Phillippa Banister

Street Space is a fresh and exciting community engagement and collaborative design social enterprise, led by Phillippa Banister.

Proud to be based in London & Bradford, Street Space works with people to reimagine streets and spaces to make them feel safe, bring joy and social connection.

You can find out more here.

Recent clients & collaborators include:

JU:MP (Bradford Sport England Delivery Pilot)

Be First (London Borough of Barking and Dagenham)

London Borough of Newham

London Borough of Redbridge

If Do

Field Operations

London Borough of Camden

PJA (Phil Jones Associates)

Over the years I’ve become more conscious of how our personal sense of connection with ourselves can impact our ability to connect with others, find our purpose and feel a sense of belonging within our family, community and wider world. I am passionate about how coaching can support people with this.

In 2020 I became a certified coach with the MOE Foundation and alongside running Street Space I hope to practise my coaching with ‘pay what you can’ remote sessions.

If anyone is interested in beginning a coaching journey with me or if you’d like to find out more about Desire Lines coaching please visit our website here.

After the success of the inaugural Marcon Place street party my neighbours and I were keen to maintain the momentum of using the street as a re-purposed space to connect with people on the street and add some much needed colour and interest to a rather grey Marcon Place.

We applied to the first ever round of the Community Parklet scheme supported by Hackney Council: gathering signatures of support from neighbours along the street and submitting sketches of our parklet vision. We heard we were successful in November 2018 and worked with friends and neighbours to construct and fill the parklet during December.

Already we’ve found the parklet slows down traffic speeding along the street and offers a lovely green resting spot for passers by, who’ve told us it’s brightened up their walk to the station no end! A big thanks to everyone who helped us build GreenSpace and donated to our small fund to help pay for it.

Fancy exploring Hackney by bike and taking in all six new community parklets at the same time? Manping at Street Space has created this map for you to download here.

Keen to experiment with bringing people together on the street where I live. In June 2018, I led a small team of residents to put on the first Marcon Place Street Party and big lunch.

With support from Hackney Council (who organise temporary road closures free of charge for street parties) we were able to open the street for people, meet neighbours for the first time and share food and music together.

With a WhatsApp group of residents now assembled, we’re already planning what we can do next! The street party demonstrated the power of streets as tools for community building when they’re used as public spaces.

News just in - In November 2018 we heard our application to Hackney Council to create a community parklet on Marcon Place has been successful! Stay tuned for progress and how to get involved in the creation of our parklet: GreenSPACE

To celebrate Women's Empowerment Month and HerStory, marking 100 years since some women got the vote, I connected a collective of local women's organisations in Barking and Dagenham to run the borough’s first women's Human Library.

A Human Library operates in the same way as a library of books but instead of borrowing a book, you listen to real stories of people from across your local community.

Women from a variety of backgrounds came together at Eastbury Manor House in Barking and listened to the self titled ‘books’ featuring stories of courage, prejudice, discrimination and journeys from across the world.

Participant feedback emphasised the transformative power of both listening to and telling personal stories in building a respectful and tolerant, peaceful society. Women felt empowered through the act of sharing stories with other women in a safe environment, creating the conditions for confidence and support for action.

Trough is a collaborative project formed out of a group of friends taking the IDEO Human Centred Design for Social Impact course way back in 2012..

Trough hosts supper clubs to connect people over good food and talk about stuff that matters. Some suppers will be themed or inspired by a recent book or movement to kickstart discussion, others will provide a space for people to bring issues and topics to the dinner table, those knotty webs you might want to start to untangle and hear a range of views on. All suppers will take place at independent restaurants with funds going directly to support small, local businesses. 

Break out of your social media echo chamber in 2018 and join us at Trough. 

Join our mailing list here. 

Working in collaboration with the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and Digilab, I facilitated the UK's first ever social cohesion hackathon in September, 2017. 

Over twenty participants from the local community from a range of backgrounds, worked against the clock over the weekend using the design thinking process to come up with ideas to tackle issues relating to community cohesion.

Ideas ranged from 'Speaking Seats' - community benches that play music, to trigger community conversations between neighbours, a Library of People's skill sharing platform and I Am My Neighbourhood a social media campaign and app to breakdown stereotypes about different communities in Barking and beyond. 

The energy and commitment shown by all teams was inspiring and created the space to expose the wealth of talent, creativity and ideas that exists, bubbling away in our communities, just often doesn’t have the right kind of opportunity or channel for it to come up to the surface.

We're now working with the RSA and other organisations to connect the teams to mentors and other forms of support to help them develop their ideas and prototypes. Watch this space! 

#HackCohesion was made possible due to funding from the Building A Stronger Britain Together (BSBT) Fund. Media credits: BSBT. 

In Spring 2017, Lewisham Council commissioned Sustrans to facilitate a community engagement and collaborative design process to create a proposal for a healthy Rolt Street. 

Rolt Street runs parallel to Folkestone Gardens and is a key connecting crossing point for people on bikes and school children. Active community group Deptford Folk raised serious concerns around the speed of traffic, poor visibility at the crossing point, flytipping and general ugliness of an unloved street. 

I led the engagement and collaborative design process for Sustrans. We started by conducting a 'Discover' phase, popping up and listening to residents, school children and local businesses and gathering traffic data. This gathering of hyper-local knowledge was followed by a dynamic collaborative design workshop with local people and relevant stakeholders. Taking the design process one step further I co-ordinated a day of live 'prototyping' on the street for a chance to test ideas from the workshop. This helped us and community members to gain further understanding of how the street environment could be improved for all and what impact different interventions could have on traffic speed, noise and sense of place. 

