At the tearoom in Bury Market there's a chalkboard with a cheery-looking rag doll beside it. The board advertises Jackson's rag pudding – ‘a little bit like chippy pudding but better’ – for a modest £3.50. Few people south of Lancashire have come across rag pudding. You wouldn't call it a delicacy, but it's substantial and filling, the kind of dish you’d need after a long shift at the mill. And that's exactly what it was made for: the rag pudding originated in Oldham, where cotton workers would tuck into a pie of minced meat and vegetables, wrapped in suet pastry and boiled in a cheesecloth rather than baked in a tin. A bit like the now ubiquitous Cornish pasty, it was a meal in itself, put together with whatever was to hand. You could make one even if you were too poor to afford a baking dish, which many people were 150 years ago. Lancastrians still vouch for its flavour and wholesomeness, although it's said to taste even better after a few pints of ale.

The rag pudding makers knew how to make a little go a long way. In a nation where the divide between boom towns and bust towns is becoming starker, it's a secret many of us will need to re-learn: how to value and apply the resources we have ourselves rather than wait for the wash of others’ economic ripples to reach us. At the heart of that is a rediscovery of solidarity. ‘Me towns’ of takers must become ‘we towns’ of makers, with a shared ambition to create a common future. The ingredients at hand may look more suited to a rag pudding than a banquet, but we need not be helpless in the face of forces that seem beyond our control.

While the changes in our town centres will affect everyone, they will be felt hardest and sharpest in the places that are already falling behind. Hence the rag pudding analogy. We have to take our future in our own hands while we can, using the resources we have now.

The challenge of change is an opportunity to think and to act differently. It is a chance to rediscover and recreate the magic of place, the local shared value that makes every town distinctive and generates pride in the work of our hands and minds.