Croydon needs to become a place that is unique, distinctive and cherished according to Joseph Watson, creative director of the National Trust.
Mr Watson was behind a series of walking talks in the town centre this summer, celebrating Croydon’s contemporary heritage and brutalist architecture.
During a session on Cutting Edge Consumerism at the Develop Croydon Conference, Mr Watson joked that the National Trust’s contribiution to that theme was “to tea and cake consumption around the nation” but felt there were lessons the town could learn about the emotional connection between people and places.
“The way that UNESCO goes around and finds its world heritage sites, and how it defines those, is the idea of spirit of place. And it defines those using three kinds of metrics which are its uniqueness, its distinctiveness and what is cherished about it,” said Mr Watson.
“I would love to see that turned on its head – so that you set out to create a place that is unique, that is distinctive and that is going to be cherished. Because I think in terms of consumerism, the biggest thing you have at your disposal is place.
“If people want to have the experience of coming to this place to do their shopping – great if they want to do, that we want them to do that not online, all the rest of it – but you’ve got to find hooks to bring them here in the first place.
“One other point I wanted to make: we also work with the idea, and this is particularly in relation to our places and the places that we care for as a charity, that if we can give people an extraordianary experience, that if we can give them as they come through the doors a moment of wonder in the time that they spend with us, that leads to them caring about our places.
“And then what we hope that will lead to, of course, is their participation in our places. That might be in becoming one of our members, and we have 4.5million of those and every increasing, so some success there I think we could say; but also through volunteering, we have some 70,000 volunteers who volunteer for the National Trust throughout the UK. So we’re an enormous organisation and the buttons we’re pushing are all about experience, that experience leading to caring and then leading to participation.”