My mantra for the last month seems to have been local distinctiveness and Norwich 12 (www.norwich12.co.uk) certainly provide a key component of that for Norwich, as I will be telling the World League of Historic Cities at their biannual conference in Turkey next month. It all kicked off with an editorial in HEART's newsletter with me slating clone towns and the ubiquity of 'one fits all' street treatments, globalise retail formats and 'out of the design catalogue' architecture. To counterpoint this assault, I extolled the virtues of the Norwich Lanes as a model for getting it right. I also lobbed in a passing plea to the Greater Norwich Development Partnership to have the distinctive character and identity of the area at the forefront of their decisions along with more 'practical' considerations like sewage capacity.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this worthy but modest effort may have then provoked a chain of events that will have cast me in a less than serious light subsequently. First, and first thing on a Monday, I got a call from the Norwich Evening News who wanted to know if I thought Norwich was looking the same as everywhere else in the world. I thought I'd said 'no' and put a commendably positive spin on what was happening in a locally distinctive way in Norwich. However, what my HEART colleagues saw leaping predominantly from the article was not any of that but rather me saying 'the good thing about Norwich is that you can pop into Thorns for a screw' (distinctive indeed) and an incoherent reference to French bogs (as in something you pee in as opposed to something you sink up to your waist in - although some French toilets....) but more of that later.
Hot on the heals of this came the Norwich Union announcement that henceforth it would be known as Aviva and I suppose I was grateful, at least, that the Evening News didn't immediately phone to ask how I thought that sat with my local distinctiveness view of the world. On the upside it avoided me saying the 'good thing about Norwich is that you can pop into Aviva for a double indemnity' while it also gave me a bit of reflecting time. I suppose people might have expected the Heritage Czar's reaction to be 'wicked' or 'another nail in the coffin of Norwich traditions', but it wasn't. What I thought was that virtually all of the rest of the world didn't call Norwich Union ‘Norwich Union’ anymore but that getting Aviva on the Canaries shirts might be a very potent way to get our brand out to a world audience - particularly when they return to their rightful place in the Premiership as they inevitably will. While I feel that international brands can be helpful in their own right, brands and football together make a potent combination.
As if to underscore the point, I was in Southern Ireland shortly after, talking about local distinctiveness you'll be amazed to hear, when my taxi driver asked me where I was from. His response said it all - 'ya had a brilliant football team before, dey beat Bayern Munich, finished in da top tree with Man Utd, great' he eulogised. Interestingly, what he didn't say was 'yeh dat Norwich Union, I insure me cat with dem, I'll be going there on me holidays.' Neither did he express the sentiments of his alter ego from Ulster who, a few months earlier, had lamented the fact that Norwich had dispensed with the services of the alleged 'good servant' Worthy and that Northern Ireland were now stuck with him, so he did.
The other half of the Irish story was that I was ambling through the host town captivated by its delightful and distinctive local architecture, shops and heritage when I stumbled across a French bog in the main street. Well obviously not actually in the street but you get the idea. If you're not getting this, here's the story. The French have rather distinctive toilets called pissoirs. A French street furniture company have exported a modern version of this, often with advertising, all over the world from San Francisco to Sydney. While French bogs are so right in a local distinctiveness sense in France, they are so wrong in Singapore or in this case in an Irish high street. It would be like having a cocktail umbrella in your Guinness. Confronted with this aberration, the local officials sort of grinned, shrugged in a stoical way and may reasonably have said 'you're not wrong but at least we didn't get Worthy as well'.
The next day, I was back in Norwich talking to an audience from half a dozen European countries and when I confronted them with the 'bog' the French chortled hysterically but that could have just been the speed of the translators relaying an earlier joke. The same could perhaps be said about an inspirational Danish speaker who concluded his eulogy about street life in Sienna and Verona by saying that perhaps we all needed a little Italian inside us. I think that this might be taking globalisation just a bit too far though.
No comments:
Post a Comment