Tim Smit has changed Cornwall for good with the Eden Project. Christian Annesley met a man still daring to dream.
It is more than a decade since work began on the Eden Project, and its success as a tourist attraction, flag bearer for the environmental movement and design marvel has seen the plaudits flowing thick and fast.
But Tim Smit, its Anglo-Dutch founder, hasn’t got time for basking in adulation. There is still too much to do.
“When we started on this, at the tail end of the 1990s, the timing was right and it caught people’s imagination,” he says. “The Eden Project was symbolically important for Cornwall. It gave renewed hope to a place and people feeling a sense of bereavement at the slow death of the mining industries.
“It also offered a focus to the environmental movement, which was tending to be angry and inward-looking rather than taking a positive message of change to the world.”
These days, with the threat of environmental catastrophe looming, and huge cuts in CO2 emissions being targeted by the world’s governments by 2050, Smit says a revolution in our way of life is the only answer.
“If you agree about the need for an 80 per cent cut in carbon outputs, and are serious about getting there, hardly a single area of our lives will be untouched. Most people – most business leaders – may be pinning their hopes on a technological quick-fix, but that’s extremely hard to imagine.
“The best chance we have lies in getting people to believe in a new story about how we all might live: a new culture of shared ownership.”
Smit’s proposition sounds simple, but the failures of communism and other collectivist movements cast a long shadow. “Communism left common ownership in disrepute. But if we are to husband resources and keep our quality of life we need new ownership patterns: shared cars, shared heating systems – even shared lawnmowers. A community with 5,000 houses and 5,000 lawnmowers makes no sense,” he says.
Smit’s message isn’t political as such. He’s no anti-capitalist, adding: “If you can bring rigorous management of capital to social ends and to notions of ‘membership’, there is an exciting world out there. You can have systems of trade that aren’t exclusive but can still turn a profit, though the world will have to become more decentralised.”
It’s not yet a story many will want to hear, but Smit knows better than most that stories really can change the world.
For his first major success, the Lost Gardens of Heligan, near Mevagissey in Cornwall, the gardens of an estate owned by the Cornish Tremayne family were restored. They had fallen into neglect after the First World War when many of the gardeners were killed.
“Heligan is hugely popular, and that’s not just down to the beauty of the gardens. We managed to marry a British love of great gardens with a romantic story about its lostness. That story elevated the working people to lead actors. By telling people about the ordinary men and woman that created something beautiful and were then lost, we touched a nerve. People want a sniff of a past that connects to them.”
Some of the original impetus for restoring Heligan came from Smit’s encounter with some civil servants who worked on the government’s five National Garden Festivals in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The festivals were an effort to bring about the cultural regeneration of derelict land in industrial districts. After the last of them, in Ebbw Vale in 1992, Smit spoke to several of those who had been involved. ]
“It was the right moment. Those I spoke to were brutally honest and gave me some real insights I wouldn’t have got to alone,” he says. “What stuck with me was having to look at a project in its entirety and try to imagine every aspect of its impact. That’s crucial to any major project, which is what those festivals were and what Eden became.”
That’s no idle boast. The numbers look like this: £135m has been invested in Eden but it is calculated to have put more than £900m back into the Cornish economy. It also employs 500 staff.
So what can the West Country’s regeneration masters – from the councils and urban regeneration companies to the South West RDA – learn from the Eden Project’s success?
“I couldn’t claim to be able to offer a strategy for the region. I’m thinking at a local level. But when you are creating something you have to think about the social milieu,” says Smit. “It’s not just about putting up industrial units and trying to fill them. Cafes are more helpful because people need space to talk and share ideas.
“The other point is that the public sector is still mired in the siloed thinking inherited from the Victorians.
You can see it in the names of government departments. It’s not conducive to finding lasting solutions to problems.
“Say you want to make Cornwall a centre for renewable energy. The issue isn’t how to find the money to build wind turbines. You need a new narrative where communities start pushing to produce their own community energy from renewable sources. That’s where lasting change comes from, not from yet another government initiative with some money wrapped around it.”
Smit also says new buildings or schemes need to truly inspire people if they are to make a difference.
“If a city centre is being redeveloped, it’s all too easy to spend £50m and replace it with something quite good, when, really, £100m is needed to create something that will change the place for good.
If you get it right – and don’t cut corners – the spin-off in terms of self-esteem and the change in aspirations is out of all proportion.”
Also in: April 2009
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