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Between Blackpool and Fleetwood, Cleveleys has built something quietly radical: a volunteer-led model of town centre renewal that combines flowers, friendship, footfall and civic pride. Invited by Jane Littlewood of Care for Cleveleys, MagNorth visited a Lancashire seaside town showing what community-led regeneration can look like when people, place and policy meet.
Jane Littlewood does not begin with a theory of regeneration. She begins with a bakery, a butcher, a tram stop, a bench and the wind.
We are standing in Cleveleys, the Lancashire seaside town tucked between Blackpool and Fleetwood, where the high street runs at a right angle to the sea. It is a small detail, but a revealing one. Here, town centre and seafront are not separate ideas. They feed each other.
There are national names and independents, cafés and barbers, places to sit, public toilets nearby, parking behind the shops and a tram running through the middle. The seafront is only a short walk away. The place is flat, accessible and busy in a way many high streets would envy.
“If you stand here,” Jane says, pausing in the town centre, “this is a really good position. You’ve got New Look, Boathouse, then if you turn round, you’ve got Family Bakery - and you must buy something out of there before you go.”
She points out the butcher, the cafés , the everyday shops, the small practical things that make a town work. There are, she says, one or two empty units, “but I would make it a lot lower than the national average.”
Why?
“Because it’s a vibrant town, and it’s busy. I mean, you can see.”
You can. Even on an ordinary day, Cleveleys has movement: shoppers, walkers, older residents, day-trippers, volunteers, people who have come for coffee, the sea, a sandwich, a browse, a bit of company.
Asked what makes it work, Jane pauses. It is the sort of question that invites language from a policy paper: footfall, accessibility, mixed-use economy, active frontage, social capital. Jane chooses something simpler.
“That’s the special sauce,” she says. “As a journalist, you might be able to describe it. We never get any further than this: it’s really, really nice.”
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There is, Jane says, “a bit of a hidden rivalry” on this part of the Lancashire coast. Blackpool is just down the road. Fleetwood lies to the north. Cleveleys sits between them, but does not feel like either.
“Cleveleys is nothing like either of them,” she says.
That distinction is important. Blackpool has scale, spectacle, investment, millions of visitors and a national identity. Fleetwood has a working-port history, handsome architecture, and the legacy of industrial and maritime change. Cleveleys is smaller, calmer and more everyday.
It is not trying to compete with Blackpool’s razzmatazz.
“If you’re not looking for razzmatazz,” Jane says, “you can have a really nice time when you come here. Thousands do every year. And it’s busy in winter and it’s busy in summer. The weather is the big determining factor.”
The weather, on the Fylde coast, is never incidental. The wind comes in hard from the west and south-west. Rain can arrive sideways. Events have to be planned with caution. Seafront structures weather quickly. Public realm has to be tough.
Yet Cleveleys’ strengths are deeply practical. It is flat. There are places to sit. The tramway runs through the town. Toilets and car parks are close to the high street. There are cafés and shops, and the seafront is near enough to be part of the town centre experience rather than an entirely separate destination.
It is also home to a larger-than-average retirement population, something Jane sees not as a weakness, but as part of the town’s engine.
“People will typically come here as soon as they can escape,” she says. “If they can get out of work at 55, they’ll go. If they’ve got to wait until they’re 65, they’ll still go.”
She laughs at the unkind stereotypes sometimes attached to older seaside towns, then turns the point on its head.
“These older people have all got money. They all come out shopping Monday to Friday. They all support their local town centre. They’ve all got a social life. They’ve got a better social life than you or I.”
And that daytime activity is key. In many towns, high streets have been hollowed out by changing retail patterns, commuting habits, out-of-town shopping, online commerce and the loss of everyday public life. Cleveleys still has people who use the town because it is part of their routine. They shop locally, meet friends, attend events, volunteer, drink coffee, visit the prom and keep money moving through local businesses.
This is where the charm of Cleveleys begins to look like something more strategic.
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Jane coordinates Care for Cleveleys, the public-facing volunteer force connected with Cleveleys Town Centre Group. The group’s own slogan is direct: “Putting People at the Heart of the Town.” Its work includes public realm improvements, gardening, events, fundraising, Cleveleys In Bloom, partnership working and a community shop. In 2024, Care for Cleveleys received the King’s Award for Voluntary Service, often described as the MBE for volunteer groups.
But to describe Care for Cleveleys as a volunteer group risks making it sound smaller than it is.
