A Nation of Neighbours: rebuilding Britain from the ground up

We have a long proud history of this. We are a nation that has been powered forward by communities, building with creativity, care and graft, all fuelled by a sense of shared endeavour.  This country wasn’t built by elites in Whitehall. It was built by communities — with care, graft, and imagination.

From the world’s first railway lines in the early nineteenth century, the construction of the early welfare state in Welsh Valleys at the start of the twentieth, to the launch of a thousand designers in the early twenty-first, this country has been characterised by design and innovation – almost always led first by communities. 

They didn’t wait for permission. They got together and built what they needed: maternity wards, youth centres, railways, design collectives. They made things happen. They still do. When the pandemic hit, it wasn’t politicians who held the country together — it was neighbours. It was volunteers. It was civil society.

The quiet revolution is already underway

Across the country, there are groups making change happen, from the Scouts to the Women Institute, from Camerados, Citizens UK, Locality, the Co-Op Movement - and many more. They don’t wait around for permission. They build, they adapt, they create. They’re running food banks, supporting young people, reviving local economies, designing new ways of delivering care. 

Leading thinkers and practitioners, think tanks and journals, have tried to shape a counter narrative to the declinism and disbelief, rooted in the art of the possible. It’s the story that some have called Ordinary Hope, others Community Power, Relational, or Liberated, public services. People like Hilary Cottam have captured attention in wide parts of the UK and across the world, with brilliant books like Radical Help and The Work We Need. Vital scholars like Dan Honig and Margaret Levi have done the same. Inspiring organisations, new and old, including Belong, Camerados, Citizens UK, the Co-Operative Movement, Locality, Local Trust, New Local, Our Future, and Power to Change, have also led the way, making the argument, bringing people together, pushing the case. 

Politicians have been inspired, have listened, and have acted. But these efforts are too often seen as “nice extras” rather than what they really are — the heart of national renewal.

Our theory of change is that there is powerful energy at the edges, as others have called it. But the edges need to become the whole. We need to flip the script. Let the communities who are already leading shape the national agenda — not the other way around.

But that takes more than funding. It takes belief. It takes a new national story — one that celebrates what’s already working, and makes space for it to grow.

Demos and UCL Policy Lab, supported by Lloyds Bank Foundation, is working to build the coalition of the willing for national renewal, and to cocreate a new story of national renewal rooted in neighbourhoods rather than the centre. Stories matter. They give a movement direction and enable united movements to act as one. They can change the role of the centre from doer to enabler. They create the license for everyone to act. 

This isn’t a story the centre can write alone. Frankly, it doesn’t have the imagination or the language to do it. But communities do. That’s where we need to start.

The real opportunity of our moment is in our communities and not in Whitehall-as-usual. We have already seen that. When there is political inertia at the centre, civil society can take the lead. Government doesn’t have the capacity or imagination to change things. Communities don’t yet have the coordination or empowerment. To change this, we need a shared story to fuel us. You can’t get people behind things without a mission. So, this is the work we, together, need to do.