20/20 VISION UPDATE
The Heart of Newhaven Steering Group – set up at the Launch of the Vision for the future of Victoria Primary School – has met to assign a number of tasks in preparation for a bid to acquire the site through Community Asset Transfer.
Rodney Matthews, Vision Facilitator,reported:
“I have just visited Finland’s new National Library next to Helsinki Central Railway Station. I spent hours marvelling at how many activities were absorbing the attention of over 1,000 people from babies to oldies. Books? They are minor section of spaces that include huge conference halls with giant cinema screens and tiny rooms for tete a tete chats; microscopes; computers and 3D printers; museums and interactive exhibitions, recreation areas, cafes and information at the touch of a button. But what impressed me most was the sense of a living community in this colossal shell of prize winning architecture at the heartof Finland’s capital.”
In order to justify our claim for The Heart of Newhaven we have to look ahead 20 years beyond the next 20 months. Imagine what might be going on at and from our heartin the future. That’s why we need this asset for Newhaven to express its Community, innovatively imaginative, dynamically energetic, deeply caring, and inexhaustibly enthusiastic.
The enhanced charts and post-it notes produced last month, fleshing out ideas of a vision last October, inspire us. Clubs, organisations, craft creation already existing need space; dreams of caring activities not yet realised depend on a physical place to be.
In the next 20 years Newhaven will grow considerably in population, much on the other side of Lindsay Road. Who would have thought years ago you could build on the sea itself that once which inspired the creation of New-Haven when many didn’t reach three score? Before long life expectation will be beyond 4 x 20. Technology will radically change the time people have to pursue interests that appeal to them beyond putting food on the table.
It is such a vision of the future that will keep alive this wonderful place we’ve inherited through the imagination and commitment of previous generations. Looking back nostalgically, longing to preserve in aspic a memory as if we are still in the past, is the surest way to lament its death and decay. History – true heritage – is what is living and creative, the blood continuing to flow in and out of the heart, as it pumps energy.
That’s the 20/20 vision by which we can focus on the small print immediately in front of us.