Yes, volunteers litter-pick, plant, crochet, paint, restore, fundraise, organise and clean. But collectively, they are doing something that many towns are trying to work out how to do: they are turning civic pride into economic and social infrastructure.
A bench is infrastructure.
A planter is infrastructure.
A clean street is infrastructure.
A WhatsApp group offering lifts to the doctor is infrastructure.
A community shop is infrastructure.
A cup of coffee after a clean-up is infrastructure.
Not in the conventional sense of roads, pipes or capital schemes, but in the everyday sense of what allows a place to function well.
Care for Cleveleys began, Jane explains, not as a grand regeneration project but as a response to a problem.
When she and her husband moved to the area, they lived at Rossall, near the seafront. There was, she says, “a really big bump in the road” linked to the sea defences, and young drivers were using it as a challenge.
“The idea was that you drive as fast as you possibly can over the hump to get all four wheels off the floor,” she says. “Then when you’ve done that, you go and park against the sea wall, which is a beautiful little spot, and get up to as much trouble as you can.”
Some residents went to police meetings. The advice they received was simple: form a community group. A group would have a stronger voice than isolated individuals.
“So we started a group, which became a beach cleaning group,” Jane says. “And that’s where it all really kicked off.”
The beach cleaning group has now been going for around 17 years. Over time, that practical civic action developed into something wider. The same instinct - see a problem, gather people, do something useful - now runs through much of what happens in Cleveleys.
“It just developed and morphed and ran away with itself,” Jane says. “But that’s what I always wanted. I wanted what we’ve got. That friendliness.”
Walking through Cleveleys with Jane is to be shown a series of small interventions that, taken together, become a strategy.
There are flower pots and planted areas. There are benches where there were none. There are volunteers who decorate bollards with knitted and crocheted displays. There are seasonal installations, poppies, planters, clean-ups, town centre events, workshops, and the Care for Cleveleys shop.
“Some of this would just have been completely empty,” Jane says, gesturing to a stretch of public space where people now stop and sit. “There was one bench for some reason, put in by the council. Other than that, nothing.”
The volunteers made and maintain planters. They work with landlords and tenants where private land meets local authority land. They organise events in spaces that were not always used to their potential. They respond to the awkward realities of public ownership, private ownership, permissions, highways rules and wind exposure.
“We’ve sort of looked at it practically and said, right, what’s the problem?”
That sentence could be the unofficial methodology of Care for Cleveleys.
The group’s event programme follows the same logic. Rather than putting everything into one large, expensive, weather-vulnerable event, they try to create a rhythm of activity throughout the year.
“We don’t want to go all out and do massive events that cost a fortune to stage,” Jane says, “because any day of the year, you can have weather that just cancels everything. So rather than putting all our eggs in one basket, we’ve done lots of different things. We’re trying to develop an event programme where there are things happening all the time.”
This is not just community animation. It is footfall strategy.
Events give residents and visitors a reason to come into town. They create dwell time. They support cafes and shops. They make the high street feel active. They encourage repeat visits. They give families something low-cost or free to do. They generate local pride.
They also make a place feel as though someone is paying attention.
That may sound intangible, but it is one of the first things people notice about Cleveleys. The town feels looked after.
Jane is careful not to overstate the glamour of the work. It is weeding, watering, painting, selling raffle tickets, making things, cleaning things, fixing things, asking for favours, building relationships and persuading people to join in.
But the accumulation matters.
“Putting people at the heart of the town,” she says. “That’s what we work to.”
On the promenade, Jane stops at what she calls Cleveleys’ “one and only heritage attraction”: the clock shelter.
Built around the 1930s when the promenade was redeveloped, the shelter had fallen into disrepair. The clocks had gone missing. The roof was in poor condition. There was, Jane says, talk of pulling it down.
“I thought, oh no,” she says.
Through the local websites she publishes, including Visit Cleveleys, Jane ran a campaign to save it.
“Everybody in the town really got behind it,” she says.
The clock shelter became more than a structure. It became a symbol of what residents valued and what they were prepared to defend. Later, volunteers stripped it back and repainted it.
“A team of volunteers literally stripped it back down to the wood and repainted it and did as much restoration as we could,” Jane says. “It’s just years since it’s been done.”
