Place-shaping in practice in Liverpool
29 August 2024
I am in no doubt that Speke and Garston are better places to live, because of the work of SLH.
Recently we’ve been thinking about what place-shaping means in practice and trying to define the elements that make up place-shaping. This is harder than it sounds, because really place-shaping is about responding to the unique needs of communities so they can thrive, and this will look different in different places and in different contexts. But you know it when you see it, and you can certainly see it in the work of South Liverpool Homes (SLH).
Matthew Walker and I went to see Anna Bishop, the Chief Executive of SLH, to hear more about their priorities, their challenges, and how they want to work with PlaceShapers, on a lovely day in August.
With about 3,800 homes in Speke and Garston, SLH is an organisation that really knows its place, its communities, and its residents. They are a great example of a phrase we use often about our members – not the biggest nationally, but definitely the biggest locally.
It is an area of Liverpool that has already been through significant change, becoming a place where people now chose to live, and that is in no small part due to the stewardship and long-term commitment of SLH. That doesn’t mean the residents of Speke and Garston don’t still face significant challenges, including health inequalities and high levels of disability.
The current priorities of SLH include helping more tenants into work and investing in their ASB services so people feel safe and listened to and they can resolve problems as quickly as possible. The number of ASB cases are rising, as they are in other areas, but tenant satisfaction levels with how these are dealt with are impressive.
They are also looking to make the green spaces around their estates more diverse and more community focussed, including working with the local authority and residents on creating an imaginative and engaging new park and planting orchards to improve biodiversity. This is an aspect of the place-shaping role of housing associations that is currently underexplored, so I am looking forward to hearing more about this project as it develops.
The Grow Speke project, a community space and garden that has been developed and funded through an innovative partnership that includes the police, is a brilliant resource for the residents, schools and communities of Speke. Grow Speke produces fresh, local vegetables which are donated to The Market Place, South Liverpool Homes' community shop.
Grow Speke now has its own beehives and has trained eight qualified beekeepers and I can’t wait to try the honey they produce.
This brilliant blog (Gardening for Health and Wellbeing) demonstrates the difference getting involved in a project like Grow Speke can make to residents:
I am in no doubt that Speke and Garston are better places to live, because of the work of SLH. Our job now is to tell their story so we turn the opportunities presented by the new government into policies that make a tangible difference to what they are able to do in the coming decades.
