Local government budgets were among the first to be hit by austerity measures imposed by the UK government after the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. With seemingly little room for manoeuvre, councils were forced to close libraries and community centres, sell off their fixed assets, and outsource social care, catering, park maintenance and other services to private providers whose business model has tended to depend on the erosion of workers’ pay and conditions and tax avoidance. In London, in particular, we also saw borough councils pursue highly controversial regeneration schemes that replaced social housing with luxury developments that have often effectively served as empty containers of global finance capital.

Out of this inauspicious context, an exciting experiment emerged in the small Northern English city of Preston. Fresh from the cancellation of the much-vaunted Tithebarn shopping and leisure centre development and shortly before its central government grant was cut to zero, the city’s council decided to embark upon a radical project aimed at transferring economic, social and political power back to the local community, following the principles of the growing community wealth building movement.

This is the subject of Paint Your Town Red a new book out this May on Repeater Books, which is co-written by Preston’s council leader Matthew Brown and writer Rhian E. Jones, author of several books, including Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender and Triptych: Three Studies of the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible. For Breezeblock 19 we talked to Jones about Preston, community wealth building, and its capacity to radically transform our approach to development.