating and improving the town centre

When almost every other town centre in the UK today can boast at least
one nationally-branded coffee shop, Castleford may be unique in not being
able to do so. This lack of something so ubiquitous is symptomatic of the
need for regeneration in the town and particularly in the heart of the
community – the town centre – which provides only for rock-bottom needs.
There are very few leisure facilities of any kind or quality. There is hardly
anywhere decent to eat. This is at odds with the modern consumerist
interests of the ordinary citizen and the growth of the town, expressed in
new housing development and industrial investment on its periphery.

Freeport – the factory shopping outlet located immediately to the south of

the town, adjacent to the M62 motorway, has been developed as a regional
draw, pulling shoppers from many miles away into its retailing offer. This
has now been joined by ‘Xscape’ – a major leisure development built
around a huge real-snow ski slope. Whilst these developments are really
part of Castleford, their edge-of-town location and their economic drag-
effect of sucking the economy away from the town centre is a
contemporary and provocative condition which the existing somewhat tired
town centre needs to address. Cas retains less than 30% of the potential
catchment spend on comparison goods and less than 24% on convenience
goods – mainly due to the Leeds factor. The comparable figure for nearby
Pontefract is 66%.

The Carlton Lanes shopping centre dominates the civic centre of Castleford
while the surrounding streets, including Carlton Street (the ‘High Street’),
have suffered from economic decline and need new life pumping back into
them. One Project that has emerged is the rejuvenation of Carlton Square
itself – a popular but cluttered, run down space that is the notional civic
heart of Castleford.

2 Moving the market into the square and environs

Various rearrangements over the years, including the development of the
Carlton Lanes shopping centre, have seen what was a thriving outdoor
market move into an unsatisfactory location sandwiched between the
railway line and the south elevation of the shopping centre. It has declined
as a result. The market could be liberated from its present location and
used to help animate and promote the town centre and in the process help
restore its fortunes and those of the town centre. There are strong views
about where it should move to.

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3 Transforming Tittle Cott Bridge
Just south of the market’s existing location is the delightfully named Tittle
Cott Bridge. It is in fact a narrow, run-down subway under the railway line
immediately to the east of Castleford railway station. Despite its
diminutive proportions, it is the central pedestrian link between the
southern half of the town and the town centre, which are divided by the
east-west route of the railway line. Not only that, but it provides
immediate access from a large popular car park on the south side of the
line to Carlton Lanes shopping centre on the north.

Opportunities of widening and deepening the subway have been examined

with Network Rail, but no practical solution that is within current budgets
has been found to date. So it is designers’ imagination that will be needed
to generate this transformation. There is a small but potent site, which
currently belongs to a local developer, located on the south side that can
be used as part of the design proposal for this important link.

4 Connecting the town to the waterfront

At present Castleford turns its back on its most striking natural asset. Just
north of the town centre is a sweeping ox-bow loop in the River Aire which
features a large weir. Not only that, but just upstream from this loop, the
river Calder joins the Aire and there is also a lock into the Aire & Calder
navigation canal forming a dramatic ‘crossroads’. Like many towns that
grew up in the industrial revolution, Castleford’s river became polluted
and many of its most pragmatic buildings occupied the southern river bank
leaving no space for public access. Now the river has almost recovered its
natural character and salmon have returned as pollution has departed. How
can the town centre be connected back to the riverfront so that the people
of Castleford come to see the river for what it is – a feature that most
towns (and cities) would be deeply envious of? New routes and destinations
need to be established to achieve this.

5 Integrating the Forum Project

Designers should be aware that an existing Project called Castleford Forum
is at the feasibility stage and forms part of Yorkshire Forward’s urban
programme for the town. It is an as yet undesigned proposal supported by a
large section of the community that would re-occupy the car park to the
north of Carlton Lanes and to the east of Sagar Street and which would
lead down to the river. A business case for the proposal is to be made by
consultants later this year. Its name is a conscious reference both to the
outdoor market that used to occupy this site and Castleford’s significant
Roman history. Ideas that link the centre to the river need therefore to
handle this proposal sensitively especially if they interact with the
proposed site for this scheme. Arguments for doing so will need to be
convincing.

