Mitcham Matters: In conversation with the Town Centre Manager on community, culture and change
Merton Chamber of Commerce met with Mark Warren, Mitcham Town Centre Manager at Merton Council, to talk about his role and his focus on encouraging residents to actively participate in shaping their local environment.
Mark talks to us about the return of Mitcham’s bandstand, as well as some exciting future projects that he’s working on.
Tell us a bit about yourself, your career and your role at Merton Council
I’m Mark Warren and I’m the Mitcham Town Centre Manager for Merton Council. I’m a qualified architect and I first worked for the council in 2019 as an Urban Designer before being seconded into this role in 2023.
My role is all about creating positive experiences in the town centre. It’s interesting to think about town centres today and the struggles that they’re all facing nationwide. Spending habits are changing and evolving so one of the things we’ve been looking at is how we can make residents active participants in their town. How can all the amazing residents, communities and advocacy groups here help build the town centre into something which we are all really proud of?
Recent projects have included public art projects like our notice board mosaic, designed by local artists Karen Parry and Louise and David Frewin, which Mitcham residents were invited to help design and build. The bandstand project in particular has been great for getting residents involved whether that’s sharing their stories of time spent there in the past or hosting events and activities there including salsa lessons, chess lessons and a plant and seed swap. Over nine weeks, we have had over 50 activities, completely free for all to enjoy.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I’m really lucky because I get to meet and talk to a lot of interesting people, from market traders to residents and businesses, and I get to hear their stories about what Mitcham is to them. I then get to share those stories and try to incorporate them into the development of Mitcham in a collaborative way.
The role is very fast-paced and varied; one day I’m dealing with graffiti the next I’m working on a big project like the bandstand, but I often see quite an immediate impact of my work so I can really feel the difference we’re making. That gives me a sense of purpose to really work hard at what we’re doing because it’s driving positive change in the neighbourhood which all of these people live in and use.
Tell us about the recent Mitcham bandstand project
The bandstand project was funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund as well as the Merton Civic Pride Fund which is all about how we can celebrate the uniqueness and identity of our borough.
There’s a lot that makes Mitcham unique; not many people know that it has tons of really interesting history, as well as community spirit and goodwill, so the bandstand is a way of creating a platform to really celebrate that.
Mitcham’s original bandstand was built in 1924 in a similar location to where it is now but was dismantled in the seventies. Over 100 years later we decided to bring it back for people to enjoy and to encourage members of the public to visit the town centre. It’s a temporary structure that will be in place for the summer, between August and October, but it will be brought back every year to signal that summer is here, and Mitcham is open.
The bandstand was designed in collaboration with members of the public and the architects Charles Holland, who also worked on projects like Thornton Heath Library and Lambeth Green Pavillion and Raskl who built the Dulwich Colour Palace. It’s made up of several amazing individual parts which are put together to make one holistic, celebratory structure.
It’s now open until October and is completely free to use. We’ve had so many people come forward to use it as a space including a local mother who wants to hold beginners’ chess classes, a young artist who is debuting an animation he’s made about Mitcham, and we also have a free weekly exercise class on Saturday mornings. It’s really a space for everyone and anyone to use and the whole idea is that we will come together as a community and celebrate the amazing talent we have in our neighbourhood.
The architects ran a co-designing workshop as part of Merton’s 60th Birthday celebrations where residents were asked to draw different patterns and icons that represented Mitcham for them and this was then distilled into a geometric pattern. In contrast to the previous bandstand’s Victorian aesthetic, we really wanted this one to reflect how we see Mitcham today: diverse and vibrant. It’s bold and colourful and the two main colours, bright pink and green, represent a specific type of peppermint plant called Black Mitcham which was originally grown in the area.
Have you faced any challenges along the way?
Town centres up and down the country face similar challenges. I think the main one for us is antisocial behaviour in the town centre and how we best manage it in a proactive way. The bandstand is a way to positively disrupt public space, to see what happens if you do something interesting and engaging to bring the community together in a public way to help deter the negative behaviour.
Can you tell us about any upcoming projects you’re working on?
We’ve just released the first edition of the Mitcham Matters newspaper which is a collaborative project with six students from the Cricket Green School, which is a Special Educational Needs school. As part of their syllabus the students write positive articles about the town centre which we then make into a community newspaper along with articles written by the council. We’ll be publishing a new edition every term with the next one coming out in early December for Christmas.
We’ve recently won some High Street Place Lab Funding from the Greater London Authority which we’ll be using on a new project to explore how we can better integrate play and make the town centre more child-focused and family-friendly. We also continue to work with youth engagement in the borough by hosting a really successful youth club. Every Friday from 3pm till 6 pm young adults can come and engage with youth workers and take part in activities in a safe environment. The popularity of that initiative has continuously grown so now we see up to 70 young people engaging with the council every week which is a really positive thing. We’re really excited about all these projects because Mitcham has the highest percentage of under 15s in the borough so we want to reflect this in what the town centre offers residents. It’s important that the town centre works for them and that their ideas are heard.
We also have Mitcham Market every second Saturday of the month which is a really lovely market with great local traders who sell a wide variety of products from natural teas to locally made honey so I would really invite people to come along and support fellow local businesses.
Why do you think organisations like Merton Chamber are important?
Organisations like the Merton Chamber of Commerce provide a great network and create a sense of community so that businesses can learn from and support each other. In Mitcham alone we have such a variety of businesses; cafés, salons, pharmacies, estate agents. We’ve even got a local shop that exports smoked sausages around the world, and even though all these businesses offer so many different products and services, there is a lot that they can learn from each other and having a space to do that is really important.