So here’s what I want to do. I want to meet some British people and have a cup of tea and a biscuit with them. It’ll take, what, twenty minutes of their time? It won’t be recorded, or photographed, as all I want is the memory, the story to tell.

I need to find a way to meet the people I want to meet now. It’s a quest. I think Twitter can do it for me, and probably take me sideways to meet a few other interesting people along the way as well.

I want a cup of tea and biscuit with Jeremy Deller, Prince Charles, Kate Rusby, Peter Blake, Karen Gillan, Alan Bennett, John Major, Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry, Judi Dench, Banksy, Gilbert & George, Tony Benn, Emma Thompson, Billy Bragg, Tony Robinson, Phil Jupitus, Len Deighton, Zadie Smith, Michael Caine, Dawn French, Benjamin Zephaniah and The Queen. Can you introduce me, please?

We rose early and
made paper aeroplanes
from pages of last week’s paper;
we threw them from the highest point
of tattered Teville Gate,
and watched them drift over
the empty, old Norfolk Hotel;
further south towards the Town Hall tower;
and west towards the Creative Quarter.

We made banners from the sports pages
and waved them high as we marched for Fair Trade
and against Tetra masts.

We wrapped morning-caught fish
in the small ads,
ate our local catch with chips for lunch.

Later we made an armada of paper boats
and launched them from the landing stage
of the Art Deco pier;
watched them drift in the lazy late afternoon sun,
west to Littlehampton and out
to the distant, just-visible Isle of Wight.

And as the sun set we stood on Highdown hill
and lit the fire under a hot air balloon
(a two foot wide ball of twisted withy sticks
and pages from the business section and glue)
and watched it float high over Worthing
before it was lost in the fading light
and caught by its own flames.

“It’s just a matter of trawling our brains for good ideas” Jamie Hewlett

In 1988, artists Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin created Tank Girl for Issue One of Deadline Magazine. The pair, living in a Worthing bedsit, could have had little idea of where she would take them. While studying at Northbrook College of Art and Design, Hewlett, Martin and fellow student Philip Bond, had created a fanzine called Atomtan. Deadline, created by Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins, was a more accomplished forum for these new talents. Even amongst strips like Wired World, the great Love And Rockets and Hewlett and Martin’s own Fireball XL5, Tank Girl, with its post-feminist and post-apocalyptic vision of a not-too-distant future, stood out.

Seminal style magazine The Face referred to her as “Fab!” while the NME predicated “a rise to world domination”. The anarchic comic strips were full of cut-and-paste imagery, and used a visual equivalent of the sampling that was becoming so popular in a music scene where guitar bands like Pop Will Eat Itself, Jesus Jones and Carter USM were discovering new technology.

It was easy, in the politicised late-’80s and early ’90s, to identify with Tank Girl’s aggressive attitude, upfront humour and sexuality. Hewlett and Martin said “She was Thelma and Louise before the fact; she was Mad Max designed by Vivienne Westwood; Action Man designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier.” She was an obvious icon, and Tank Girl t-shirts began to spring up- including one for the Clause 28 March, against Thatcher’s homophobic legislation. In 1991, Deadline was approached by Wrangler, who, keen to build an advertising campaign for their jeans that was individual and anarchic, used Tank Girl in a series of press ads in 1991. Hewlett and Martin subverted the character at every turn. She flirted with a hippy revival and new age fashion before it was fashionable, dabbled in post-modernism, and hung out with riot girrrls and the beat generation. Tank Girl could be all things to all people and Hewlett and Martin revelled in their artistic freedom.

More surprisingly, readers loved this freedom too. Far from wanting Tank Girl to be tied down to shooting, shouting and spitting, they wanted to see what Hewlett and Martin could dream up next.

Tank Girl wasn’t just a British phenomena, though. Penguin, the largest publisher in Britain, had bought the rights to collect the Tank Girl strips as a book (they all appeared first in Deadline), and offers for foreign rights were plentiful. Before long, Tank Girl had been published in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Argentina, Brazil and Japan; several publishers were fighting for the US license. Eventually, Dark Horse Comics acquired the US rights to publish Tank Girl and a US version of Deadline. Two successful series of Tank Girl’s adventures and two collections created a stir in the US, and before long there was interest in a film version.

Established rock stars including Adam Ant, Billy Bragg, The Ramones and New Order loved her and were keen to be involved in the magazine. In the early ’90s, bands like Blur, The Senseless Things, Carter USM, Curve and Teenage Fanclub all appeared in Deadline. In true post-modern style, comic strip and reality blurred. Many of the bands appeared in the strips and Hewlett’s artwork appeared on their record sleeves. Sarah Stockbridge, a catwalk model and favourite of punk designer Vivienne Westwood’s, brought Tank Girl to life in a series of photos that went on to be used in Elle, Time Out, Select and The Face. Vogue, too, featured Tank Girl. They cited her as a crucial influence on “Bad Girl Fashion” which featured shaven heads, body piercing and tattoos.

