What better way to spend Community Business Week than being welcomed into the community of Stockport by the wonderful team at MadLab at the end of last year.
Through the Community-Led High Street Innovators (CLHSI) programme, we’ve had the chance to visit projects across the country – exploring Make CIC in Birkenhead, MadLab in Stockport, Southmead Development Trust in Bristol, and Makespace Oxford, learning directly from peers who are testing solutions to high street challenges. These study visits give us the chance to see what works on the ground, share ideas, and build practical solutions together. Artspace Lifespace has also welcomed innovators at Sparks and The Island Bristol, with further visits to the Dewsbury Arcade and Bricks in Bristol planned for this year.
Filling the void
During our visit to Stockport, a local woman stopped to ask what we were doing, as we walked around the town. When I explained we were there to learn about the positive changes happening Stockport, her face lit up – until she spoke about the industries Stockport had lost. Stockport was once known as “The Workshop of the North,” famous for its hat-making industry and engineering. Like Bristol and Liverpool, it has had to reinvent itself after decades of industrial decline. Increasingly, it’s the creative industries that are filling that void.
But there’s tension. Stockport has seen significant investment, and like Bristol it faces the same challenge: ensuring the very artists and independents helping to revive high streets and driving regeneration aren’t priced out of the areas they’ve helped bring life back to.
High streets across the country are struggling for many reasons, including a tough economic climate, changing shopping habits, and years of underinvestment in public spaces. While Bristol’s outlook appears positive on the Centre for Cities High Street Catchment Data tool, a closer look at the figures tells a more complex story – the most popular destination for spending isn’t one of Bristol’s neighbourhood high streets, but the out-of-town retail centre, Cribbs Causeway. What looks like a success masks the ongoing challenges facing the city’s streets and local centres. That disconnect came into focus last summer when a visit by Annunziata Rees-Mogg, a freelance journalist and a former politician, sparked local outrage. After a shopping trip, she described Bristol as feeling like a city that had “given up”. For many residents the comments felt unfair – for others, they reflected a frustration that is increasingly hard to ignore.
The fact is, many of us can see and feel what years of austerity have left behind. There is less street cleaning, less visible policing, and long-term underinvestment in public and community spaces, high streets and town centres – even in a relatively wealthy city like Bristol. I have every hope that the new Director of Operations (or “crime and grime”) role created by Bristol Business Improvement District (BID) will help tackle the impact of this underinvestment. But this work cannot sit alone with BID. Revitalising our high streets must be done alongside businesses, community organisations, and residents, all of whom have a role to play in creating places that feel cared for.
Community asset ownership
One of the key reasons Artspace Lifespace set out to create a Vacant Property Toolkit is that we are meanwhile space occupiers ourselves, operating in one of the most expensive cities in the UK outside London. The toolkit will be a publicly available resource, offering practical guidance to community organisations and independent businesses looking to access and activate vacant space – particularly through meanwhile use.
In Bristol, we have seen a wave of arts closures in recent years. At the same time, many buildings sit empty not because there is no demand, but because the system makes it difficult to unlock them in ways that work for both owners and communities. The precarity of not owning our own building means that the knowledge accumulated by Artspace Lifespace over the years could be easily lost if the charity were no longer able to operate.
When rising rents threatened to price us out of Bristol, funders encouraged us to move to Weston-Super-Mare. While we love Weston, the offer focused on meanwhile regeneration, not long-term community building. We chose to stay and make a stand for culture in Bristol and for the future of the high street. That decision led us to the creation of Sparks, joining the Vacant Property Taskforce and becoming one of five national Community-Led High Street Innovators supported by Power to Change.
We’re now developing partnerships with local authorities, transport teams, and neighbouring businesses. But through our work with Power to Change and the Mycelial network, we’ve learned that in an environment of “wealthism”, occupying vacant property isn’t enough. To break cycles of gentrification and displacement, communities need to move towards asset ownership – through creative and community land trusts, cooperative ownership models, and other forms of shared ownership.
The challenge is significant. Since 1979, approximately one-tenth of Britain’s territory has been sold into private ownership, ranging from council assets to nationally owned land. Analysis by Guy Shrubsole in Who Owns England shows that about 25,000 landowners – less than 1% of the population – control roughly 50% of England’s land. Since 2019, central government has sold billions of pounds’ worth of “surplus” land and buildings, while councils continue to sell local public assets – including libraries, community centres and schools – amounting to thousands of properties. To counter the decline of our high streets and the loss of civic spaces, solutions must prioritise community-led asset ownership and regeneration initiatives.
Community power
People feel pride in place when they feel they have ownership and agency in their local areas – when they have “skin in the game”, and when they know that their actions benefit their community. That means creating high streets where wealth circulates locally rather than flowing outward, where prosperity is shared rather than extracted.
The path forward isn’t entirely clear. We’re still learning how cities can redesign their local economies to keep wealth within communities, and how to persuade funders to enable community ownership rather than perpetuate dependency. Through our work as an innovator and the development of the Vacant Property Toolkit, we hope to build build more community power, encourage more property owners to work with community occupiers, and support more creatives and communities to take ownership of vacant spaces.
I’ll leave you with one important piece of advice, gleaned from our final stop in Stockport at Grit Studios, and on a sign hanging from one of the studios: “Keep Going. You’ve Got This.”
Artspace LIfespace is one of five Community-Led High Street Innovators collaborating with Power to Change to test and learn how community-led high street regeneration projects can be a model for communities everywhere. Alongside the Vacant Property Toolkit, to be published in spring 2026, Artspace Lifespace is creating a property database of Broadmead, mapping the area around the three buildings they operate – The Island, Sparks and Broadmead XP.
