Think Yorkshire and images of rolling hills, Sunday roasts with golden Yorkshire puddings, white roses and men in flat caps often come to mind. And on this, Yorkshire day, we certainly do treasure and celebrate these things, in fact in true 2016 style, Plusnet has even developed a series of emojis that bring to life much of this standard Yorkshire fair. But as we face the choice between a Yorkshire terrier, rose, pudding, teapot and flat cap for the truest digital representation of God’s own country, shouldn’t we also be pushing to put a bit more of an updated view of all the county has to offer?
What Plusnet’s flat caps and puds don’t really bring to life are the leaps and bounds being made in the world that we at Savvy live and breathe – creativity. Last week a report by Nesta and Creative England found that Leeds has the tenth highest number of creative businesses in the UK and the second largest creative cluster in the North employing 15,000 people. As we’ve long witnessed, the talent pool in Savvy’s home town has been growing and deepening for some time, which means the standard of creativity continues to rise and our relative position is stronger against those who fall further from our Yorkshire borders. We’ve come a long way London and we’re not stopping yet.
But this isn’t new news, beyond the world of marketing, Yorkshire has a long history of breeding world class creative talent across art, music and the culinary world. From the Bronte sisters to Michael O’Hare, Dame Judi Dench to The Arctic Monkeys, our green hills and busy cities continue to claim many world class creative greats. But as much as these big names bring the county fame, it is the infectious creative culture found at the grass roots level which is allowing us to thrive as an agency. The creative thinking that is being employed not just across the arts, but all kinds of businesses like ours enabling us to compete on the world stage. It’s that thinking that allows us to be much more than a collection of flat caps or a plate of Yorkshire puddings. So perhaps rather than celebrating all that we know and expect about the county we should take Yorkshire day as a time to showcase all that people are not so aware of. For it is that Yorkshire that I also know and love.