In the Community Shop West Waddy ADP, the Architects, are exhibiting the results of two competitions.
Students of Abingdon’s schools were asked to ‘devise imaginative new shop-fronts and signage to improve the legibility and identity of the town’s retail environment.’ The winning entry was a new shop front for Mostly Books created by Grace Edge from St Helen and Katherine School. Mark from Mostly Books was very pleased with the design.
On the other side were entries to a competition for students at Brookes University to assess the key issues necessary to improve connectivity between Abingdon town and the river Thames.
The competitions are part of the West Waddy 125th Anniversary celebrations.
I was really impressed with some of observations that these young people made of our Abingdon shop and will be implementing some of these suggestions in the New Year.
Younger people can come up with really interesting ideas, though they mainly come up with rubbish, but they’re ‘too sensitive’ for us to be allowed to be frank (and useful) with them (there’s a bit of irony in there if you look hard enough). Older people tend not to come up with good ideas as they’ve had most of their creativilty knocked out of them by some bureaucracy … parent, school, employer, peer group, etc and forever etc.
The young people in this ‘competition’ (is ‘competition’ a prohibited word nowadays?) may look back on it (in decades to come) as a golden time when their creativity was recognised.
I later years, once consumed by the maw of The Great Bureaucratic Beast, they will abandon creativity with the necessity of keeping their heads down while earning money without upsetting people.
Could these be the people, in twenty years time, designing the new Abingdon traffic system, giving the Old Gaol development a necessary updating, bringing The Vale waste collection service back to sanity?
The ‘mature generation’ are still getting things wrong … we are hardly the right people to give advice and guidance to the young.
I’ve just written ‘The Everyman Autobiography’ – You’re born, You ossify, You die’
ps: now someone (including himself) has blown backstreeter’s Secret Identity as a Town Councillor could we all make sure that he’s re-elected in May, otherwise he doesn’t get to wear the big cross-dressing necklace which The Lad Duncan has been sporting this year … not that I’m knocking Duncan who’s been impressively hyperactive this year (and avoided being in traction … a miracle if you ask me)
I am a newcomer and I came here because I figured-out that Abingdon is a great place and could be even better. This blog is about as big an asset as any town has.
Vote backstreeter