though we’d always challenge the reductive assumption that there is only one type of Welsh accent – Wales has many accents – the ‘fading Welsh accent and does it even matter?’ article by Stephen Price (Nation Cymru, 17 August 2024) does highlight a broader issue about how local identities are threatened by mass media, greater social and geographical mobility, but also by inertia: a failure to support local communities and to invest in their local identities and stories of who they are.
Our social enterprise Grow Social Capital has been working around Britain creating a blueprint for Common Peoples across the UK to enable them to create better futures for themselves by respecting and celebrating their local and regional identities, heritages, and inclusive values for overcoming adversity and fighting social injustice.
Are we witnessing the emergence of ‘Engbland’ where it is not just the high streets that all look the same but, as Price notes, also how we speak and identify ourselves? Unless we do something about it, yes.
Our work is not a nostalgia-driven yearning for preserving ‘a lost past’, but rather recognises how our communities’ sense of identity, narratives, and stories are profound influences on individual self-belief, confidence, and sense of togetherness to face up to adversity.
Working-class communities don’t have cultural institutions to defend their collective interests. As a result, their stories get mis-told, negatively stereotyped, marginalised, ignored, or even airbrushed out of existence by others.
Now, what we do not need is a ‘Royal Institute of Common People’. Rather by carving out emergent spaces – anything that brings people together on or offline – and positive calls for action, like Price is making, we enable local peoples to explore, discover, and celebrate their shared sense of who they are, where they come from, and where they are going forward together.
It is what our pocket museum project is all about. So far, we have told the Story of Cockney in 50 Objects, a part of the Modern Cockney Festival; and this autumn we will be working in Splott in Cardiff to curate the Story of Splott in 50 Objects.
In both cases, we have little input to the objects – landmarks, people, events, cultural motifs – that are curated. Indeed, in keeping with the famous community development maxim: it’s not the result that matters, but the process. What we mean by this is that the interactions in the spaces that are carved out are more important than the actual items selected for the pocket museum. People come together in a convivial and inquisitive manner to nominate and deliberate their suggested museum objects.
The diversity of people involved helps build bridging social capital i.e., trust and networks between people are not alike – of different faiths and ethnicities, with different migration stories, young and old, male and female and non-binary – but who, through the course of curating their pocket museum, uncover much that they have in common.
We are also working with Associate Professor of Sociology Black Hawk Hancock from Chicago’s DePaul University on the Fulbright-supported Knowable Communities Need Knowable Neighbours project that will explore how social capital is propagated in working class districts of Cardiff.
So, let’s speak up more about what Stephen Price observes. We agree, an accent is mote than just how someone sounds. It is sense of identity, heritage, and a badge of pride to go forward in life.
Do we just accept change as inevitable? Or do we do something about it? It’s our shout.
Contact us at hello@growsocialcapital.org.uk to know more about any of the work outlined here.
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