West Sussex

Yeah, and funnily enough...

My boys just changed teams, but he played for a club in West Sussex last season.

And a lot of his teammates were going off to train at Brighton during the week.

And I was a bit perplexed because I thought, well, unless I'm missing something, these kids are not going to become professional footballers.

I want the youngsters to get the best coaching possible, but there's situations in schools in my area where they're going to these academies, which aren't really academies, and they're getting taught by coaches with lower ability than perhaps some of the teachers they've got there.

And I wonder, we were talking about it as well, weren't we, Sam, about the ego of parents.

I was telling the story about my lad's old team in West Sussex.

A lot of his teammates were going off to play for the Brighton Academy or train with the Brighton Academy.

He uses design in its broader sense, not simply just how something looks, but how an organisation, service, system or place can work differently, and how we test those possibilities rather than merely writing another report about them.

John has lived in Sussex for nearly two decades, first in Brighton, then Plumpton Green and now Linfield in West Sussex.

And the phrase at the centre of our conversation is one that he's been developing recently.

Sussex is a thing.

And Sussex is a complex assembly of contradictory issues to pull on the Bruno Latour articulation of that.

It is social, it is material, it is the experience in a day you have on a particular high street and the experience you have living here over the course of 12 months, 24 months, a lifetime.

It's all of these different things And I find it fascinating that we are bringing together Sussex as a thing again, formally for the first time since 1888, when the Local Government Act split East and West Sussex, but informally for the first time since the 12th century, when Henry II decided that this place was too big to manage as one thing.

So I'm really interested in, from a design perspective and that broad definition of it, how do you bring together a more participatory purposeful process that starts articulating what Sussex is as a thing and therefore if you want to be mayor of this place this big sprawling wonderful complex assembly of contradictory issues what are the sorts of things that you should be doing for the people of this thing

Molly, thank you very much indeed.

John Barstow from West Sussex says, a full North Sea oil and gas expansion coupled together with the continued rollout of wind turbines in the North Sea will turn it into a true industrial powerhouse.

More jobs in Scotland and the North will make for a more evenly balanced country, complete with less housing pressure in the South.

I've got time for, oh, let's squeeze someone in.