What makes a place?

A series on the politics of production.

Andy Burnham wants to “reindustrialise Britain”. Bold, ambitious words, but what do they mean in practice? Responding to Ben Glover’s opening essay, “Burnham’s Politics of Production”, Future of the Left will be publishing a series of replies as part of a debate on the new politics of production.

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Written by Jessica Prendergrast, co-founder and director of the Onion Collective.

Ben Glover is right to identify something hopeful in Andy Burnham’s emerging ‘politics of production’. After so many decades in which the peripheries in Britain have been extracted from and abandoned, and in which prosperity has been imagined as something generated in a handful of cities and redistributed elsewhere, it does feel profoundly important to return making to the centre of economic life and to move economic life away from the centre.

But I am not sure that, on its own, production is enough. What deindustrialisation took from places like mine was never simply economic. What we lost were not just jobs, productivity or GDP, but also the relationships they held together: the sports clubs, working men’s halls, chapels and everyday rituals of care and solidarity that accumulated around shared work. When Watchet’s paper mill closed after more than 250 years, the loss wasn’t only livelihoods, it was also purpose and identity. It was a rupture in attachment, to place, to one another, and to the generations who had built the town around it.

So for me, the politics we need is not simply a politics of production, but a politics of making. Sure, production is part of this (and the move away from consumption very much welcomed), but maybe making is the bigger idea. It recognises that economies are shaped not only by what comes off a production line, but by the relationships, knowledge, imagination and institutions that allow places to keep creating and recreating themselves over time, and by who owns, shapes and governs them.

I also think it can start to remove the false distinction between industry and culture that dominates and divides in this country. Before they became separate policy silos, both were simply ways that communities made things together. A paper mill, a unionised shop floor, a pottery, a theatre, a repair workshop, a community kitchen or a social enterprise all rely on remarkably similar human capacities: curiosity, experimentation, skill, cooperation and care. They transform raw materials into useful things, certainly, but they also produce confidence, trust, identity and shared purpose. They don’t simply make products; they make communities capable of making more and wanting to do so together.

It speaks also to the infrastructure that is integral to Burnham’s ambitions. Policy on infrastructure tends to mean roads, substations and factory floors, all of which obviously matter enormously. But many former industrial and coastal communities have become fragile in another sense too. Over decades, in rural and more peripheral places, neoliberalism has optimised away the slack that allows them to absorb disruption. The community spaces have disappeared; the bus route has gone; there’s no hospital; not even a petrol station. It might be efficient, but systems have become so lean that when one thing fails, everything else quickly follows. If this renewal is to reach beyond the centre, and away from the cities with their built-in market redundancy, we have to tackle this too.

This means that in any kind of politics of production, social and cultural infrastructure is not an optional extra to be added once economic growth has been achieved. It is productive infrastructure. It is where people build the attachments, trust, confidence and practical capabilities that allow communities to adapt, innovate and organise themselves in different ways and in tough times.

Through our work at Onion Collective, we’ve come to think of attachment not as sentiment or therapy but as infrastructure. Secure attachment doesn’t stop children exploring the world, it gives them the confidence to do so because they know there is somewhere to return to. Communities are not so different. They become more resilient when relationships, institutions and shared practices provide enough steadiness to imagine – and make – a different future.

If green industries simply arrive in places shaped by decades of extraction, while ownership, decision-making and value continue to flow elsewhere, we risk reproducing the same economy in new clothes. Green extraction is still extraction, just as regional devolved authorities look much like centralised Whitehall from out here on the peripheries. If nothing real changes, in terms of power and agency and connection, polarisation and fear will continue to spread. Reindustrialisation, therefore, has to rebuild meaningful attachment alongside productive capacity. It has to invest not only in factories but in the civic, cultural and social infrastructures that allow people to shape the future of those places for themselves.

The shift is not just from consumption to production, or from the centre to the edges, but from a focus on what kinds of things we can produce in which places, to what kinds of places that production can help us to make.

Economies have always been about relationships and communities as much as wealth and jobs. They are systems through which people learn to make together. They are shaped through practice: through building, repairing, designing, performing, sharing, caring, owning and stewarding over time. If production is to matter again, it has to leave places not simply wealthier, but more deeply rooted, more imaginative, more capable of adapting, and more able to make what comes next together. That would give me hope.