The Engine Room at Wayfarers Arcade in Southport has now closed as the project’s founder thanked everyone involved for their support.
Dr Eric Lybeck founded The Engine Room on the first floor of the arcade, on Lord Street in Southport town centre, as a new creative co-working and digital hub in 2023.
He said he has learned valuable learning from his “practical experiment in placemaking” which will inform his academic career.
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Engine Room Director Dr Lybeck said:
“The Engine Room is now officially closed.
“When I first started the project, people would sometimes ask: why are you doing this?
My answer was fairly straightforward. I wanted to see whether one small project could kickstart the regeneration of Wayfarers Arcade, and from there contribute to the regeneration of Lord Street and Southport more broadly.
“There was a theory behind it. The idea was that if you could begin rebuilding the different civic ecologies of a place — bringing together culture, enterprise, education, community and institutions — then each could start generating demand and capacity for the others. A small intervention might become a generative one.
“I still think that model was plausible. Indeed, I still think the Engine Room could have worked. But without substantial financial investment, too many things needed to align at exactly the right moment. Audiences had to grow quickly enough, partnerships had to mature quickly enough, funding had to arrive at the right points, the wider Arcade needed to move with us, and the underlying economics had to remain survivable while all of that happened.
“I also used to give people another answer when they asked why I was doing it. I would say: my career is as an academic. If this works, brilliant. If it doesn’t, I will learn an enormous amount by understanding the process through which it doesn’t succeed.
“It has. Over three busy years, the Engine Room became a practical experiment in placemaking: in what generates activity, what fails to, how cultural and civic projects interact with local economies, where voluntary effort reaches its limits, and what happens when regeneration depends upon good ideas but insufficient capital.
“I have already begun consolidating those lessons into a wider programme of work on placemaking and civic reconstruction.
Some of that writing is available at CIVIC RECONSTRUCTION:
https://civicreconstruction.substack.com
“Over the coming months I will also be archiving some of the materials produced during the project — photographs, events, experiments, ideas, collaborations and the various things we tried along the way.
“To everyone who played, performed, volunteered, partnered with us, or simply turned up on a wet Thursday night: thank you. The Engine Room had a great deal of potential, and it was a great deal of fun.
“It was always conceived as a project. Projects have beginnings, periods of intense activity, and endings. After three years, this one has reached its logical conclusion.”
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