6 Opening up the riverside

Once the riverside is reached there is no obvious destination. Ways of
opening up the riverside to the town centre are needed and also desirable

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riverside destinations or points of fresh departure. There is a ‘gap’ site on
the south bank just east of the mill and weir which could be the site of a
discrete Project. There may be other opportunities on the north bank
where there is a pedestrian right of way along the river bank. Visual links
from the river to the town centre would help re-establish and reintroduce
the key relationship between the town and the original reason for
Castleford’s existence, which is of course the river.

7 Crossing the river

Originally Castleford was the site of an important Roman ford that crossed
the river from the point at which the present-day Church Street on the
south bank intersects with Savile Road. Could this be the site of a new
bridge? Equally, could the weir be built upon sensitively to allow
pedestrians to cross the river above and observe aquatic activities beneath?
Further east, Castleford Bridge, the main vehicular and pedestrian crossing
to the northern part of the town and beyond to the beautiful, dramatic
landscape of the Ings, is inadequate and unsafe, particularly for
pedestrians because of its narrow width and two-lane traffic. The location
of any crossing will need to be supported by convincing arguments about
pedestrian movements and lines of desire.

8 Connecting with the canal, the landscape and the Ings

To the north beyond the loop of the Aire in the town centre lies the Aire &
Calder Navigation canal, and beyond that the beautiful, dramatic
landscape of the Ings created from the former colliery spoil heaps that
surrounded Castleford before their closure in the 1980s. What were once
harsh but lucrative industrial assets have become under-utilised potential
leisure destinations. They now offer an extraordinary series of natural and
man-made resources, sweeping around the northern edge of the town.
Welcome recognition of this potential came recently with SUSTRANS’
agreement to purchase the former railway between Allerton Bywater and
Castleford town centre, including the magnificent steel rail bridge crossing
the river.

9 Connecting Fryston and Airedale into the town

Moving further east along the Aire and Calder is the mining ‘village’ of
New Fryston, then the river bends south and contains large green areas to
the east of the suburbs of Airedale and Ferry Fryston, while the north of
the river are the Ings. How can a circular rural route that links Airedale,
Fryston, the landscape and the canal best be realised?

10 Making The Green at Ferry Fryston safe and beautiful

In Ferry Fryston is a formal rectangle of open space that has become
unloved and virtually derelict. It is an asset that can be brought back to
life and to form a visual link with the wilder landscape beyond to the east,
and thereby link to the rest of Castleford’s amazing landscape. The
Castleford Project’s activities with the community have helped to establish
a community group – The New Friends of The Green – which has over 90
signed up members and has already established energetic views about the
future of The Green and its future governance.

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11 Developing a pocket park strategy for Wilson Street
At the western end of the town centre, west of Church Street a series of
terraced streets run south and north off Wilson Street. Demolition and
dereliction have left a series of empty plots and people are angry that the
external environment of the area has fallen into neglect. These plots
provide opportunities for inserting ideas that regenerate these sites while
introducing animation and restoring a stronger sense of community to the
area. There are also opportunities for restoring/reviving degraded
passageways. Within Koetter Kim’s early ideas for Castleford it has been
suggested that the town centre needs to restore its former residential
densities and streetscapes. The Wilson Street area is seen as a potential
model for how other inner areas could accommodate new homes and create
new urban lifestyles at the heart of the town.

12 Cutsyke Projects
Cutsyke is a tightly knit suburb of Castleford just to the north of the M62,
composed predominantly of purpose-built semi-detached and terraced
council housing. Some houses have large gardens. There are large
underused neglected public spaces and the area is in need of substantial
revitalisation to prevent further decline. The local community, assisted by
Groundwork, has been very active in seeking schemes that stop this decline
and provide the kind of facilities people have expressed an interest in.
Notably these include sorting out the allotments to the south of Cutsyke
Avenue and developing a tri-partite playground to provide opportunities
for local young people on a site adjacent to a Groundwork community
garden that is about to enter construction. There is a clear need in the
area for some private gardens to be improved and items such as bus
shelters and local routes to be upgraded. Increasing social problems
associated with decline mean Cutsyke has a pressing claim for help with
regeneration. Designers will find input from the community and from
Groundwork helpful and essential.

