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https://www.positive.news/society/value-in-the-meantime-the-social-enterprise-transforming-londons-empty-buildings/>
"There are 80,000 empty buildings in London, and I’m in one of them.
Perched across the road from the vast Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in Silvertown
– a part of east London that gentrification forgot – the Tate Institute is a
memory of Victorian corporate philanthropy. Built to provide its workers with
education and enlightenment, it fell into dereliction as such paternalism fell
out of favour and into the hands of Newham Council, who struggled to find a
suitable use – and funds – with which to revive it.
Then came the squatters, leaving their graffiti on the walls, but doing little
to stop the decay: holes in the roof, floors collapsing … It’s an all-too
familiar tale.
But this one comes with a twist. The building today is buzzing with people at
work, renovating and restoring. They’re a mix of staff and volunteers at
ReSpace Projects: a social enterprise that is transforming derelict or at-risk
sites across the capital and beyond.
Essentially, as ReSpace director Fleur Disney tells me, perched on an old sofa
over a cup of tea in the ‘Tate’s’ kitchen, they take buildings that are lying
empty, sometimes for years (so-called ‘meanwhile spaces’), and, with the
agreement of the landlords and local authorities, turn them into places for
community use – such as workshops, arts venues and startup hubs.
It’s a win-win for all involved, including crucially the landlords, who save
money and gain security by having the building inhabited and cared for. It does
so in a way that also earns them brownie points with the local authority upon
whose planning decisions their business goals often depend. And it’s preferable
to the ‘property guardians’ model, where security is provided by a series of
short-term, usually poorly paid, occupants who have no incentive to look after
the space.
If ReSpace sounds like a sort of benign squatter invasion, that’s not
surprising, as founder Gee Sinha explains. “I became homeless in 2010 and ended
up living in a squat.” He got involved in squatters’ rights campaigns, just as
the residential version was made a criminal offence – a ban which, he
acknowledges, “made sense in its own way”. That still left hordes of commercial
properties in a ‘meanwhile’ state, often for years on end, and they became the
focus for Sinha and his fellow campaigners, fighting to legalise occupation of
such empty buildings and make them available for community use. That made the
activists something of a thorn in the side for local authorities.
Then in 2014, “I got a message from someone I knew in Hackney Council, which
basically said: ‘If we give you a building, would you stop squatting?’” The
building in question was an empty three-storey office block in Dalston – fast
emerging as London’s latest hipsterville. Its owner was Michael Gerrard, a
developer who was keen to stay on-side with the council. And so an alliance was
formed between these two least likely of collaborators: squatter and landlord."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
