Ipswich director shares her thoughts on City of Culture bid

On 10th August we press send on one of the most ambitious and exciting funding bids I’ve ever been part of.

And that's saying something.

I’ve been working in the cultural sector for 30 years, as a practitioner, a funder, and a leader.

I’ve written and read more funding bids than I’ve had hot dinners, but nothing has ever felt quite as extraordinary as developing this bid for City of Culture.

I’d been working on phase 2 of the culture and heritage strategy since the autumn, building on early work led by IBC last year.

A dedicated team was developing an expression of interest submission to the City of Culture programme at the same time, and we connected on themes, feedback, and ideas emerging from their work.

And when I was invited to lead the final push, it was an easy decision.

I knew there would be big hurdles to overcome, but something about what I’d seen throughout the strategy work and the bid development made me feel like Ipswich was where I wanted to be, and where something truly extraordinary could happen.

I wasn’t wrong.

We appointed a team of producers, rooted locally, connected to as diverse a range of people and communities as possible, to create a rapid and effective spiderweb of idea creation.

We sent the bid themes out through those networks and collected up the ideas and proposals that flowed back from across Ipswich.

We brought in expertise to help us scale up those community-rooted ideas into deliverable projects, costed them up, and partnered them with companies who could make them a reality.

The director is now asking communities and businesses to add their names to letters of support for the bid. (Image: Simply C Photography)

Once the callout happened, you couldn't stop Ipswich.

Voodoo and Praise B’s ‘Big Up the Bid’ anthem set the tone brilliantly.

High attendance at workshops, an endless stream of people wanting to help, offering support, from libraries to sports clubs to cafes and shops.

When we announced the first in a long queue of Ambassadors for the bid, it was hugely exciting, but it doesn’t touch the sides in terms of illustrating the depth of support we’ve felt all the way through from communities, businesses, education, and public bodies.

No-one we’ve engaged with has said no or blocked our progress.

There will always be naysayers in any place, there will always be rumblings and disquiet, and some may even find the whole idea of this sort of ambition a fantasy, but that's standard in any regeneration story.

We also haven’t got round to as many conversations as we would have liked, which is a frustrating side effect of the time and capacity constraints in this process.

So now, as we sprint to the finish line, we are calling on communities and businesses to add their names to letters of support and indicate how they’d support the bid if Ipswich is shortlisted.

It's the start of a big conversation about cultural regeneration, and we want to know who’s in.

I can only stand in admiration of what has been achieved in the last two months.

This bid is written by the community.

It’s not engineered to fit with sponsors, high-profile names, or funding bodies.

People are coming to the table because they believe in what has been created.

This bid carries the heart and soul of Ipswich, an ambition to be bigger, better, and bolder, dreamed up by the people who live here and ready to be shared with the world.

This is our moment, and we are taking it together.

So big up the bid.

I’m all in.