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The Designers’ Response

“Each work occupies a space; it also engenders and fashions that

space.” – Philosopher Henri Lefebvre, 1974

Since their appointment by City of Wakefield in 2004 on the

recommendation of the community and Project Steering Group, a top flight
team of designers, Project leaders from the local community and Project
managers appointed by the local authority have developed designs for a
series of highly localized sites.

Town Centre: Hudson Architects

“Carlton Square” forms a centre point to Hudson Architects’ overall scheme

for the regeneration of Castleford.

Existing street furniture is rearranged to one side in order to leave a more

open space, which along with a low podium will be used for public events. A
group of fountains provides a focal point to this space when it is not in use.
A new cafe is proposed to one side of the square, enlivening the space and
providing a facility for the market stall holders. A glade of trees forms a
canopy over the cafe’s tables. An art scheme is being devised with public
artist Pierre Vivant.

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As befits a quintessentially British and also object/interiors-orientated firm,
the market stalls are a key to Hudson Architects’ scheme. They have
developed the design of these in association with the Royal College of Art
and B2 Consultants.

The stalls are permanent pieces of street furniture; the canopies unfold
during the day to shelter market tables and then fold up overnight. Lighting
is embedded in the stalls to provide task lighting during the day which -
when closed - makes the stalls glow.

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Town Centre: DSDHA

For the subway that is a key entry point in to the town centre, architects
DSDHA have reviewed the experience of travelling through a narrow tunnel
and sought to create a new public space to the south side.

Deborah Saunt and her team are inspired by the ideas of urban sociologist
Ray Oldenburg who writes about the importance of informal gathering
places and how bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other "third places"
(in contrast to the first and second places of home and work), are central to
local democracy and community vitality. In Saunt’s words, these are
“alternative infrastructures” that make towns desirable social and
economic places, in contrast to the “short-lived rape and plunder” of the
leisure/retail model on the periphery of the town.

With lighting artist Martin Richman and engineer Jane Wernick, DSDHA plan
to create a new public place whose focal point is a sculpted seat, stratified
with references to the town’s material history.

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‘Castleford Bay’: Mc Dowell + Benedetti

With Arup Water and Alan Baxter Associates, architect Renato Benedetti has
been developing the concept of a floating or fixed structure which connects
the town and its water space and ‘Duck Island’ to the North.

Essential to the scheme is a Belvedere on the north bank and a new public
promenade to the south.

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Benedetti believes that in cities, it is the public spaces that are the
infrastructure and objects such as bridges act as “the soft connecting
tissues”. At night Benedetti plans to turn ‘Castleford Bay’ in to a magical
place, realising a ‘string of pearls’ in light.

Castleford Waterfront Follies: Sarah Wigglesworth Architects

Sarah Wigglesworth is best known for her house in London which uses a wide
range of innovative materials including straw bales, sandbags, gabions and
quilted cloth – an attention to the stuff of architecture which won her the
RIBA Sustainability Award 2005 and she is bringing to a new studio and
dance complex for the Siobhan Davies dance company.

“For too long architecture has erected a defensive wall around itself,
technically refining matter and twiddling with form in the deluded belief
that this alone is enough. It is time to cross over these self-defined walls
and engage with wider cultural forces.”

In Castleford, Wigglesworth has been asked to draw up a first stage action

plan for the improvement of access to the River Aire.

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She has also developed a series of designs for seating and fishing follies at
strategic points adjacent to the waterside and connected with plans laid out
by Hudson Architects and McDowell + Benedetti. Three of these will be
constructed within the context of The Castleford Project.

“We suggest that the real productive

potential for architects lies in an
endless movement between
engagement and retreat. Engagement
as social beings (eating, farting,
fucking), as users of spaces (and no
different to the many other users of
spaces), as political beings (where
the personal is, as she says,
political).”

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Village Green, New Fryston: Martha Schwartz

At New Fryston, on the site of demolished housing adjacent to the former

Fryston & Wheldale colliery, American landscape architect Martha Schwartz
has created her first open space in the UK.

