Oxbridge Homezone
Follow Up Projects
The completion of the construction work on the Oxbridge Home Zone at the end of 2003 did not mean that the project had ended. One of the objectives stated in the initial challenge bid for this Home Zone project was to set up a residents' group which would take over from the Project Team when the construction of the Home Zone had been completed. An Arts Lottery bid was made to fund a celebration event in May 2004 and a series of prior 'interventions' to mark the completion of the project, and to develop its handing over to the residents.
This part of the project was referred to by the governmental Department for Transport, who administered the Home Zones Challenge scheme, as an "exit strategy". Les Bicknell and Jo McCallum preferred to call it "a project on the end of the project". Funded and conceived separately from the main Home Zone scheme, Bicknell and McCallum brought together a collaborative team of arts workers "to make art with the people in the street." A writer (the Lowestoft-based 'performance writer' cris cheek), a film maker, and a sound artist devised events including the projection of films from the East Anglian Film Archive on to houses in the street, and arts activities in schools, the local youth club, and with several elderly residents. A book/CDRom documenting these activities was distributed to all residents, and an exhibition of the work will be held at Lowestoft Library and in one of the shops on Oxford Road. A website called www.theroads.co.uk (no longer online) was partly intended to comprise an unusual sort of "manual" for the project.
The artist's brief for the Oxbridge Home Zone project includes a reference to a related "mentoring scheme for local artists" to which the artist was expected to contribute. In November 2003 Commissions East (in partnership with Waveney District Council and Suffolk County Council) organised an Artists' Professional Development Course in which Les Bicknell took part, and which used the Home Zone project as a case study. In addition, The Oxbridge Home Zone Conference, held in May 2004 in Lowestoft, was organised by Suffolk County Council to address issues arising from Home Zone and other projects which employ artists within regeneration schemes.
© Copyright David Briers 2004
