About
The Pride Of Place Project started with a chance conversation between Artist and Producer Talia Giles who was planning a ‘Creative Hub Pop-Up’ and Elaine Midgley, Director of Bedford Creative Arts launching an art in empty windows project initiative. Through their shared interests in reimagining vacant town centre spaces it make sense to collaborate as they were working towards the same goal.
From this starting point, while searching for suitable locations and finding the support necessary to make it a reality, Pride of Place was born - an umbrella ‘project’ with a more powerful approach to help drive change and demonstrate that a creative approach to placemaking through co-creating, and working together with not alongside the community can help regenerate the high street.
Through the many challenges we have had to overcome to get this far, we have found that there needs to be a complete overhaul in the current town centre. There is a disconnect between government, landlords, local authorities and the communities that live and breathe within them that needs to be repaired in order for our town centres to have a future.
Using initial funding from Bedford Borough Council’s Town Centre Priority Fund, three different place-making project have evolved: POP Art, POP Bedford and POP Studios.