Hemingway Design
Wayne Hemingway
London
You’d be forgiven if you walked straight past it.
We did.
Built in 1916 in Wembley, London to house royalty for the Empire Exhibition, this double fronted, seven bedroom, semi-detached house has been a family home, an office for Red or Dead and is now the studio of Hemingway Design.
We enter, past a Hemingway Design lightbox, ushered through the hall by Wayne Hemingway MBE to the busy studio. Two inquisitive dogs give us an excited welcome and decide we are OK to enter, a few faces look up past the computers, smile and nod as we head into the meeting room. We sit surrounded by shelves of books, ply finished cupboards, a window allowing light to bounce around the room and a long meeting table separates us and Wayne.
Wayne started by sharing stories of what the area was like for him and his wife Geraldine, painting images of Wembley back in the 80’s,“This area was a real mix of communities and each community had a hall of some type which meant it was a mecca for jumble sales. Every weekend, I became obsessed with finding tons of 40’s, 50s, 60s and 70’s clothing. I can tell you every single bloody church hall within 3 or 4 miles and how to get to them at speed, because back then it was important to get there for the good stuff before the sales started.”
Having bought the clothes, they needed to be tidied up before re-selling. Wayne and Geraldine would head to Pravin, the dry cleaner who would press them and iron them ready for the markets. The clothes would then get loaded into their old transit, which Wayne said would never start, “We relied on a West Indian guy with a garage just two streets from here who seemed to work 24hrs a day. If it wouldn’t start at crack of dawn before we headed to Camden Market, we’d just call him up and he’d come round with his magic spray and he’d spray it into the carburettor, and we were away again.”
As well as selling clothes at Camden Market, they were doing up and selling houses, moving to a bigger and better place with the proceeds every time. It wasn’t long before they bought the house we were in, “We got it for peanuts, because at the time was in need of some serious TLC. Then the kids arrived, then we moved through various warehouses and offices because our clothing brand Red or Dead started to build, so it wasn’t long before Wembley was our home.”
All of these touch points, this internal sat nav, this mind map of the different routes, along the roads, down canals to the jumble sales, past familiar sites, relying on friendly faces, building connections, community and conversations, as Wayne puts it, “This is what place is about, isn’t it? The things that tie you to an area, the reason you become embedded here.”
This initial chat, this view into a place through a thousand smaller stories built over time, is a something that fascinates us, so we discussed how you build place feel from nothing? “I think the first thing is, to find meaning in place through things that it has or are hidden. Meaning can be many things. It can be a West Indian garage owner who you call at 5:00am on a Saturday morning, or an Indian dry cleaner who will work overnight on a bunch of 1960s overcoats shipped in from Germany, so you can sell them at Camden that weekend. So when we work on events or place strategy, the main thing we do is to search for, and bring out the local, bring out the people that make these events or these places special.”
Take the National Festival of Making, which has been going in Blackburn for a long time, “The reason why it is so successful is because making means something to the people in that town. And how did we find that out? Well, we’re very good at having an inkling about something and then proving it. We found out by doing research, that Blackburn has the highest proportion of people who make things in the UK. So we thought, let’s do a festival about this and really celebrate it. That common purpose of making things and showing other people what you’re making was really powerful and it brought communities together over and over again.”
Another great example was the festival that nearly never happened. It was planned for the weekend the queen passed, so had to be postponed until 2023. It was called “We Invented the Weekend”. The team had been working with various partners in Salford to create a festival that would pull people into Media City and celebrate this part of Greater Manchester. The name of the festival came about after watching a BBC series called ‘Who do you think you are” Sir Ian McKellen had talked about his great grandfather Robert Lowe who campaigned for workers to have Saturdays off. Before that nobody had the weekend off. Wayne is smiling and animated as he says, “We just sat in this room thinking, bloody hell, this place invented the weekend. That’s it!” It turns out after some extensive research by the University of Salford that Robert Lowe’s campaign in 1843, was based in Salford and it was the first ever globally successful campaign to allow textile workers the weekend off.
It isn’t just about finding historic gems, it’s finding meaning in shared values. Wayne talked about one of his favourite place projects with the City of York, “There is no logo. There are no words. There’s no visual identity, no fonts, nothing. It’s just a set of values. Three values and a filter. Those values test every decision that they make as a city, decisions like the they were the first city to ban cars from its historical city centre.”
Values and meaning ground projects and stop them becoming what Wayne calls “Place Blands – generic work, like, our people are great, our rolling hills, our future thinking, etc etc, it’s just a load of bollocks. Couple that with a bit of shitty or even great graphic design, it just doesn’t matter and is a waste a money if there is no connection to the place.”
It’s clear from our chat that everything Wayne and the team work on is grounded in what a place does, what it stands for, not just about what it says. His search to go deeper and find meaning can perhaps be traced back to his mum, “She always said to me, your job while you’re here on earth, is to leave this world a better place for the next generation. That’s what I’ve done, just try and do things that are good.” And if you look at any of the place shaping projects Hemingway Design have worked on, it’s easy to see this rings very true.
So while many cities and places look to visual identities to help define them, the learnings here are to first search for local meaning and values, it’ll make all other decisions after that much easier.
