Place before party: why modern politics needs a somewhere

This essay was first published in Nation of Neighbours: rebuilding Britain from the ground up. A full version can be downloaded here.

Before there’s a politics, a party, or even a politician, there is a place. All great political journeys are rooted in one. A neighbourhood, a community, that helped cultivate our views and ideas before any institution or campaign.

Marcel Proust once spoke of the ways in which places evoke deep memory, as reflections of our own lives fractured by time and experience. He even spoke of a kind of supernatural ability for landscapes and locations to hold a collective consciousness. Faint, half-echoes of the struggles that have been - revolutions, moments of uprising and action.

We can feel it in some of the darkest of sites of our shared history; anyone who has visited the battlefields of Europe knows what Proust meant when he said: “…places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space.”

Yet it is not just in the darkness that places become imprinted with this kind of power. There are streets and neighbourhoods that take us back to our earlier selves and to a moment of shared action.

We all have them: streets, buildings, and shared spaces. The field where we played football after school, and where our hearts were broken. The community centres or village halls, the familiar serving hatches worn down by little hands and spilt tea, that carry the memory of a million birthdays and anniversary celebrations. The stands and stadiums where we learnt about community, of collective struggle for victory, no matter the hurt we felt along the way.

In Nation of Neighbours, we’ve sought to understand and explore how community action can shape and build a better Britain. Throughout the project, and long before, here at the UCL Policy Lab, we’ve been asked why we start in a community or at the grassroots, when so much of what Britain grapples with is large-scale. How do these localised approaches shift the major problems in our economy, our security, or our health system?

Firstly, for all these big things to work, politics must sustain itself long enough for change to happen. Democracy must live and thrive, generating the energy and ideas to power us through times of unrest, such as the age in which we live.

And politics must have an anchor. To withstand the shocks and storms of war and insecurity, it must have firm roots. None of this is possible without a place for political ideas to call home. Without such an approach, our politics becomes unmoored, inauthentic, and even technocratic.

This need for a ‘somewhere’ is often characterised as a play for the right, but in truth, all political movements find strength from a place-first approach. Be it the socialism of South Wales, or the multiethnic communitarianism of South London.

For a democracy, renewed through collective action and change, place must play a central role. We cannot bind ourselves to the business of changing a country, an economy, or a society without a story rooted in a beginning.

We recently wrote again about how respect for ordinary people is rooted in politics’ ability to act, not in technocratic ways but in radical democratic action.

That is when life is hard, when social bonds are strained, people have come to demand more than just ‘fixes’. Responding to raw anger with clever fixes from Whitehall risks doubling down on disrespect, by failing to recognise the scale of the anger and demand.

Place-based politics is part of this.

For voters, the rationale is simple - when they put their faith in conventional politicians of centralised change, with promises, sound bites, and technocratic policies, they fail to get the action they need to restore life to empty high streets and help people struggling to make ends meet. They’ve seen local services disintegrate and a growing anxiety over cohesion or violence.

It is why parts of conventional ‘centrism’ have crumbled as a political force. It is also why any message that speaks to ‘measures’ and ‘promises’ risks doubling down on disrespect. In the end, it fails to understand the pain and anger voters have towards a political and economic system that has failed them. Where is their agency? Where is our part in shaping the system?

In South Manchester, there is a real sense of what change and agency can look like. It isn’t some central state - it is local people taking action in small and big ways, enabled by a new type of politics that has emerged from the bottom up. And what Proust was to the modernist conception of place and space, Ian Brown is to Manchester’s sense of communal memory. In Longsight M1, a song he wrote long after his heyday with The Stone Roses. He provides us with his love letter to his place; he sings of dreams that will always be imprinted with his little part of Manchester.

What drew Brown back after all those years? “We came out of there; it was where we became us” he said. In the end, someone had to write the story of that place in Manchester where it all began. As Brown said with that pencil Britpop smile, “so why not me?”

Why not me? Why not us? Why not here? You see this time and time again among those who take action as communities and neighbours. You can say the same thing about the group of community organisations that operate a couple of streets over from Brown’s Longsight.

Levenshulme is made up of close rows of terraces, every so often broken by the bright lights of a corner shop. When I speak with Andy, the area’s history tumbles out. He tells of the early protest against the library’s closure. The spontaneous protest in 2013 led to a sit-in. Andy, is a quietly spoken kind of bloke - not an agitator.

“I needed to get home, but I ended up here with 40 others refusing to leave until the council agreed to talk to us.” Like others, he became an accidental campaigner. “The library mattered to us all, and we decided we weren’t just going to let it go.”

Today, the Levenshulme Old Library functions as a space for all. And the campaign sparked a broader movement within this neighbourhood. Around the corner, Bluebell Green community garden and nature play space, where folks gather to get a break from the daily pressures of life. As one of the organisers explains, for many who don’t have a green space, Blubell has become a vital refuge.

This work is part of Levenshulme’s long history of community action: an early allotment movement began here in the 19th century. Small unused parcels of land being taken over to grow vegetables and food for those in need. 

Just like those early social pioneers, Beth Powell, the Founder and Managing Director of Creative City, has been helping develop new forms of place-based change. Showing how, through organising, you can breathe life into democracy, beyond elections. Delivering lasting change in the community she loves.

For democracy to thrive, it needs places like the library and community garden, where action is taken and change is visible. In part because, without a politics capable of allowing us in, we simply walk away or opt for ever more radical forms of action. There is almost no evidence of a return to mass party membership, but that doesn’t mean Britain is incapable of building a thriving democratic culture. Party membership was as much about what happened in your community and neighbourhood as it was about the annual conference.

Often, this kind of place-based participation draws people in who have lost faith in politics but wish to find a way back to shared connection and change.  Many of those who work to improve their neighbourhood, be it through volunteering at a school council, supporting other parents, or even putting up the nets on a Saturday, are able to build shared values and trust, which are central to a country’s ability to flourish.

Just as in South Manchester, so many communities in Britian want to see politics recognise and talk up the achievements of ordinary people. For politics to do that, it must return time and time again to a story of place. From there, we have the capacity to build a kind of radical democratic renewal from which social and economic possibilities can flow.

This essay was first published in Nation of Neighbours: rebuilding Britain from the ground up. A full version can be downloaded here.