Rachel Talalay, producer of Hairspray and Cry Baby for cult director John Waters, and herself director of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, called up Deadline’s Tom Astor. Talalay had been sent the Tank Girl book for Christmas and was immediately smitten. With an unswerving belief in the project, she steered the Tank Girl movie into pre-production with MGM in January 1994.

Hewlett, although still living in Worthing with girlfriend and one-time Elastica member Jane Olliver, was spending time with fellow Deadline artist Glynn Dillon, hanging out with bands in Camden’s Good Mixer pub and helping formulate a scene that would become Britpop. Hewlett and Dillon brought their new friends to Worthing, and to seafront venue The Wine Lodge. The pub was described by press as ” Camden on Sea.” Elastica, Menswear and Blur could be seen listening to DJs like Worthy Dan, who went on to work at legendary London club Blow Up, whose website www.blowup.co.uk charts their long-running success. After the Wine Lodge, the party carried on at The Factory, a nightclub whose design- by Hewlett, and friends including fellow artist Philip Bond- echoed the Tank Girl strip. Bold red and green stripes, a wall of blown-up panels from Tank Girl set against ’70s wallpaper, a Ford Escort hung from the ceiling and toilets pasted with pages from old annuals were a suitable backdrop for a mix of alternative sounds. [Hewlett's nightclub designs were eventually lost when I redesigned the club. DT]

Meanwhile, the Tank Girl film was ready for the cinemas. Disappointingly, the final film was a result of much fighting, some agreement, and too much compromise. Although it preserves the anarchic and nonsensical charm of the Tank Girl strips, reeling from Busby Berkley to Mad Max and back through Tex Avery, it mystified critics and public alike. It sacrificed the danger and raw vitality of the original, and was a box office flop. Deadline, after reputedly taking huge gambles on their future with Tank Girl merchandising, folded.

A new Tank Girl comic was short-lived. Meanwhile, Hewlett and Olliver opened a vintage clothes shop in Worthing. Called 49, it, too, folded after a short life. It looked like Hewlett and Martin’s fifteen minutes of fame was over. Hewlett moved to London. After splitting with girlfriend Olliver, he moved into a flat with Blur’s Damon Albarn. He had also just split from his long-term girlfriend, Elastica’s Justine Frischmann.

Hewlett worked on a number of advertising campaigns. His designs also appeared on the set of children’s TV programme SM:TV, presented by ex-pop stars and Byker Grove actors Ant and Dec.

Rumours about how Albarn and Hewlett spent their time were rife, but no-one predicted the end result of their relationship - Gorillaz. The band are four comic characters who could easily have appeared in a Tank Girl strip. Using digital technology, Hewlett has animated his characters, giving a new twist to his distinctive visual style. Interestingly the band’s live line-up includes The Senseless Thing’s drummer Cass. The website, www.gorillaz.com is a testament to Hewlett’s creativity. And with Gorillaz winning MTV Music Awards including Best Dance Track and Best Song, Hewlett has taken the earlier crossover of comics and real life to new extremes.

In his acceptance speech, Peter talks about the need to engage with the voters who aren’t turning out. ‘Next week we need to start campaigning to get the one third of voters who didn’t vote engaged in the process. Nationally, we know that elections are won or lost by those who vote. The fact that the Liberals have lost seven seats is actually a sign that it’s people who have a say.’

Perhaps one way to help people have their say would be listen to everyone who voted, value even those who didn’t get your vote this time (the Dalai Lama taught me, years ago, to value my enemies for the lessons they taught me, not to hate them), and let people feel they have some engagement with both parties and processes?

For years, Adur and Worthing’s councils have flip-flopped between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. Peter seems determined that, at a local level, that divide-and-conquer approach is the way forward. Regardless of what’s best for Worthing’s voters - any or all of them, Liberals, Conservatives and non-voters alike.

Peter says, ‘I tell you this I shall never willingly support a system which gives a permanent place in parliament to the BNP or a permanent place in government to the Liberals.’ (That’s a direct quote, taken from a video by the Worthing Herald)

That’s dangerous stuff, putting the Liberals in the same sentence as the BNP, but do remember Bottomley is a long-term political animal and he knows the effect of that pairing. Make the Liberals sound like an extreme party.

