Community BBQ
Consumers aren’t daft. You can do all the marketing, advertising and PR that you like to ensure success but the real test, and real success stems if people like a product and recommend it to friends. Consumers aren’t daft.
As designers, we are doing our bit to lay the foundation and infrastructure for a community to develop. The school, the district centre, the leisure facilities, the open space and pedestrian and cycle friendly streets should all help but its people that make community.
Saturday 26th April was a big day for The Bridge, and a big day for Dartford and a big day for yours truly. I started the day at Sky TV Studios on Soccer AM waving a Dartford FC scarf in celebration of their crowning as champions and their promotion to the Rymans Premier League. Then it was a dash across London to the first community event at The Bridge. We had laid on a posh (ish) BBQ using the newly erected permanent barbeques built in the first communal pocket park to be landscaped.
The sun shone and the residents came out, got to know each other, we got to know them and a dialogue between housebuilder, designers and the most important part of the equation, the residents, has been struck up.
Our good leader Jeremy Kite tucked in to the marinated mushrooms and cut the ribbon before dashing back to Princes Park and he like the rest of us, realised that The Bridge is attracting a pioneering, questioning community; just what a place and Dartford needs to prosper.
I am sure that the Bridge community will offer much to their locale and the town onwards and upwards.