The restored shelter now stands above the beach, looking out over the water. Nearby is the shipwreck memorial, listing vessels wrecked along this stretch of coast. Further along, the promenade tells another story through public art inspired by The Sea Swallow, a children’s book that brings together local fact, folklore and fiction, including stories of the “missing coast”, petrified forest and drowned village.
Cleveleys’ seafront is beautiful, but it is not ornamental. It is engineered as coastal defence. The stepped promenade is designed to take energy out of the waves. The sea wall is both public space and protective architecture. When storms come in, design matters.
Jane understands this in detail. She can talk about shoreline management, promenade construction, sea defences and wave energy as easily as she can talk about bakeries and benches.
That combination is part of what makes the Cleveleys story interesting at a policy level. The work is emotional, local and voluntary, but it is not naive. It sits within systems: local authorities, highways, flood defence, tourism, retail, planning, public realm and economic development.
Jane’s approach is to work with those systems where needed, but not wait for them where local action can move faster.
“We try wherever possible to do what we can do without anybody else helping or giving us permission,” she says. “If it’s within our control, then we’re off.”
The reason is not hostility to local government. It is experience.
“Add a council into it and you can double, triple, quadruple your timescale,” she says. Referencing meetings, licences, the important stuff that slows progress.
That is one of the sharper lessons from Cleveleys. Community-led regeneration thrives on energy, speed and trust. Bureaucracy can support it, but it can also slow it to a crawl.
Jane has been asked whether she has political ambitions. Her answer is immediate. “Absolutely not.”
Why?
Because she believes Care for Cleveleys can get more done by remaining independent.
“We’ve all been approached by all the political parties to get us to stand for this, that and the other,” she says, “and we’ve all said no. Obviously, we work with politicians. We’ll work with local politicians because that’s how the system works. But we find that we can get more done by being apolitical.”
That distinction works. Care for Cleveleys is not disengaged from politics in the broader sense. It is deeply involved in civic life. It works with local authorities, businesses, schools, volunteers, community groups and public agencies. It comments on public realm, transport, events, town centre improvement and future planning.
But it avoids being captured by party identity.
“You don’t get dragged into, ‘Oh well, you’re Labour, you’re Reform…’ We’re just us. And we all just want the very best for the town long-term.”
This is a different model of civic leadership: not electoral, but relational; not party-political, but deeply public.
“I don’t want things for me,” Jane says. “I have my preferences, I have my opinions, but I very, very rarely share them. It’s not me that matters. It’s the town.”
In an era when local debates can quickly become polarised, that independence is an asset. It allows Care for Cleveleys to convene people who might not otherwise sit comfortably together. It also keeps the focus practical.
What needs cleaning?
What needs planting?
Where do people need to sit?
What would bring families into town?
Which shop unit could become useful?
Who needs welcoming?
What would make this place better?
One of the most important developments in the Care for Cleveleys story is the opening of the group’s shop. The Care for Cleveleys website describes it as a fundraising space and community hub, opened in July 2025.
In policy language, it might be called an anchor space. In Cleveleys, it is simply the shop: somewhere to sell donated goods, hold activities, run meetings, store materials, make things, welcome people and turn goodwill into practical action.
Before the shop, Jane says, everything was harder.
“We were at the mercy of anybody that would put us up for an hour,” she says. “If you wanted a meeting or an event, you either had to pay for a community room, or you were begging a cafe to let 25 of you in. Then they’ve got the egg on because they’ve got to make 25 drinks at once. It was just all difficult.”
Now, if a discussion needs to happen, people can “plonk downstairs and have a cup of coffee and discuss it.”
The difference is profound. Space creates capacity. Capacity creates confidence. Confidence creates activity.
It also creates visibility. People can walk in, ask what is happening, buy something, donate something, volunteer, join a workshop or simply have a conversation. The shop makes the community infrastructure legible.
It is also a place where new ideas can begin. Jane mentions a newly formed sea shanty group.
Its name?
“Care for Cleveleys Shanty Group,” she says, laughing. “Brand new. Not an existing one. One we’ve started from scratch.”
There is humour in that, but also something serious. The group is not only maintaining the town; it is generating culture.
Perhaps the most important thing Care for Cleveleys does is also the hardest to measure.
It helps people belong.
Jane talks about WhatsApp groups for different activities: watering, gardening, knitting, general coordination. She tells a story about a volunteer needing a lift to the doctor while her husband was away. A message went out. Someone helped.
That may not look like regeneration. But it is part of what makes a town resilient.