But what does he mean - ‘a permanent place in government’? I’m not sure even Peter knows; he has since said to the local paper that for ‘never willingly‘ people should have heard ‘would find it difficult‘ and for ‘a permanent place‘ he meant a ‘near-permanent place‘ (as if there is such a thing; permanent or temporary, surely, no qualification?). Already, those brave words, full of election-night bravado, are being taken back, slightly.

No democratic system guarantees any party a permanent place in government; but the various proportional representation systems do suggest a future where neither Labour nor Conservatives would be guaranteed places as the government and the opposition. A future where all voters feel valued, and that they have a voice. And surely that way, empowerment and a positive approach to partnership, are the ways to bring out the absent voters?

My hometown has been my nursery slope. Worthing’s been suffering for years, a gradual loss of any sense of place or purpose, and as I’m always plugged in to grassroots community activity, I’ve been watching from the front line. I’ve got my hands dirty, time and again. Literally, cleaning drains backstage at the local theatre, stripping the shabby wreck of a cinema, carving a new cinema out of an old scenery workshop, clearing shops of debris and rubble to make community spaces.

About fifteen years, the council stopped seeing Worthing as a tourist destination and said the town was a business centre. There was no action to back this up, no new business parks or office buildings. Just words on the boards at the town’s gateway.

So since then, it’s been neither one nor the other. The folly of that lack of focus is demonstrated by the fact that while the recession has wiped out a few large employers locally, like Norwich Union and Lloyds TSB, there’s been no investment in tourism and the town can’t capitalise on the rising number of stay-in-Britain tourists.

But Worthing hasn’t reached rock bottom yet. We have a masterplan, and an active regeneration team who are taking exactly the right approach, doing what they can and supporting people as they start small, sustainable initiatives; pushing for better quality and long-term thinking.

That team has helped the planning department to drive up the quality of new developments developments, with decently designed social housing replacing old pubs. There’s a new village of retirement flats in the town centre where there was once a dated art college. On the seafront, the site of the burnt-out Warnes hotel has become a swish and stylish Art Deco block of flats. The ever failing Guildbourne Centre had a minor revamp a few years ago, and cosmetically looks much better – although it still has a completely empty first floor. The historic Dome Cinema is safely restored, even if the Trust managing it aren’t thinking comprehensively about the spaces they have and consequently the building’s massively underused. Along the seafront there’s a cool beachside cafe next to half a dozen art studios carved out of old beach chalets. Next door, there’s a new and truly landmark swimming pool planned, to replace the crumbling concrete Aquarena.

The bigger projects, like the massive, empty Teville Gate quarter, and building new colleges to replace antique huts and 60s architecture, haven’t even made it to the starting line.

But all of this all fits the narrative I’ve understood for regeneration. When I was involved in a huge masterplanning effort in the town, one of the planners said Worthing just needed ‘urban acupuncture’ – small pressure at key points to revive the town. I thought that made sense, and that the projects I’d been involved in – that historic cinema, the beachside cafe and studios, a crumbling old theatre – would be the pin pricks the town needed.

After working on projects in empty shops and seeing towns across the country this year, I’m rethinking that idea though. I’d always thought that the caterpillar, wrapped up in its cocoon, transforms into a beautiful butterfly. It doesn’t. It dies in there, rots away, and something new and beautiful is made from the rotted flesh. There are distinct stages, not a constant process.

I don’t think we can start regeneration while the town’s heading down, and turn it around that way. I don’t think the caterpillar transforms into the butterfly. I thought it did, we could, but I think maybe we need to reach the absolute bottom, and stop, and contemplate where we are.

There’s a story Leo tells in The West Wing. A man falls in a hole. A doctor and a priest can’t help him – they won’t get in the hole. But the man’s friend come along and jumps in the hole too.

“Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’”

I’m thinking back to the Brighton I knew as a child; a run-down, shabby seaside town with no place or purpose. It had to sink really low; that pushed property prices down, allowed people to think creatively about the spaces available and how to use them, and allowed a meteoric rise from failing city to special place.

And looking at Margate, where an absolute decimation of the town centre has led to new, fresh thinking and focused action. Margate, with its magnificent old town, will thrive in the next few years.

A bushfire clears the ground for new growth. Plants have adapted, with extra shoots that push up quickly after a fire and seeds that need the heat to germinate. The Eucalyptus even encourages fire, with oil-filled leaves, so that it can start new growth and spread.

I suspect that the people that usually start a town’s renaissance, the artists and writers, the entrepreneurs and visionaries, are the same. They need the clear ground and the heat. They need to get down in the hole.

