DIRECTOR OF PAISLEY’S 2021 CITY OF CULTURE BID REVISITS CHILDH
IT’S been a long, long time since Jean Cameron was last inside her childhood home, but the memories haven’t faded. The woman in charge of Paisley’s bid to be UK City of Culture in 2021 is standing – slightly self-consciously, as she admits – outside the house in Tannahill Road, in Ferguslie Park, Paisley. She vividly recalls growing up here in this four-in-a-block, of playing in the small, shared front garden.
“It was good growing up here. There was a lot of love,” says Cameron. “I don’t want to be Pollyanna about it, because there are challenges here, but I felt very well loved.
“My mum worked in the mills. She was even on a TV documentary recently, The Town That Thread Built, talking about her time there with her old friends around a table in Paolo Nutini’s mum and dad’s cafe.
“My dad worked at Chryslers car factory but he was on strike a lot in the 1970s. So my mum was part of that strong Paisley female workforce that put the bread on the table while their menfolk were standing up for what they believed in in terms of social justice.
“But at least I grew up knowing that I lived in a street that was named after a poet, a Paisley poet (Robert Tannahill, the famed Weaver Poet, born in 1774) who, it turns out, couldn’t take himself seriously because he was never going to be Burns. There’s something in that, isn’t there? He said, ‘An honest heart is never poor’, and there are a lot of honest hearts in Ferguslie.”
Cameron, who is 48, remembers growing up with a substantial family and church community. Both the local churches, St Fergus and St Ninians’s, had solid youth-work programmes, too. She attended St Fergus Primary, then St Mirin’s and St Margaret’s High, where among the other pupils was one Gerard Butler, now a Hollywood star.
We’re walking down Tannahill Road at midday on a working day, and it is eerily quiet. A good number of the houses are boarded up. Tannahill Road and nearby Tannahill Terrace form part of a scheme that has sometimes been described as “notorious” in the tabloids; today, though, it looks perfectly ordinary.
A year ago Ferguslie Park, long a shorthand term for urban deprivation, found itself – once again – at the bottom of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, or SIMD, but Renfrewshire Council is consulting on ambitious proposals to transform the area by investing in new housing and building a £15 million regional sports village.
A few minutes’ walk up from Cameron’s old home, and visible from its back door, is the eight-year-old stadium that houses St Mirren Football Club, the Buddies. A sponsorship deal signed with Renfrewshire Council in 2015 gave it a new name: the Paisley 2021 Stadium.
Cameron, who is project director for Paisley’s 2021 bid, is genuinely enthused by the possibilities City of Culture status would open up. And if anyone knows about culture as a catalyst for change, it’s her.
After studying Italian and French with business studies at Edinburgh University, she returned home to work at Paisley Arts Centre. She took the BA community arts course at Jordanhill College then embarked on a successful career in the arts, initially in Glasgow at prominent venues such as the CCA and the Arches.
She produced the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and, 12 years ago, Scotland’s national presentation at the Venice Biennale. She worked on the Aye Write! book festival, and on Glasgow Mela, and was the lead in the international strand of Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games cultural programme. It’s an impressive CV, and she is now bringing her experience to bear on steering Paisley’s dream of succeeding Hull as UK City of Culture.
The town, she says, is excited by the immense rewards that victory would bring, should it be chosen ahead of its rivals – Coventry, Stoke-onTrent, Sunderland and Swansea.
Hull has enjoyed over £1 billion of investment since winning the title four years ago; it’s interesting to envisage Paisley reinventing itself as a cultural beacon. Cameron acknowledges that Hull has “really seized the opportunity. They’ve set the bar very, very high and we have drawn inspiration from that”.
If the long bid process has energised Paisley, bringing the town together and snuffing out local sceptics whose reaction could be summed up as “yeah, right”, the looming final bid submission to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) on September 29 is concentrating minds. “That’s our send-off moment,” Cameron says, “and it’s wonderful, because it’s a collective focus for us all.
“The next thing we know is that the judges will visit Paisley at the end of October. They’ll visit all five places then. They’ll want to see the 2021 Partnership Board and see that that’s authentic. They’ll want to see our venues and the cultural infrastructure.
“In terms of the buy-in for our bid, we’ve had over 33,500 face-to-face conversations with local people – we’ve had Paisley 2021 cultural conversations, we’ve had culture tours of the town. That represents over 40 per cent of Paisley’s population.
“We know we’ll be in Hull on December 6 and 7, in the judges’ chamber, and that they’ll make an announcement pre-Christmas.
“For this final bid,” she adds, “it’s a case of re-stating your vision and your partnerships. We’ve had great feedback from DCMS on our vision, about the need in Paisley, about the role of culture as a driver of regeneration. It’s very much about the specifics of how you are going to do this, and what is your legacy.”
Things have been picking up speed in recent weeks. In recognition of the fact Paisley is carrying Scotland’s hopes, VisitScotland, the national tourism agency, has recently joined the 2021 Partnership Board.
Lord Duncan, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Scotland Office, has enthused about the bid in an online video. Eleanor Laing MP, deputy speaker in the House of Commons (and, incidentally, the Paisley-born MP for Epping Forest), came back home to visit the town’s creative industries incubator, inCube.
Paisley Pattern, the distinctive design that took the town’s name around the world, is being “re-profiled as a great local asset”, Cameron says; Pringle of Scotland has used some examples of the Pattern, held in the town’s historic museum, to inspire its autumn/ winter womenswear collection.
“It’s all about repositioning Paisley and its significance to Scotland, the UK and internationally.”
Paisley has the highest concentration of listed buildings in Scotland after Edinburgh. A stroll through the town centre takes you past the ancient Abbey, past the splendid Thomas Coats Memorial Church, past the Paisley Museum and Art Galleries. The last is to undergo a £49 million regeneration to turn it into an international-class attraction based on the town’s textile and design heritage. And the architectural treasure that is the Russell Institute, a 1920s A-listed building, has been refurbished. There is, plainly, a lot going on.