Barnsley is making the headlines after the Government designated it the UK’s first ‘Tech Town’.
Serving as a blueprint for future nationwide adoption of AI across public services, healthcare, schools and jobs, the South Yorkshire town’s institutions will work closely with US tech giants to bring about a “transformation designed to make life easier, fairer and more prosperous in Barnsley”.
While some outside the county may be sceptical, it is the latest phase of a long-running council plan to reinvent Barnsley following the decimation of the mining industry in the 1980s and 90s.
So how did we get here? And what is at the core of the vision?
Industrial heritage
Barnsley is best-known for coal mining – the headquarters of the once-mighty National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) are in the town – but it also has a deep-rooted history in glassmaking.
Indeed the Barnsley coat of arms features a coal miner and a glass-blower. The DNA runs so deep that the crest adorns the shirts of the town’s football club.
When as a teenager I watched ‘the Reds’ reach the promised land of the Premier League for the one and only season in their long history, it was a monumental achievement. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but the club had given the town hope – something long missing amid the economic havoc wreaked upon it by the pit closure programme.
With around 40,000 jobs lost from mining and its supporting industries, it would take more than 11 men on a football pitch to regenerate a town on the brink of collapse.
Tuscan hill village
A few years later, Barnsley was suddenly beamed back into the national consciousness. Watching the Six O’Clock News with my housemates at university, I was mercilessly mocked when the final item proclaimed: ‘Barnsley is aiming to reinvent itself as a Tuscan hill village’.
The late Will Alsop’s vision was to remodel the town centre on the theme of a walled village in Tuscany, with the celebrated architect telling the BBC: “If we can just make this town beautiful, people will come.”
In truth, the council – led, then as now, by Sir Steve Houghton – had embraced the free publicity but never truly intended to change the nature of the town.
Yet the regeneration plan was very real and saw roads, schools and youth centres rebuilt before attention turned to the town centre.
The Glass Works
Visit Barnsley today and you may be astonished by your surroundings.
The first stage of the £200m Glass Works project saw an indoor market open in 2018, crucial given the town’s 800-year history of market trading. I remember buying flower seeds in the old market in the 1980s before enjoying a ‘sticky bun’ with my grandma, while I’d get my subbuteo teams from nearby Sugg Sports.
Then in 2021 The Glass Works Square was officially opened, a pedestrian-friendly town centre which combines leisure, restaurants and bars with retail.
Last year more than nine million people visited Barnsley, rivalling nearby York for footfall.
Barnsley 2030 Board
Returning to the latest aannouncement, what is coming next?
Central government has pledged to provide free AI and digital training through Barnsley College and the South Yorkshire Institute of Technology, while the Seam Digital Campus – already home to 33 digital businesses – is planned to become an AI Campus based around a new National Centre for Digital Technologies, and Barnsley Hospital will be used to test AI tools.
The UK CEOs of Microsoft and Cisco will join Technology Secretary Liz Kendall on a visit to Barnsley to see the town’s digital and AI ambitions – which span many more collaborations – first-hand.
This national (and indeed global) attention didn’t come out of the blue. The holistic vision for the town is provided by the Barnsley 2030 Board, which brings together stakeholders from organisations across the borough – including the football club – with an overarching aim of aligning wider initiatives at a strategic level to secure outward investment.
More than a decade ago the arrival of major eCommerce fulfilment centres, attracted by the proximity to the M1, brought jobs. However, pay and working conditions in some of those centres left many feeling degraded and, in the words of one insider I spoke with at the time, pining for the return of widespread unionisation.
I couldn’t comment on the working conditions there now. But the present willingness of Barnsley to embrace the promise of technology – giving its residents and young people the tools to thrive and create the businesses of the future – feels like an incredible opportunity.
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