Nottingham's hidden creative heritage

A few weeks back I blogged about the potential for a serious creative quarter in Nottingham, dwelling on remarks made by venture consultant and commentator Lucy Marcus, who suggested this wasn’t something that state intervention could manufacture.
In short, her point was that a creative quarter would happen only if the creative industries in Nottingham had enough momentum to make it happen - money can help, but it can't invent it.
In view of the fact that Nottingham City Council wants to use part of its £60 million City Deal to develop a creative quarter, this is an important question.
Nottingham's creatives are certainly trying to deliver an emphatic answer. And it may be that there’s more of a heritage of creative and technical achievement in the city that conventional analysis suggests.
Outside the realms of industrial classification, most people will tend to see the creative industries as either something artistic, perhaps wandering into fields of design, or 'tech’ – which is stuff like computer programing, isn’t it?
That’s not wrong. But it doesn’t come close to doing justice to the breadth and depth of creative, technical, research and scientific activity which takes place in the city right now.
Or, more importantly, of acknowledging how long it’s been happening for and understanding where its strength really lies.
In design terms, our creative heritage is epitomised by Sir Paul Smith. And this was, once, an international centre for the textile trade. Through Nottingham Trent, it still produces graduate talent in this field. It's a tough game to make money in, though.
Nottingham’s right to a place at the top table in life sciences and pharmaceutical discovery is well-established, based on the discovery work that used to be done by the likes of Boots (Ibuprofen was discovered here) and the research carried out by the University of Nottingham in particular.
But something else has happened since then that might not be as well recognised. Thanks to the emergence and growth of businesses like Experian and the arrival of the bank Capital One, we now have the best part of a 20-year track record in a field known as data analytics.
This is the story of Experian, founded here and now a global leader in the fields of forecasting and analysis around consumer and business financial behavior. Its multi-faceted demographic tool, Mosaic, is almost a map of the way we live now.
It's the story, too, of Capital One, the US bank which set up its European headquarters in Nottingham. It is very much a can-do corporate, all the way from being a regular in the great places to work charts through to giving its own analysts time to indulge new ideas.
The end result of their presence can be seen and felt in three areas: in other financial services businesses, like Ikano, tapping into a talent pool; in start-ups like HD Decisions, launched by people who found their feet in the two biggies; and in knowledge graduates - people whose degrees deliver skills suitable for programing, analysis and software tools and apps - deciding to stay in Nottingham.
Along with the existing science research, these firms have become another reason for specialist legal and accounting expertise to maintain a presence here.
I was chatting last week to Mark Onyett, the engineer and ex-Capital One exec who co-founded the credit and risk software and services firm TDX (on course to be the city's next £100 million business).
Onyett's journey and his entrepreneurial outlook put him in a strong place to understand the kind of message the city needs to be giving out to the students, start-ups, businesses and backers who might drive the creative and tech sector here.
Again, this is a knotty issue. Identifying a distinctive message won't be easy in a world where local authorities everywhere are fixating on their own mini-me of Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout. But Onyett thinks we're more plausible than most.
"I'm not sure I'd go for Maid Marian Roundabout!" he says. "It's got to be about the future. How about something like 'For the next generation, come to Nottingham'?"
Next generations don't just appear and you can't invent them, even with a wodge of money. They evolve from what's already been happening.
And that's the point about Nottingham: creative and tech has been happening here for longer than we think. Only now are we beginning to realise what we've got.

Bringing students to book

He can find inspiration in everything

I had one of those spluttering, what-on-earth-is-the-world-coming-to, moments yesterday afternoon (happens a lot in Baker World).

I was sitting in the office checking a story which has appeared in today’s Nottingham Post, and I must have been a proper sight: mouth open, skin turning purple and head shaking from side to side.

What left me in a state bordering on apoplexy was a story about a scheme set up by a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University to encourage his history students to read books for pleasure.
He was, the story said, “shocked at their reluctance to do so”.
I’ll bet he was. If university study is not about the exercise of an inquiring mind what on earth is it for?
Now, there may be two causes lurking underneath this issue. One is that the students on Nick Morton’s history course are effectively forced to read certain books. So may be after an afternoon scanning The Memoirs of George Sherston they’ve perhaps had enough Great War literature for one day, and would prefer to spend the evening listening to some popular music while sipping a bitter shandy (or something like that).
The alternative explanation – one favoured by paid-up GOMs like me – is that they are part of a generation which is slowly losing the reading habit because so much of the information it consumes is served up on a laptop-shaped plate.

As the very existence of this blog suggests, I have huge respect for laptops and anything which makes information more easily available (as long as someone pays for it!). But – and it’s an Everest-sized but as far as I’m concerned – I do not believe for one moment that everything I need, want or might benefit from knowing is best chosen by someone else.

While it is certainly convenient, I loathe Google’s habit of continually refining searches so that what is served up in the results is what IT thinks I should be told. Similarly, I detest the fact that it will serve up ads based on some of the words it has scanned in my emails (so I’ve turned AdWords off).

I’ve digressed. But it’s the same issue as the one Nick Morton is trying to get his apparently bibliophobic students to confront. Read what you have to, by all means, but don’t stop there. Do what I do – go into Waterstones, look in a section that you know nothing about, and find a book which introduces you to it.

One of my favourite phrases in life is one uttered by the Nottingham fashion legend Sir Paul Smith, one which goes some of the way to explaining why a walk round his shop on Low Pavement is so much more than an encounter with fashions which don’t suit me.
What is the phrase? Don’t look it up on the interweb – that’s a cop-out. Go into Waterstones and ask for his biography. It’s on the cover of a book that’s well worth reading.