Meet the Board

I was born in Fleetwood, grew up in the town and have lived here for almost all my life. I suppose many of my erstwhile friends and acquaintances have long since left, while I've found myself destined to stay - for over half my life I've been an Associate Minister at Emmanuel Church, now located just behind the Mount.

From looking forward, in my earlier days, to "leaving this place behind", I've found it instead somehow taking its hold on me and developed a sense of belonging here - and a love for a town which has missed out in many ways: losing railway links, a fishing fleet and cargo trade, unfortunately close to Blackpool as a holiday destination - and there is our main street, which seems to ask the question on behalf of the whole area, "What is my identity?" - colourful/faded, hopeful/disappointed, generous/deprived, open/vulnerable, optimistic/broken.

Afflicted, but healing? - for there are sounds of revival, voices of belief for something new, better and lasting, calling us to create a vibrant community embracing a shared vision of making our town known as a great place both to live in and to visit.

I hope and pray that I may listen with wholehearted attention to these voices and, with my friends who also find themselves stirred to seize this moment and make the most of every opportunity which this grant offers us, to nurture imagination and to discern what touches the hearts of those who genuinely seek Fleetwood's prosperity and to see aspirations and longings becoming a reality.

I look, for instance, at the large area, once alive with shipping bound for Ireland and, before that, ferries for the Isle of Man, now desolate and weed-grown and think, as well, of a couple of lines which you can read on the base of the figure of Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, in the North Euston Park as our founding father may have expressed his own vision, nearly two hundred years ago: "Out of this wasteland will rise up in glory A shining new town, the town of my dreams."