Schwartz’ approach to ‘place’ is to combine landscape and geometry and

form a memorable image – a connection has been drawn between her work
and the minimalist sculptors Carl Andre and Frank Stella.

“Given the nature of our built

environment, the use of geometry in
the landscape is more humane than the
disorientation caused by the incessant
lumps, bumps and squiggles of a
stylised naturalism. Geometry allows us
to recognize and place ourselves in
space and is more formally sympathetic
to architecture.”

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Cutsyke Playforest: Estell Warren Landscape

Adjacent to a new community garden, on common land set aside from a

council estate, a children's 'play forest' has been commissioned from Estell
Warren Landscape Architects. It is an experience that the designers describe
as “a high energy 3-D puzzle, no way in, no way out.”

The original concept for the scheme came from the youth section of the
Cutsyke Community Group in an action-planning event in Autumn 2003. The
group wanted a climbing experience that was exclusive to local young
people, a playful place that that they could call their own. The forest is now
under construction.

Green, Ferry Fryston: Parklife

At The Green, Ferry Fryston, the community and landscape planner Phil
Heaton of Parklife are creating a new play space. In conjunction with the
new Friends of the Green group, Parklife has run many design events,
including ‘Parties in the Park’ attended by thousands of local residents. In
part, this approach is informed by Heaton’s unwillingness to let design be
dictated by manufacturers of equipment or furniture. This is a political
position to creating places for play that is a reaction to the constraints
imposed upon and expressed in many play schemes in the UK.

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The plan is to create a new
entrance to the Park and a play
space at its centre: a soft
landscape keyed to Heaton’s
favourite aesthetic of moonscapes
and volcanoes. He is designing the
scheme in collaboration with
Oyster Park Junior School and
Yorkshire based, metalworking
artist Chris Campbell.

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Urbanism and the creation of an Event Space

All designers participating in the Project would identify themselves as

‘urbanists’ – planners, not just designers who immediately grasp the
meaning, relationship and value of their work to fostering and participating
in an urban social life.

They epitomise a generation tutored in the merits of public space and the
value of design intervention, pioneered by the likes of architect Cedric
Price, 60s imagists Archigram and ‘The Cambridge School’ of architectural
design – ideas expressed in initiatives like the Urban Task Force and
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

In part this is another expression of the traditional modernist idea of

architecture and its power to propagate social change. However, it is also a
commitment to design as a catalyst to urban renewal on a scale below that
of a master plan: a localism that has proven its value in places such as
Barcelona, Lyons and Curitiba, Brazil.

All designers participating in the Project are driven by an interest in what

they see as a democratic deficit in the genesis and delivery of urban
regeneration schemes and they believe in inspiring the public to want more
and get involved in the evolution of their public realm.

All are against sprawl and understand that urban flight leaves in its wake a
fractured community and faded sense of spirit.

All understand the value of planting an idea and believe that genuine
communal value is the standard against which urban change should be
considered.

In effect, they subscribe to the Project’s informal, non Master Plan

approach, an ethos echoed by the 60s idea of ‘Non-Plan’, pioneered by
journalist Paul Barker, planner Peter Hall, cultural critic Reyner Banham and
Cedric Price. The idea was to bring a new sense of freedom to people and
enable them to take control of their built environment. In the words of
journalist Paul Barker: “What would happen if there were no plan? What
would people prefer to do, if their choice were untrammelled?”

What participating designers have subscribed to within The Castleford

Project is something similar. They have shown themselves capable of
working without a grand plan. In the words of project design advisor Roger
Zogolovitch, they are “floating in a net. The Project is elemental. It is an
idea of multiples, not a single thought.”

Knowing the limitation of architecture in addressing the question of how

people practically use public space, the Project enlisted the support and
advice of architects Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzoe, apostles for the pedestrian
use of public space and tutors at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art.

