You know when you’ve hit a town or city with some attitude. First there’s the obligatory town-twinning on the sign as you enter, signalling a partnership with some unpronounceable outpost just to the east of Vladivostock. Then there will be a ‘Glorious Gardens’ or ‘Barnesville in Bloom’ competition won suspiciously for three years running by the Rector’s wife. A shiny new sports centre, a couple of famous sons or daughters and some link with Elizabethan aristocracy and you’re there: civic pride in all its plumped up glory.

Oh and one more thing: if you're anywhere North of Watford, it will also be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Myriad towns lay claim to being the haloed ground where the earliest engines started steaming or the jennies started spinning: ‘First railway journey began here!’ will read the plaque; ‘Birthplace of internal combustion’, runs the strapline.

Whether the Northwestern town of St Helens would put Ironbridge’s nose painfully out of joint and grasp for revolutionary cradle status is up for debate, but one thing is certain: industrialisation and St Helens are well nigh synonymous. At its height, in the early to mid-20th Century, the town employed more than 20,000 miners and had 30,000 people working in the glass industry - ‘World Class in Glass’, states the sign as you cross the town border.

Then there is the towering viaduct: a powerful symbol of muscular planning across which the steel wheels of Stevenson’s Rocket took the first, plucky, rail travel pioneers.

Fast-forward to the late 20th Century: the ravages of consecutive oil crises, economic downturn and manufacturing decline had hit the town hard.

Fast-forward to the late 20th Century: the ravages of consecutive oil crises, economic downturn and manufacturing decline had hit the town hard. Unemployment was rife, land lay derelict, shops were shuttered and the town was on its uppers. But the disastrous state of affairs sparked off resolve, not despondency. A series of new pioneers came onto the scene, following in the footsteps of the earlier industrialists. Regeneration came to St Helens in the form of new partnerships and fresh initiatives.

The Community of St Helens Trust, for example, was the UK’s first enterprise agency, launched in 1978 and soon to become the model for 400 other, similar agencies across the UK, fostering start up enterprises and small businesses. The town was also used as a pilot for the first Youth Training Programme and vitally, for the first Groundwork Trust.

The Groundwork Federation now includes more than 45 individual Trusts working across the UK and delivering community-led regeneration, small business advice and environmental improvement programmes. In 1981 the first Trust was launched in St Helens, headed up by the now-Professor John Handley. It began by establishing a pioneering ‘Wasteland to Woodland’ programme that built a partnership to transform derelict and neglected areas of land; these areas would one day become part of the Mersey Forest, England’s largest community forest. Then, as now, the Trust was steered by a partnership that included local businesses, authorities, community representatives and volunteers. Such partnerships are branded as standard sustainability kit nowadays: in the early eighties they were cutting edge and revolutionary.

Alongside Groundwork came other mould-breaking programmes that would today seem commonplace. Urban renewal was pretty much born in St Helens with the 1988 Ravenhead Renaissance, a partnership of public and private players that co-ordinated the reclaiming of 250 acres of derelict land south of the town’s centre. As major cities won big cash injections courtesy of Urban Development Corporations, St Helens’ partnership drew in private sector investments to regenerate the town; in turn, these unlocked public monies. In total, the partnership found more than £70 million for new investments and regeneration projects. One good example is the Greenbank Project. Launched in 1990 by St Helens Council, Pilkington plc and Milverny Properties, the project reclaimed 50 acres of heavily contaminated land that sat unstable, unusable and unsafe.

The regeneration of St Helens continues to this day and the town’s Groundwork Trust is thriving, as are the region’s 14 other Trusts. In total across the region Groundwork Trusts are actively involved in 1,200 community regeneration projects each year and busy implementing the Government’s Welfare to Work strategy, advising businesses through a new ‘Enworks’ network and managing Landfill Tax programmes.

The green shoots of environmental and social recovery are making an appearance throughout England’s Northwest through partnerships such as these. Directed and driven by a new review of derelict land; urban regeneration companies; the Northwest Development Agency (NWDA); European assistance; and most importantly, by the imagination of people who know what the community wants.

The two community forests - Red Rose and Mersey - are an excellent example. Initiated in 1994, the Mersey Forest is creating the largest of England’s twelve ‘Community Forests’, multi-functional forests created within and by local communities. The Mersey Forest covers a total of 110,000 hectares of land across Merseyside and North Cheshire and involves nine local authorities, the Forestry Commission, the Countryside Agency and a range of private, public and environmental organisations.

A similar scheme, the Red Rose Forest, covers 292 square miles of land across Greater Manchester bringing individuals, schools and communities together to reclaim local wasteland or support forest initiatives. Their work is sorely needed: at just six per cent tree cover, England’s Northwest is the least wooded of all the UK regions.

Elsewhere across the region, more woodland is being promoted. A new ‘Wastleland to Woodland’ programme, this time in West Cumbria, has won the support of the NWDA in the form of a £1 million campaign to reclaim 15 derelict sites in rural and urban areas. New forests will be created for the public to enjoy, with the first areas in the programme being North Walney and Hawcoat quarry. There is the successful ‘ELWOOD’ partnership bringing new woodlands to Lancashire and, more recently, a Newlands initiative led by the Forestry Commission that will feed £10 million into land reclamation that has community woodland as the principal end product.

From new forests to new communities, there is now a good chance that for the region with the lowest tree cover and some stubborn, entrenched pockets of poverty, environmental improvement and community renewal are starting to be more than well-meaning phrases.

From new forests to new communities, there is now a good chance that for the region with the lowest tree cover and some stubborn, entrenched pockets of poverty, environmental improvement and community renewal are starting to be more than well-meaning phrases: partnerships are putting sustainable development into practice right across England’s Northwest.

Main image: Noel Waller of the Wasteland to Woodland project, restoring a stone wall in West Cumbria. Photo by Len Grant.