Feeling Towns
2022

Feeling Towns was part of the AHRC Place Programme that ran from 2022 to 2024. It sought to understand and evidence pride in place, and it explored the correlation between place attachment and the health of local cultural ecologies, using creative methods to understand what pride meant to different communities. Because pride in place was a key, exploratory metric in the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper, we worked with policymakers and heritage organisations to understand how pride could be meaningfully evaluated. We engaged with policymakers and arts practitioners to explore approaches that pride in place required.

Feelings Towns delivered a series of policy outputs:

• Hosted a series of policy-focused seminars on Levelling Up and pride.
• Co-produced a think kit that made our methods for understanding pride in place accessible to organisations and communities.
• Commissioned a poem and developed an animated film about the role of pride in the Levelling Up agenda.
• Presented our project recommendations to launch the AHRC Place Programme Policy Brief Series.
• Adapted our findings for parliamentary calls for evidence on Community Cohesion and New Towns.
• Published a peer-reviewed journal article in Politics and Space.

We collaborated with communities and decision-makers in five areas to understand the specific role of pride in place. We conducted hyper-local research in Darlington, Southampton, Hereford/Ledbury, Dorchester, and the Isle of Wight, using creative methods to elicit people’s feelings about the places where they lived, worked and volunteered. We provided each of our partners with bespoke place-based reports.