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In an early phase of design development, Gehl and Gemzoe advised
architectural teams on movement in the town. In their analysis, they
encouraged the Project to celebrate certain values in their design, values
espoused by American sociologist William H. Whyte and expressed by the
organisation he founded in the United States, Project for Public Spaces:
“Four key ingredients make for a great place: Accessibility, Activities,
Comfort and Sociability.” In one of Whyte’s immortal phrases, “What
attracts people most is other people.”

Many of the participating architects use natural materials, place special

emphasis upon art and play and appear to understand, like landscape
architects, that designs are to be continually adapted and transformed. In
the words of urban designer and landscape architect Adrian Geuze of West
8, who expressed an interest in participating in the project but was not
selected by the community: “We have learned to see landscape not as a
fait accompli but as the result of countless forces and initiatives.”

In many cases, the designer has approached the site as an ‘event space’.
Some have simply arranged objects in a given space, be it the cairn that
features at the centre Martha Schwartz’ open space design or the oversized
rocks that edge and define Parklife’s play space. Others have sought to
create objects that provoke new activity.

On one level, site as ‘event space’ is simply responding to the brief for the
design competition which asked for permanent ‘objects of enchantment’.
On another, in the nature of their approach to site, the scale of their work
and the work’s creation of its ‘own’ space, the designs express themselves
and their site as an environmental installation.

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Intervention of Visual Artists

Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt

“To experience a structure is not to receive it into oneself passively: it

is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover its immanent
significance.” – Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1962

In 2005/06, artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt are to present a

temporary exhibition in Castleford and its surrounding towns.

From Münster, Germany, Winter & Hörbelt first gained an international

reputation for their production of ‘crate houses’: beautiful, light-filled,
functional pavilions constructed from recycled bottle crates. They have
been used as meditation spaces, information kiosks, a light-house and
cinema. The artists also work with resin, plastic and steel – as used in their
steel basket, presented at an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2004.

In the catalogue accompanying the show, Clare Lilley of the Sculpture Park
drew attention to the relationship between Winter & Hörbelt’s work and the
idea and reality of crossing, viewing and occupying space. She connected
their ‘behavioural space’ with the idea of a social sculpture. “Their walk-in
structures both reveal (enclosed space, views) and filter (surrounding
space, views) and they are made complete only when entered and used.”

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Carlos Garaicoa

Carlos Garaicoa was born, lives and works in Havana, Cuba. In 2006, he will
visit Castleford and in a one-month residency, create an artwork for display
in the town. He visited Castleford for research purposes in early 2005.

In the early 1990s, Garaicoa

became known for his
interventions in public places. He
would anonymously post signs
around Havana listing the mystical
powers of numbers like ‘6’ or ‘39’
or announcements such as ‘Dear
resident: This next Sunday this
building will become a different
one. Your life will also change'.

Carlos seeks to address Cuba's

politics and ideologies through the
examination and creation of
utopias and is building a body of
work that has already featured at
Documenta XI and in a major show
at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles.

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Interested in urban planning and the architectural social fabric of the city,
Garacoia often illustrates his utopia in large installations using various
materials, such as crystal, wax candles, and rice-paper lamps.

He has created pop-up books depicting decrepit turn-of-the-century

buildings in Havana and sculptures exploring utopian space using chess.

The city is there, waiting for you…Over time she grows, becomes more
complex, fugitive….This web of experiences affects, contaminates, reflects
upon, and is projected onto the city’s architecture and urban planning, her
temperature and airs, her skies and stars, her buildings, corners, texts,
languages, and peoples.

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Creation of an Art Space: 2 Sagar Street

When The Castleford Project started in February 2003, we recognised that

we needed to help create conditions for change in the town.

The Project needed to prioritise and deliver design excellence, create

economic strength, take responsibility for the quality of environment,
support and invest in urban government and prioritise social well being – the
fundamentals of ‘urban renaissance’.

We knew that securing high quality urban environments has as much to do

with public awareness of urban design, as it is about the skills of the
professionals involved in the management and implementation of schemes.

We knew that the measure of a successful town or city rests with its people,
the strength of their attachment to a place and their ability to join forces in
the ongoing process of regeneration.

To create an atmosphere in the town other than neglect, we thought that it

would be useful to run a programme of ‘cultural events’, parallel with the
development and delivery of capital works, much in the spirit of successful
Garden Festivals of the 1980s and early 90s.

