Somewhere Between Nowheresville and 'Innovation Nexus': Britain's Place Rebranding Gold Rush

Somewhere Between Nowheresville and 'Innovation Nexus': Britain's Place Rebranding Gold Rush

There is a town in the East Midlands — we'll call it Greybridge, because the real name would be crueller — that spent £340,000 on a rebranding exercise in 2023. The result was a new logo featuring a geometric swoosh, a tagline reading 'Greybridge: Where Ideas Arrive', and a brand guidelines document running to 94 pages that specifies, with some urgency, the precise shade of teal permitted on council noticeboards.

The high street remains largely empty. The last Woolworths closed in 2009. The ideas, as far as anyone can tell, have not yet arrived.

Welcome to Britain's place rebranding epidemic — a booming, largely unexamined industry in which local authorities funnel public money into the pockets of consultancy firms who have discovered that geographic mediocrity is, in fact, an extraordinary business opportunity.

The Consultancy Industrial Complex Comes to Your Cul-de-Sac

The formula is, by now, depressingly reliable. A council — usually one whose regeneration strategy has consisted primarily of hoping for the best since approximately 1987 — commissions a 'place identity review.' This is not a planning document. It is not an economic strategy. It is, in essence, a very expensive exercise in deciding what font best represents the collective soul of a former pit town.

The consultancy arrives. They conduct 'community engagement workshops' — which is to say, they sit in a draughty civic centre with twelve people who happened to be passing, serve lukewarm coffee, and ask participants to describe the town in three words. The words are inevitably 'friendly,' 'community,' and something like 'up-and-coming,' which is then repackaged as evidence of 'latent brand equity.'

Months later, the council unveils its new visual identity. There is always a sans-serif font. There is always a colour palette described as 'warm yet dynamic.' There is always a tagline that sounds as though it was generated by an algorithm fed exclusively on LinkedIn posts: 'Hartlepool: Boldly Forward.' 'Stoke: The Original Maker City.' 'Luton: Your Story Starts Here.'

Nobody asked for any of this.

The Vocabulary of Transformation

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the place rebranding industry is its linguistic one. These firms have developed an entire dialect specifically designed to make the words 'slightly run-down' unsayable in a professional context.

A redundant factory unit is not derelict. It is 'a canvas for creative enterprise.' A car park is not a car park. It is 'a flexible urban activation space.' A town that has been haemorrhaging residents since the pit closed is not struggling. It is 'entering a period of exciting transformational realignment.'

The crown jewel of this vocabulary, the phrase that has colonised council documents from Penzance to Peterhead, is 'vibrant creative quarter.' It requires only two things: a small cluster of independent coffee shops, and absolutely no memory of what the area looked like before the independent coffee shops arrived. Wigan has a vibrant creative quarter. Rotherham has a vibrant creative quarter. At the current rate of deployment, Britain will have more vibrant creative quarters than it has quarters of any other description by 2031.

What £180,000 Looks Like in Practice

Let us consider the case of a real — though anonymised — coastal town in the North East. In 2021, it received a Levelling Up grant and promptly allocated a substantial portion to a 'destination brand refresh.' The brief, obtained via a freedom of information request by a local journalist with more persistence than most of us can manage, specified that the chosen agency must deliver: a new town logo, a suite of brand assets, a 'narrative framework,' a social media toolkit, and — this is genuine — a 'tone of voice document' explaining how the council should speak about itself online.

The agency delivered all of this. The logo depicted an abstract wave. The tone of voice document advised staff to be 'conversational but authoritative, like a knowledgeable friend who also happens to be very excited about regeneration.'

The fish and chip shops remain. The amusement arcades remain. The bus service to the nearest city was cut in 2022. But the Instagram grid is cohesive.

In Defence of the Unrebranded

Here is what the consultancy firms will not tell you, because there is no money in it: most people do not experience their hometown as a brand. They experience it as a place where they grew up, where their parents live, where they know which chip shop stays open past ten and which pub has the best Sunday carvery.

The Britain that existed before someone decided Wolverhampton needed a 'strategic narrative' was not a Britain without identity. It was a Britain whose identity was too specific, too local, and too stubbornly itself to be rendered in a 94-page brand guidelines document. Accrington is Accrington. Grimsby is Grimsby. These are not problems requiring solutions. They are facts requiring, at most, a decent ring road and a functioning leisure centre.

There is something quietly melancholy about watching a council spend the equivalent of three teaching salaries on a geometric swoosh, in the sincere belief that the reason people aren't moving to their town is insufficient brand coherence. The reason people aren't moving to their town is usually rather more structural than that. But structural problems require structural solutions, and structural solutions are considerably harder to present at a stakeholder launch event with prosecco and a branded tote bag.

The Inevitable Next Chapter

The rebranding, of course, is never quite the end of the story. Eighteen months after the launch, there will be a review. The review will find that 'awareness metrics have improved' — a finding based on a survey of 200 people, 40 of whom work for the council. It will also find, buried in an appendix, that footfall on the high street has declined by a further 7 per cent.

This will be described as 'a complex picture reflecting national trends,' and the council will commission a follow-up piece of work to 'refresh the brand positioning for the next phase of the journey.'

Somewhere, a consultancy firm will update its case studies page.

The ideas, in Greybridge, are still on their way.