Returning Ground: Youth Spatial Practice and Ethical Placemaking in Coastal Newhaven

Returning Ground reflects on a series of drawing and making workshops developed with Year 9 students in Newhaven, East Sussex, exploring how creative practice can support young people's relationships with place. Returning to the coastal town where I grew up prompted broader questions about what it means to undertake placemaking research in a place to which one is already personally connected. Rather than positioning lived experience as a source of authority, the paper considers the ethical responsibilities that arise through return, drawing on ideas of place as relational, embodied and continually evolving.

Through collaborative mapping, drawing and speculative model-making, the workshops became practices of enquiry that made students' relationships with Newhaven visible while simultaneously reshaping my own understanding of place. Developing the metaphor of fabric in place of Ingold's meshwork, the paper argues that drawing and making can cultivate a more reflexive and empathic approach to placemaking, positioning return as an ongoing process of negotiating relationships rather than recovering a fixed past.