To pull focus, we created a project office in the centre of Castleford which

also expressed the town’s determination to deal with empty, under-utilised
buildings that blight its fabric – places described by the Urban Task Force as
“small gashes that render our urban texture spoilt.”

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The Castleford Town Centre Partnership acquired the lease of a derelict
furniture store at a key, strategic location on a street connecting the town
centre with the waterfront and lend use of the site to the Project. The shop
was refurbished as an exhibition space and community venue.

Opening in September 2003, the site has since hosted events that have
attracted over eight thousand people and become a bridging point between
the dream and reality of the town and its regeneration. The location has
hosted exhibitions of the work of sculptor Henry Moore, a son of Castleford,
organised by the Castleford Heritage Group and supported by the Henry
Moore Foundation; several exhibitions of visual art by graduates of the Royal
College of Art, London, Moore’s former school; several architectural
exhibitions related to our programme of work, design workshops, dance
nights, formal council meetings and quirky local creative events, such as
artist and writer Brian Lewis and Harry Malkin producing sixty-seven
artworks in twenty-four hours in celebration of their sixty-seventh birthday
and in passing tribute to They Shoot Horses Don’t They.

New and Familiar Eyes on a Place

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The connection between the Project, local culture and regeneration reaches
beyond offering artists an exhibition space. It is about identity.

If the Project’s architectural program is about what to do THERE, how to

create a sense of HERE, the relationship between the Project and local art
and culture is about creating opportunities for people to win a new and
different understanding of the meaning of HERE. This is a simple, new
quest, brilliantly expressed by writer Marcel Proust as “The real voyage of
discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Inspired by innovative heritage trails in the United States, such as

REPOhistory in Atlanta and the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, the Project
encouraged the Castleford Heritage Group in early 2004 to develop and
deliver a series of walks in the town related to its cultural, industrial and
social history. The hope of the Project was that trails would involve local
artists, connect with and extend its spatial and psychological impact and
usefully explore ideas of time, movement, place and permanence.

The most powerful and exciting amenity group in the town, the Castleford
Heritage Group, had always been interested in the theme of marking
history, underlining the covenant and contract between past and present.
The arrival of the Project offered a moment when a proposal for a piece of
work could be put together. The first trail, themed to the life and work of
Henry Moore and created by artist Harry Malkin and writer Ian Clayton is
now being developed with local people and will be delivered in 2006.

“In Castleford, there are what are called sand holes. They’re caves where
the sand has been excavated and run into the side of certain hillsides,
quite a long distance, and you can get lost in them. As boys we would
take a reel of cotton many yards long and go in to the caves. But one
wouldn’t go further than the cotton because it was dark. The caves
always had this fascination for me, these holes did.” – Henry Moore,
1973

The Project has coupled this dynamic, didactic approach to expressing the
town and its past with a dynamic, expressive attitude towards its identity in
the present. We have done this in two ways: direct creative work and
educational initiatives.

In 2003, graphic artist Peter Anderson created a temporary installation in

the main street and square of the town out of comments made by local
people during our programme of public consultation.

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Anderson is a graduate in graphic design and fine art – as well as a tutor at
Camberwell College of Art - who mixes gallery shows with corporate identity
work and interior design with outdoor installations. So alongside his type
work for commercial clients like Moschino and Nike and interiors for
restaurants and bars, Anderson constructed an installation around the coast
of St Lucia in 1998, painting culturally significant numbers on coloured
wooden poles – not unlike Garacoia’s work with numbers on walls in Havana.

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In Castleford, Peter collected memorable opinions, at times abstract
comments on the town stated by local people at public meetings in clubs,
pubs, through street surveys and at ‘action planning’ events in 2003.

Anderson printed his choice of people’s phrases on ribbons of coloured

paper and attached them to lamp-posts in the town centre. On one level, it
was a novel way to report back community consultation. On another, it was
an effective external expression of a place and its self-image.

A second important strand of visual arts activity, related to the idea of

identity, has been our collaboration with local schools.