There are volunteers who have recently moved to the area, people who are bereaved, people who have retired, people with mental health challenges, people looking for friendship or purpose. The work gives them a reason to leave the house, meet others, contribute and be known.
“At some point in everybody’s life, you need something else,” Jane says. “And it’s a really good way to improve your mental health, to make friends, to feel comfortable, to settle your life down, to do whatever it is that you’ve got as a problem. It’s just nice to talk to other people, have a laugh, talk about something completely else, and you go home feeling, ‘Ah, that were a nice day.’”
After clean-ups, volunteers go for coffee at The Shipwreck.
“Everybody goes and sits,” Jane says. “They talk over one another and you can’t hear anything. You come out with a headache. But it’s lovely.”
This is social prescribing without the terminology. It is community safety without enforcement. It is preventative health without a referral pathway. It is economic development without starting from a spreadsheet.
A town where people know one another is a town with informal care, local loyalty and eyes on the street. It is a town where people support shops because they feel invested in the place. It is a town where newcomers can become participants rather than observers.
Jane grew up hearing stories of a different kind of neighbourhood life.
“My mum was born in 1945, just at the end of the war,” she says. “We spent a lot of time with my grandma and my grandma’s friends, and they were all that kind of post-war era that did stuff together. They’d pop in and out of one another’s houses, have a cup of tea, and my grandma would do somebody’s hair, and all that kind of thing.”
Those memories stayed with her.
“My mum also talked to me about when she was young and all the neighbours used to sit on the back step at night when it had gone dark in summer, just chatting and talking to one another. That sense of community, that warmth and friendship, really stuck with me.”
Cleveleys, in some ways, has allowed her to rebuild that feeling in contemporary form.
“I always describe it as playing out on the street with your mates when you were a kid,” she says. “That camaraderie that you’ve got as a bigger group - that’s exactly what this is like.”
One of Jane’s strongest convictions is that community groups should not be cliquey.
“Quite a few community groups can be cliquey,” she says. “They can be sort of, ‘Oh well, you’re new, we don’t know you, we’ll give it six months before we start talking to you.’ I hate that. I really don’t like that.”
Care for Cleveleys tries to do the opposite.
“We just welcome everybody,” she says. “If you’ve got purple hair and one leg, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter how you’re different. We’re all different. All comers welcome.”
She has seen the effect of that openness. On the morning of our visit, a woman who had recently moved from Bradford had spoken to someone in the shop about joining a clean-up. She came along, met another volunteer, Brenda, and discovered that they were both from Bradford.
“And then that’s it,” Jane says. “That’s priceless.”
This is one of the places where the Cleveleys model becomes transferable. It is not only about having volunteers; it is about how those volunteers behave. A closed group can inadvertently reproduce loneliness. An open one can change someone’s life.
Care for Cleveleys uses people’s skills wherever they appear. Some people garden. Some crochet. Some paint. Some run events. Some serve in the shop. Some write funding bids. Some make displays. Some turn up with tools. Some make tea.
“Everyone has a skill,” Jane has said elsewhere of the group’s work. “Just come along and join in, you’ll be made to feel very welcome.”
In policy terms, “nice” is a difficult word. It does not sound rigorous. It cannot easily be entered into a spreadsheet. It is not a performance indicator.
But in Cleveleys, “nice” has economic consequences.
A town that feels nice attracts visitors.
A town that feels welcoming encourages people to linger.
A town that looks cared for gives businesses confidence.
A town with visible activity supports footfall.
A town with social connection reduces isolation.
A town with pride has people willing to maintain it.
Jane’s day job gives her a useful perspective on this. She, her husband and her father run The Rabbit Patch, a business that began in design and publishing and evolved into local place promotion through sites including Visit Cleveleys and Visit Fylde Coast.
Her interest in promoting Cleveleys and Fleetwood began with a question.
“One of the things that always seemed a mystery to me is why people weren’t promoting Fleetwood and Cleveleys like you would promote Falmouth,” she says.
They built a website because they could. What began as Visit Cleveleys expanded into wider Fylde Coast coverage. During the pandemic, Jane began making videos because people could not come to the seaside.
“I’m sat next to the sea and nobody can come to the seaside,” she says. “So I just started going outside, filming the beach and the sea and saying, ‘It’s still here. Here’s your dog. Here’s today’s sea and sand.’ And that just developed.”
The videos brought people closer to the place. Some have since moved to Cleveleys after watching them.
