The National Lottery Community Fund has granted social enterprise Platform Places and its partners £2.5m to help communities transform town and city centre buildings for local benefit, and our work in Knowsley and St Helens is amongst the five areas covered nationally.
The funding over three years will go towards creating ‘Local Property Partnerships’, which empower local community leaders to work with councils, funders and private asset owners to repurpose old buildings, breathing new life into our high streets and town centres. Long-term local ownership will be essential to unlocking potential and helping boost creative communities to build the high streets of the future – for the benefit of us all.
Rebecca Trevalyan, Co-founder and Co-director at Platform Places, said: “One in seven high-street shops are empty. Many more are underused or at risk of becoming so. At the same time, it’s often expensive and precarious for local businesses and community organisations to access secure, affordable workspace.
“Now more than ever, we need services in our town centres that help address the cost-of-living, social isolation and climate crises – whether arts and music venues, reuse and repair hubs, urban farms, community kitchens, youth and sports clubs, local markets, co-working spaces, or genuinely affordable housing.”
Chris Spriggs leads on Kindred’s place-based work, and has championed the development of Street and a Half in St Helens, alongside the Women in the Know programme in Knowsley. She says: “Kindred’s people-led approach to regeneration is working across our region. Our action-driven place work in Birkenhead has seen amazing results and what we have learnt from this incredible and important partnership experience informs the exciting immersive work we are now doing in St Helens and Knowsley. In St Helens we’re working to transform a street and a half of units in the town centre into a new social and creative business hub for the town. In Knowsley, our Women in the Know project is working with 20-plus fantastic local women to find a High Street space/s for an innovative care and creativity pilot programme for the whole community to be able to access. Our work is proof of the important role the social economy plays in the renewal of our city region – watch this space on both of these programmes!
“At Kindred, we are working to prove the importance of the social economy in our region and in turn, what we are learning and experiencing we are sharing nationally and internationally. My place work centres around people-led regeneration of towns and cities and our Kindred experience tells us that it works.”
Alongside Liverpool City Region, the other areas in the programme are Wandsworth Town and neighbourhoods in Bristol, Newcastle and Sheffield.