Young people have been instrumental to the design development of

neighbourhood projects in Cutsyke, Wilson Street and The Green, Ferry
Fryston. They have also participated in a ancillary programme developing
their curriculum on the built environment, organised by the West Yorkshire
Educational Service. It is at The Green that the vision of young people in the
town has been best expressed. Students from Oyster Park Junior Infants
School, which overlooks The Green, have been instrumental to developing a
new vision for the space.

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Working in collaboration with the designer, teachers at the school have set
students projects, asking them to visualise their idea of the present space –

- and come forward with their vision for the future –

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- and participate in the final design, such as the creation of this
artwork for a mural to be created at a main entrance to the Green. In
effect, express what they want from the world about them.

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Self-Actualisation and the Art of The Castleford Project

'Boutique' architectural intervention, the commissioning of visual artists to

produce new work, the engagement of the local arts community in the
expression of a town and its identity, The Castleford Project has enabled
serial creative engagement with the town.

This activity has a direct functional purpose, be it in support of the physical

improvement of a dangerous subway, the creation of a link between the
town and the participation of potential vandals in the design and
development of a neighbourhood scheme.

It also has a cynical intent. To journalists, art images well. To some

consumers, it reads as hip. To investors, it declares self-confidence. In
effect, the engagement of a deprived, former mining town with creativity of
the highest order lends the place instant new value – and exploits the idea
that art as a language can position any sponsor.

However, the extent to which such a creatively rich process has been
devolved and taken up by the community is important.

It suggests that the town is not a vulnerable place that has lost its ego,
sense of place or pride: and that’s why its inhabitants, by espousing high
quality architectural design and art are not, behaving like “patsies for
quantum leaps and architectural acrobatics.”

Certainly, to an extent, when one talks of art and culture, the real subject
is money. But something less manipulative and more honest is also going on,
an idea which was best expressed by the artist Paul Klee: “Art does not
reflect the visible; it renders visible.”

In every which way, The Castleford Project has sought to heighten and
differentiate the town and its self-image. It has done this in several ways,
such as re-awakening the community to its role as client, personalising each
project, working on a localized scale, ensuring the appointment of a series
of designers and artists capable of realising a customized design.

A key motivation in this has been to establish a principle of self-exploration

and create a unique activity that maximises potential and complements an
age of psychological individuality and self-determination.

This suits an idea of the civic in which the public realm, our outdoor living
room, becomes an opportunity for self-actualisation, in which 'dead' space
lives as an enabler of change and an opportunity for people to self-design
their identity. Whether that change is true or false, art is an invaluable
device by which the viewer can be presented with an image of enhanced
creative capacity, another kind of artificial mirror that allows people to call
a landscape and its creation their own.

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A Note on the Author

David Barrie is a producer and director of TV programmes and projects who

was employed, until April 2005, as Director of the Project by City of
Wakefield and Executive Producer by Talkback Thames. Currently, he is a
member of the Project Steering Group.

For over thirteen years, David has made documentary and factual television
programmes for BBC Television, Channel 4, Channel Five, ITV, National
Geographic Channel (Europe), CNN (Atlanta) and WNET (New York).
Highlights include films on human rights abuses in West Africa, the death of
rock star Michael Hutchence and single editions of Omnibus, The Late Show
and Dispatches.

In 1994, Barrie conceived of and organised an architectural design initiative

for the BBC that sought an alternative future for a decommissioning nuclear
power station in Snowdonia, North Wales. This was the subject of a TV
series, book and art exhibition at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and
Royal Institute of British Architects, London.

Barrie ran a similar project for the BBC on the space beneath the iconic
cloverleaf road interchange known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’ in 1990: a project
shown in a special single edition of BBC Television’s The Late Show.

David takes a special interest in the role that the media can play as an
instrument for democracy and the added value that it can leverage from its
ownership of a licence or brand.

In the take-up of interactive television and participation in multi-platform

broadcast initiatives, viewers are fast establishing themselves as adopters of
a form of broadcasting that is a channel of communication, not just a
mechanism for the delivery of content, a media that relates to its audience
as a series of communities and assumes a role not just as a protagonist but
also an architect of the public realm.

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