“One of these days,” Jane says, “somebody’s going to say, ‘I moved here because of your videos.’”
Her communications background is vital to the community's success. Care for Cleveleys is not only doing the work; it is telling the story of the work. That helps build momentum, recruit volunteers, attract visitors, support businesses and shape the narrative of the town.
In an online culture often driven by negativity, Jane sees positivity as both harder and more necessary.
“So much social media tends to be geared towards sensational and poor-quality content,” she says. “If you’re doing the kind of thing that we are doing, on a positive angle, for a good reason, you tend not to get as much traction. The negative voices always rise to the top.”
The same is true of wider coastal narratives. Blackpool, in particular, is often treated as an easy target. Jane finds that frustrating.
“There’s a whole machine of people spending money, time, effort and resources trying to improve the town because they believe,” she says. “All we can do is keep going and keep trying to accentuate the positive.”
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Cleveleys’ story sits within a wider moment for the Lancashire coast.
Blackpool is seeing major investment and tourism restructuring. Fleetwood continues to negotiate the legacy of changes to fishing and industry. Morecambe has ambitions around Eden Project Morecambe. Lytham and St Annes offer a different coastal identity again. Across the North West, seaside towns are asking similar questions: how to attract visitors, support residents, revive high streets, improve public spaces and build futures that are not dependent on nostalgia alone.
Jane is alert to those relationships, and also to the invisible boundaries that can limit collaboration. Visitors do not experience the coast according to local authority lines. They move between places. They see a coast, not a governance map.
“Visitors don’t see boundaries,” she says. “Everybody thinks that’s Cleveleys, and it’s not. It’s Blackpool” - she tells me - pointing south along the prom.
Local government reorganisation may change some of those relationships. For community groups like Care for Cleveleys, new structures could mean new partnerships, new opportunities and new frustrations. Jane’s instinct is to keep working regardless.
“Meanwhile, we carry on plodding,” she says.
That phrase understates what is happening. Care for Cleveleys is not simply plodding. It is demonstrating how a town can become more resilient through repeated acts of care, organisation and welcome.
There is a lesson here for policymakers, funders and local authorities. The lesson is not that volunteers should be expected to replace public services. That would be both unfair and unsustainable. The lesson is that civic energy is a serious asset, and it needs to be recognised, trusted and supported without being smothered.
Give people space.
Make permissions easier.
Support small interventions as well as big schemes.
Value maintenance as much as novelty.
Treat older residents as economic and civic assets.
Understand social connection as part of town centre resilience.
Listen to people who know where the benches should go.
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Near the end of our conversation, Jane reflects on what the group has become.
“It’s very organic,” she says. “Organic with a bit of planning. We know the general direction that we’re going in.”
There are dreams: more pedestrian space, perhaps one day a covered area over part of the street, more events, more greening, more collaboration. But the work is grounded in what can be done now.
“If it’s within our control,” she says, “then we’re off.”
That is the Cleveleys model in miniature: practical, relational, ambitious, impatient in the best possible way. It does not wait for perfect conditions. It starts with what is possible, then builds.
Jane is clear that she is able to give the time partly because of her own circumstances. She has worked hard all her life, she says, and is now at a point where she can do more of what she wants to do rather than being driven only by money.
“I do it for fun,” she says. “I wouldn’t do it otherwise. That’s what we always say - if we’re not enjoying it, there’s no point.”
But enjoyment should not be mistaken for triviality. Fun is part of the model. So is friendship. So is humour. So is pride.
“My family is in this building,” Jane says of the Care for Cleveleys shop. “It’s the people that come in here. Nora and Brenda and a few others of us - we go all over together. We have dinner out on a Friday. We go out on a Monday. I’ve never had that in all my life.”
That is the emotional truth beneath the strategy.
Regeneration is often spoken about in the language of funding rounds, masterplans, governance structures and capital investment. All of those things matter. But Cleveleys offers another kind of evidence: that a town changes when enough people feel enough ownership to keep showing up for it.
They clean beaches.
They plant flowers.
They paint shelters.
They run events.
They sell raffle tickets.
They make bollard toppers.
They offer lifts.
They drink coffee.
They welcome strangers.
They know the best bakery.
They walk down to the sea.
It may not look like a masterplan.
But in Cleveleys, it is one.
Header Image: Jane Littlewood from Care for Cleveleys with the renovated Town Clock Shelter
