The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Emu Wars from their Brumby Shooting.
This week we look, in our Engagement Hub, at The Real Phoenix Nights, a documentary about a working men’s club closing, which recently screened on BBC1. Why are community assets like this quite so important to a functioning democracy?
And of course, there’s the Friday pint of John Smiths that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including a piece on the role of wonky vegetables in a draught.
The Real Phoenix Nights
We enjoyed sitting down on Tuesday evening, to watch The Real Phoenix Nights on BBC1. Part of the BBC’s regional documentary series We Are England, the film was initially shown in the East of England last year, but this was the first time it had had a national screening.
The documentary is about two sisters, who are trying to keep their father’s working men’s club solvent during the pandemic. It follows their efforts to modernise the establishment – by reaching out to families and young people. With their lease up for renewal and lockdown restrictions still in place at the time of filming, the future of the club hangs in the balance.
Directed by friend-of-TCC Charlotte Charlton, The Real Phoenix Nights is uplifting rather than sad. But it shines a genuine light on the importance of community organisations in combating loneliness and holding neighbourhoods together. One challenge that lies ahead, as the economic clouds gather, is the difficulty of retaining social infrastructure of this kind.
There are lessons, too, about local government engagement. Talk of ‘community assets’ or ‘voluntary sector partners’ can sound like municipal jargon. But we can see, with an institution like The Railway Club in Clacton (where the film is set) the reality behind the buzzwords. There is no way that a top-down council initiative could replicate the casual network of social relations which the hub sits at the centre of. Nor could council engagement teams reach many of the parts of the community which The Railway Club caters for.
The dilemmas attached to ‘hard-to-reach’ communities are often less about logistics than about trust. The groups which the council hears from least tend to be tight-knit and ultra-local; liable, if they trust anyone, to trust immediate acquaintances over remote decision-makers. Members of The Railway Club would be unlikely to turn up at your average citizens assembly without significant prompting.
The Real Phoenix Nights is a poignant slice of life. But it is also a reminder of the value which community organisations bring, and of those important it is to build local partnerships.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the pillar of your Friday community:
