By Keith Cowling (Director)
Stokes Croft Land Trust (SCLT) completed the purchase of the PRSC HQ building at 17 – 25 Jamaica Street in September 2023 and moved rapidly to negotiate and agree a 15 year full repairing lease with PRSC, its tenants and partners. The process of acquiring the building had taken a number of years of sustained effort on the part of the SCLT board.
There was little time to rest on our laurels however, since two months after completion the trust was offered the opportunity to purchase both the adjacent PRSC yard, the PRSC shop and flat above and the contiguous Jamaica Street Studios building.
After some initial appraisal and due diligence work regarding the Jamaica Street Studios building, SCLT representatives attended a meeting in January to clarify the offer of the owners of the building, Jamaica Street Partners. The co-operative of tenants in the building, the Jamaica Street Artists (JSA) explained that they have gone to some lengths to prepare a bid for the building, believing it to have been offered to them. SCLT therefore advised the vendors that although it was interested in the building, it would not be competing with JSA for acquisition. The building was then offered exclusively to JSA. In March JSA secured £500K from the government’s Community Ownership Fund (COF) towards the purchase of the building.
In view of the JSA success, SCLT decided to make a bid itself into the next round of COF for funds to repair and improve the PRSC building and accordingly submitted an expression of interest in March. A good deal of work was carried out on developing a business plan for an application to improve and repair the PRSC building, with the intention of bidding into the final round of COF scheduled for last summer. Seven days of professional support with the application was secured. Despite these efforts however, the COF programme final round was pulled prematurely due to the government purdah created by the announcement of the recent general election and with a new government taking office no news regarding the continuance of the COF fund or alternative for supporting community ownership has yet emerged.
As a new landlord, the board has been working hard on its responsibilities. It has continued to seek funding both to repair and improve the building that SCLT owns and also to grow the organisation and build its capacity. In March, PRSC took up an opportunity to have a carbon survey of the building carried out, which provided useful data on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are likely being emitting. It listed the range of mitigation measures that could be employed to improve performance. Using this information provided in this survey, SCLT has submitted an application to MegaWatt Fund (via Quartet Foundation) for a solar PV installation on the roof. We expect notification of the outcome of this bid at the end of October.
SCLT also secured funding from Nisbetts Foundation in October last year for an Electrical Safety Report and Fire Risk assessment. The Electrical Safety report was completed in May and work to remedy failings and bring installation up to scratch, also funded by Nisbetts, was completed in June. The building is now fully certified as safe and compliant in terms of electrical installations. The Fire risk assessment is still pending, awaiting action from our tenants to deal with known areas of risk.
In pursuit of new resources to develop the organisation, SCLT also made an application to the Lottery Awards for All programme this year to fund someone to work part time on funding applications, capacity building, training and community involvement. Although this bid was unsuccessful however, we have just heard that an application to Asda Foundation for funding for roof repairs submitted at the end of July did succeed and we have secured a £25,000 grant to tackle the backlog of roof repairs. Work is therefore scheduled to take place later this autumn.
Beside the immediate concerns of stewardship, the SCLT board is also mindful that the trust has a mission to counter the gathering tide of gentrification in the Croft. It needs to build up its base of community-owned assets in the neighbourhood and resist the sale of much-loved sites and buildings for speculative development.
In June this year the sale of the Lakota building was announced. This is a big property still continuing to function as a night club, but not for much longer apparently. More recently, at the end of August, the sale of Turbo Island was announced. SCLT is therefore exploring purchase possibilities and attempting to negotiate with vendors.
Whether SCLT can manage to lead a community purchase of Turbo or not, these recent property sales underline the difficulty of acquiring important local sites that have their prices set by the expected profits from speculative development. Raising money from local people, as we did with our share offer for this building, takes time and commitment, and is not a viable approach for competing rapidly with commercial interests when key properties are put up for sale. The Trust needs a preparedness strategy. This may well involve raising community investment in advance of future sell-offs, so that it has a venturing fund to seize opportunities when they arise.