PODCAST: Keith Jones spent 16 years working on the Lake District, UNESCO World Heritage Site bid.

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Skiddaw from Borrowdale © 2014 - Smudge 9000

But Keith only joined the bid half way through the 30 year process! This is "place making" on a heroic scale

Keith Jones was Chair of the technical advisory group for the Lake District world heritage cultural landscape bid. He has been a forester for more than 37 years and is now Area Director (North West England and West Midlands) for the Forestry Commission. Keith devised and helped to deliver the £59 million Newlands land regeneration scheme and Cumbria’s Forest Futures rural development programme, which helped to revive the area’s economy after the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease. More recently he worked with Alder Hey Liverpool Children’s Hospital on their redevelopment scheme. Keith was awarded an OBE in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours.

In this Working Lunch podcast he tells Joe Tibbetts how the patience and pragmatism learned over a lifetime of working as a forester enabled him to stick with the UNESCO bid for more than sixteen years. Significantly the criteria for WHS status met by the Lake District could almost serve to define the parameters within which modern place "making" sits. This is all about a proud and ancient community encouraged to better understand and value their own uniqueness and place among other communities. And how that re-valuing can provide economic and social benefits while helping in the transition from one "age" to another. A transition which so many communities face accepting the opportunities of the new age but without abandoning the existing, embedded, historic values of the old.

Anyone with a personal or professional interest in place "making" should hear this genuinely inspirational story.

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