George Clarke returned to his roots to help Washington New Town celebrate its 60th birthday. George was in Washington to announce the winners of a creative design challenge for schools in the town where he grew up.
The Washington 60 Design Challenge was organised to celebrate the landmark 60th birthday of the designation of the new town on 24th July 1964 and was run by MOBIE in partnership with Sunderland City Council 's Washington Area Committee.
Young people from schools across Washington were challenged to come up with their vision for an innovative residential community for the next 60 years. School children were asked to design a 21st century super sustainable ‘courtyard’ style housing scheme for all ages designed around a pedestrianised courtyard square - in line with the essential features of the original 1960s plan for Washington New Town.
MOBIE Chief Executive, Mark Southgate, recently contributed an opinion piece to Futurebuild on how we all need to make the built environment more visible and attractive to young people.
If we are to deliver the new homes that we need, and to retrofit 27 million existing homes, to meet the environmental standards that we expect, then we are going to need a lot more workers with the right skills! To attract more young people, we need to tell a more compelling, modern, joined-up story about our industry. It is not that young people don’t want to work in our industry, rather they don’t know about the built environment and the range of jobs available.
Fishing in the same talent pool will not increase our labour force. We need to attract a new cohort to our industry. To do that we need to tell a better story – a compelling story about the positive impact that we have and how our industry is changing and modernising.
During NCVO Volunteers' Week 2024, we spotlight the amazing contribution of our young volunteers. We can’t thank them enough!
They have helped us to judge young persons’ design challenges, assisted in running design workshops, been experts for videos about home and sustainable development, run mini-consultancy projects, presented their thoughts and ideas to industry events and conferences, produced video and animations and even pitched MOBIE innovation proposals to industry for support!
Lauren Gower and Tom Rutter (pictured with George Clarke) discuss their recent voluntary roles for MOBIE.
