YOU can take the boy out of Blackburn but you can’t take Blackburn out of the boy, Wayne Hemingway assures me.

“I’m a Lancastrian, I married a Lancastrian and all our families live there still.”

Recent trips back to Lancashire have included the opening of the Youth Zone in Blackburn and launching his vintage and arts festival plans to celebrate the Preston Guild in September.

But it’s not all work for the founder of eclectic design brand Red Or Dead. Family comes first when it comes to visits home.

“For Gerardine (Wayne’s Padiham-born wife) and myself it’s not just about coming back to Lancashire for work, but number one is family, two it’s our roots and three we do actually try to do business locally, manufacturing there where we can.”

Wayne has been working with Blackburn-based wallpaper company Graham & Brown for 10 years now.

And with the firm’s chief executive Andrew Graham a driving force behind the new Youth Zone, Wayne sees the potential to help young people from his home town.

“Blackburn needs initiatives like the Youth Zone in spades,” he said, “like a lot of towns which have suffered from the change in employment and the shift of manufacturing.

“Of course money from a job is important, but people need to work. As the saying goes, the devil makes work for idle hands, so where you have people struggling to find work you will get more anti-social behaviour and deprivation goes up.

“The Youth Zone gives people things to do, and it has an education and work element or learning skills.

“I was there with footballer David Dunn and he has some good youth initiatives. It’s something everyone with some success from Blackburn can do.

“For Hemingway Design, our aim is to bring industry together with talks there, and some mentoring, and work experience for talented people at companies we work with locally, and at our offices in London as a long-term aim.”

Currently promoting Climate Change Week, Wayne is keen to dismiss cynicism that climate change is a myth.

“The biggest worry is that half of the nation don’t think it’s real, according to research by Nissan,” he said.

“People are saying that we have had these colder winters, but climate change doesn’t have to mean that every place will get hotter, there will be variations; Britain’s going to get wetter, with warmer summers and colder winters, and that does fit with what’s been happening.

“I was brought up in Lancashire to think about people and about the future, and resources, and to live thriftily and that’s all sustainability asks of us.

“If you go back 20, 30 years before climate change was on the agenda, then the things we should be thinking about now — emissions from cars, over consumption, saving power and not just burning fossil fuels — all make sense anyway.”

And Wayne’s Vintage Festival, this year at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, on July 13 to 15, celebrates this way of looking at environmental issues.

“The festival is about modern ways of living and looking back at how we used to live, as well as film, food, arts, design and music, and it does have a lot of upcycling initiatives going on too,”

he said.

Summer is going to be a busy season, with Hemingway Design curating the Battersea Park Jubilee Festival as part of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant on June 3, hosting the Vintage Festival and arranging a weekend of events for the Preston Guild on September 1 and 2, where he’s inviting people to ‘all come back to ours for a good old Northern knees up’.

“It’s very early days of planning for the Guild weekend, but we are looking at the history of the Guild and the creative history not only of Preston, but of Lancashire — it’s going to be a proper county celebration.”

Something else Wayne hopes to be celebrating later this year is Blackburn Rovers staying in the Premier League. After a tense few month lingering around the relegation zone, ‘there is a chink of light’ according to the lifelong fan.

“I’m not going to criticise the team. There’s a tremendous load to criticise about the structure of the club but the team is fighting and that’s all I can ask of them.

“If they stay up, hopefully the owners will see the error of their ways.

“It’s a worry, not just as a football fan but as a lover of the area. Premiership football is part of what East Lancashire is about.

“We do work around the world and say to people in Japan where we are from and they say ‘Ah, Blackburn Rovers’. People know us on that scale because of the football.”