The final concept design (by Urban Designer Feras Fathallah) was handed over to Lewisham Council and has been shortlisted for a Healthy Streets Award 2017 in the Healthy Street Proposal of the Year category. 

In November 2016 I was asked to collaboratively design a community sustainable travel map with local residents and businesses in two ex mining settlements in West Lothian by Sustrans and West Lothian Council. 

In a few days I found and engaged with over 150 residents across two rural neighbourhoods to identify what people wanted to see on a map of their local area. Trialling an innovative approach combining community asset mapping with walking and cycle route mapping we used openstreetmap to enable local residents map routes and sites of local and historic interest in their own local area. The data collected on OSM, mapped by community members, has been used by Four Point Mapping to create electronic maps of the area, which can be used by the Council and community organisations to create paper maps in the future.  

Early engagement with community members means the maps capture the most locally relevant information for residents - the target audience for the map. Through conversations with a range of residents young and old, clear priorities were identified:

- to map the walking 'cut through' routes to school off the main road (not currently marked on any map or mapping app)

- the location of benches

- to map, for the first time, mining 'memory' trails around and about the villages to preserve and share these circuit walks of different lengths, for new residents to enjoy.

The mapping of locally significant routes and things that people want to see on a map, will encourage more people to get active locally whilst celebrating the rich history of the area and strong sense of community identity. 

Lambeth Transport Team commissioned Sustrans to tackle parent and resident complaints outside a primary school in Lambeth. Parents and residents had concerns around lack of safe crossing points, the number of road accidents involving children and high volumes of non local traffic and heavy goods vehicles using the road. 

Over six months I led a creative engagement and collaborative design process with community members, parents and shopkeepers. We developed bold concept designs to make the street more people friendly and reduce the impact of motorised traffic. 

As part of the formal consultation process I managed a day of prototyping, testing out the new road layout using temporary materials e.g hay bales. The street trial bolstered community support for the innovative changes and we gathered live feedback on the designs. Traffic speed was reduced to 10mph during the trial and new spaces for people created. 

Detailed designs developed by Sustrans were handed over to Lambeth Council for delivery Summer 2016. Post monitoring traffic counts taken in Spring 2017, following the successful completion of the scheme show a reduction in average vehicle speed from 21mph to 14mph. 

Between 2012 and 2014 I managed a highly successful community street design project on the Becontree Estate in Barking and Dagenham on behalf of Sustrans. 

Full time on the project I immersed myself in the neighbourhood, intensively engaging over 2000 members of the community in an area of high deprivation with some of the worst crime rates in the country. Gradually I recruited project 'champions' and co-facilitated collaboration and community design. We used art, street play, trials and temporary interventions to enable residents re-imagine their streets.

The resulting changes have reduced road traffic accidents by a third, slowed traffic, increased the number of children walking and cycling to school and 48% of people now feel more confident to participate in community activities.  

For more information on this project, please visit the project blog.

In 2015 I co-founded Give A Damn Dating - a social business connecting single people who Give A Damn. We host documentaries, talk-fuelled dinner parties and events in weird and wonderful locations across London.

Recently featured in Collectively, the Evening Standard and the Londonist. 

I was asked to create an engaging event aimed at our business to business audience and launching a new Sustrans product. Inspired by  Park(ing) Day I organised Party in a Parking Space to allow our B2B audience to experience the impact of the some of the work Sustrans delivers with communities outside an Islington office space.

With support from Islington Council I suspended the parking bays to create a new, temporary space for people. 

I have achieved a Master of Arts in Leadership for Sustainable Development with Forum for the Future, accredited by Middlesex University.

This innovative course brings together 12 participants from different sectors for an innovative, experiential learning programme, encompassing world class leadership development training from The Leadership Trust, sustainable business planning and five professional placements in local government, central government, business, media, finance and non-governmental organisations. 

Highlights of my year included delivering a listening project on the triggers of integrating sustainability at Unilever by interviewing over 40 brand directors across the globe and presenting my findings to CEO Paul Polman. 

Another placement at the Fairtrade Foundation offered me the opportunity to research and compile a study on the impacts of fair trade on producers in developing countries. 

As an associate for service design for health agency Uscreates I worked in stakeholder engagement and recruitment for a number of projects tackling health and wellbeing challenges. 

I used innovative research methods and tools to support projects redesigning services, building relationships with front-line professionals and communities to design, implement and measure the impact of interventions. 

Expert at engaging 'hard to reach' communities I worked on a range of projects from co-designing an intervention to encourage more minority women to attend breast cancer screening appointments to designing a children's centre in a box and gathering insights around inappropriate use of accident and emergency. 

As an associate working with a youth insights agency I worked as part of a team gathering cultural insights with rural and urban teenage girls in Ethiopia.

During a year long placement in Santa, in the Northwest region of Cameroon I worked with the Ministry of Agriculture at grassroots level. 

In partnership with a national volunteer we co-designed and implemented a new and dynamic platform for community engagement for the most rural villages who felt unconnected and distant from their local council. Six years on, the Have Your Say programme, which trains young council employees to facilitate 'pop up' engagement stalls at remote and rural market days, is now embedded and fully funded by the local authority.