GLOUCESTER RENAISSANCE
How Greg successfully led Gloucester’s regeneration
Dr Greg Smith is still unsure why he was asked to head Gloucester’s regeneration. “I was being served lots of wine one night at a do and someone said would you like to lead the regeneration board? I was astonished, but said yes,” recalls Greg. In fact, with his can-do attitude and skills of diplomacy, he was the perfect choice for the huge task ahead of him. He had taken over as principal and chief executive of Gloucestershire College in 1997, at a time when it had faced major challenges. “We had no money at the time. The college I inherited was bankrupt. The old college building (in Brunswick Road) was falling to bits,” he said. But with the backing of the then Gloucester MP Parmjit Dhanda, Greg was instrumental in moving the college to a new state of the art building next to Gloucester Docks. In many ways, this was the catalyst for the city’s future regeneration. Greg said:“I had some experience of doing quite difficult and challenging jobs and I was passionate about what we could do for Gloucester.” When he had arrived in Gloucester in the 1990s, he found the rundown state of Gloucester Docks to be “awful.” With the support of organisations such as the now defunct South West Regional Development Agency and the county and city councils, some £750,000 was secured to do the development planning, once the government had given the go-ahead for the establishment of the Gloucester Heritage Urban Regeneration Company (GHURC). Greg said the hardest part of being at the helm of the
Greg Smith chairman of GHURC
GHURC’s 22 strong board was dealing with the politics that arose, especially in the early days. For instance, Conservatives were suspicious of the GHURC at first, because it had been created for Gloucester by a Labour government. Greg said: “The first few meetings were spats between the politicians, with me trying to referee, but slowly we managed to establish the idea that this was about developing Gloucester and not about party politics. Slowly, slowly we got a team together “Appointing Chris Oldershaw as GHURC chief executive was very important, because he had been so successful in Newcastle and he was one of the country’s leading exponents of regeneration. Ian Mean (then the editor of the Citizen newspaper) as my deputy was sending out positive messages. The politicians started to come around and by the end of it they were a fantastic team, committed to Gloucester.” But not everyone in Gloucester at that time could see
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50 | July 2019 | www. punchline-gloucester .com
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