This project is about creating a complete history of the sites in York Central that are, at present, missing or under-detailed in the official narratives. This blog post is an introduction to the project written by Molly Shaddix, a Public History MA student at the Univesity of York.

We used our most recent Open Meeting in February to take a brief look back and an exciting look forward, finding ourselves on the threshold of big things and feeling the need to remind ourselves (and tell new members) how we got here - and what we’re currently working on.

Facilitated by Joanne Rule, YoCo ran a creative mapping exercise at Spark:York on 24th Jan 2024.

14 artists – all participants in York Open Studios – worked together to build a vision of how artists in York could share space, equipment and skills.

York Central offers potential for larger scale, shared equipment and workspace – which could make it possible for artists to work at larger artistic scale, at lower costs or in more collaborative or companiable ways.

In essence, YoCo’s approach to change is ‘Propose, Don’t Oppose’. We’re not entirely sure how that phrase emerged or who we nicked it from, but one of the people who helped shape YoCo – Rebecca Carr – used to have a Buckminster Fuller quote as her email signature ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. So it may have evolved from there.

Monday 4th December saw an evening which combined a fascinating exploration of railway heritage brought back to life with YoCo’s 2024 AGM – one of those facts of life of being a constituted body, in YoCo’s case a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG).

AGMs rarely get the pulse racing, but we made ours a celebration of a fascinating year and paired it with an illustrated talk by Tim Hedley-Jones, Director of the Railway Heritage Trust (and a York resident). The Trust has almost forty years’ experience of supporting organisations to restore and re-use our railway heritage from waiting rooms to water towers.

A guest blog by local artist Ealish Wilson, about the chances that come from saying yes, and the value of an incubator space when you start off in business.

YoCo and partners will be on-site to talk about community-led neighbourhoods as part of the The Radix Big Tent Ideas Festival 2023: REGENERATE.

Join us on the day for a fun family-friendly, map-based "Day in the Life of" activity to collaboratively inform and design a new community-owned and led neighbourhood.

What would be a good proposal for ownership of public space, and what would people want to do there?

As with YoCo’s thinking about homes and workplaces, the issue of ownership (and with it thinking around economy and governance) is central to thinking about open space. “Taking ownership” is a phrase often used, but often used to mean “you looking after the space we continue to own”. Back when YoCo’s community plan for York Central was developed, we talked a lot about co-ownership – could the “Great Park” instead be “The Commons” – and recent conversations with one of the shortlisted developers prompted us to revisit these.