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Is it possible to ‘level up’ the economy and help struggling places halt decline and become more prosperous? Paul Swinney is Director of Policy and Research at the think tank Centre for Cities and his research focuses on city economies and their development over time. He considers what strategies might be implemented to support declining town and city centres and if the government’s Levelling Up agenda is likely to deliver concrete results.The prize-winning poet Paul Batchelor was born in Northumberland and often explores the lost worlds of Britain’s mining communities, and the memories that have survived. The title of his new collection, The Acts of Oblivion, refers to seventeenth-century laws that required not only the pardon of revolutionary deeds, but also made discussing them illegal. His poems rebel against such restrictions, and against forgetting. In the forest landscape of northern Varmland in Sweden lies the village of Osebol. In just five decades, the automation of the lumber industry and the draw