In the past few years, Worthing has started to fill with refugees from the property wars in Brighton and London. I suspect that this is a false dawn; it looks like a new, comfortable, middle class rebirth but really these people, on the whole, want to dress Worthing up as Brighton’s younger brother or make a London-lite, with Starbucks and Gap. I don’t think that will ever work. I don’t think people living in the town are feeling a shift, a change of culture. Trying to imitate Brighton just makes it clearer we’re thirty years behind them, in terms of regeneration.

I want to see Worthing become a better Worthing, not an imitation of somewhere else. Give me a burnt space, clear ground, a fresh place to start from. Jump down in this hole with me, will you?

On Twitter, @lewiscoakley is saying Sheffield City Council should be ashamed of themselves. 100s of students queueing to vote and not able to in Sheffield Hallam.

John Mothersole, Returning Officer for Sheffield, apologised to residents who were unable to vote in Sheffield today, and said “We got this wrong and I would like to apologise. We were faced with a difficult situation with the numbers of people, and a large amount of students turning up to vote without polling cards. This made the administration process of ensuring the correct person was given a ballot paper much longer. The only remedy, which we could not take, was to extend the voting times.”

However, there’s no requirement to bring a Polling Card to vote; and in Lewisham, faced with the same problem, the Returning Officer kept the Polling Stations open after 10pm to allow people to vote.

@masakepic reports Birmingham, police called out when voters turned away became angry. Could say left it too late, but people queued for hours.

@angoid Tweets Can they really deny people who have queued for over an hour the right to vote? Over 100 votes looking lost at London fields.

There are stories of people locked out in Hackney after queuing for an hour; the BBC have shown similar footage from Leeds. @simoncollister is Tweeting similar news from Highbury.

Here in Worthing West the queues have been stretching out of the door. There are reports of election officials in Adur reporting huge turnouts - in some wards, possibly 90%.

Until Clegg spoke at the first Leaders Debate. He’s woken people up, inspired them to think about a real alternative and consider voting differently. Sadly, his party could get the most votes but not the most seats under our shabby electoral system, unsurprisingly skewed in Labour’s favour.

But I don’t think that’s the biggest problem. I was a very early Obama supporter, and followed his march to the White House with great interest. The key to his success was learnt when he mobilised people for community action in Chicago. Systems were in place from the start for mass communication, and to mobilise a growing army of supporters. That system was clearly scaleable and future-proof. Obama took millions around the world with him as he marched.

Clegg and the Lib Dems, however, don’t seem to have figured for becoming popular. There’s no system in place to get posters to local supporters, let alone mobilise those people into a mass door-knocking campaign. The Lib Dem party can’t maintain at a grassroots level the momentum it has at the top. Unless they move quickly, their inability to manage their own election campaign will seriously dent their credibility.

Cutting over town,
across the park
below the hills,
through the twitten,
behind the swiss hotel,
round the royal crescent,
slide past the library,
around the edge of the centre,
under the back of the gasworks,
and down to the front;

the quickest route from here to you.

A terminus without a trainline:
A suitcase without a holiday;
A book without a font;
A king without a coronation;
A map without a route;
And a chair without you.

It’s on the edge of England, or maybe the edge of Scotland. It’s a border town, a frontier place, a fringe; the edge of every empire that the last two thousand years has seen. It’s very much the end, the full stop.

It’s the thing between sentences, full of squares and courtyards, the space between places. It’s transient, shifting, always in a state of flux yet ancient, solid. Rooted in Roman history and a local deity, but alive with even more ancient religions. Standing stones, early Christian Celtic crosses in the cathedral, Green Men on the walls of shops in the market square.

The buildings are heavy, made from a local stone that itself changes from one thing to another, sandstone sedimentary layers blending from deep, faded-blood red to a soft yellow, often in one carved piece. Stone from a Roman quarry eight miles away.

The stone is so eccentric it makes the cathedral look like a patchwork. A feeling that’s only enhanced by the slipped lines of decorations, the wonky and skewiff Norman arches, the might of pillars whose feet don’t quite match each other’s ground levels. Maybe the clay, when they built one bay, was wet, (don’t forget, ever, that Carlisle floods), but for whatever reason, stone pillars sank. So even the cathedral is in a state of movement, neither one thing or another. Where there should be something static, unchanging; there’s something that wiggles like a fish.

There are solid stone city walls and metal barricades on Botchergate. Heavy gates across empty alleyways and railings around war memorials. Clear, strong definitions. Black and white. With so much that is transient, temporary, timely, the city tries to draw strong lines.

Of course, a firm line always makes you see what’s either side of it. So the city’s attempts at definition only make the change, confusion and incoherence more apparent.

Carlisle’s about shift and uncertainty, the edge of places, the impermanence of stone.”

Written for an exhibition as part of the Empty Shops Network tour in Carlisle