By Annette Russell, Executive Director
It’s been a year since I joined Margate Creative Land Trust, and less than a year since our Acquisition and Development Manager, Zuzie, joined to help us identify and acquire space for the town’s creative sector. In that time, we have looked at 51 properties and development sites in Margate, appraised 10 in detail, and offered on 4. There’s not much on the market at any one time, and property owners have often bought things as a long-term investment, holding out for an (often inflated) sale price. The commercial property market in Margate is skewed and challenging to work within, but this is exactly why the Trust needed to be established.
Our vision is to support a diverse and resilient creative sector that provides opportunities for people in the area. Everyone in Margate should be able to benefit from positive change in the town and the investment it can bring. We’ll do this by establishing accessible and inspiring creative spaces that are available to the community, creative sector, and local economy in perpetuity. Our spaces will be inclusive across a range of practices and sub-sectors. To ensure we provide space that is fit for purpose, we are continually mapping the sector and anticipated demand across Margate. Our Community Engagement Lead, April, joined us in May this year and is leading on this, connecting with the diverse creative communities in our town.
But it’s not as simple as just acquiring property we like the look of! As the Trust began to consider how to use the seed funding from the Town Deal grant to acquire space, it needed a framework to guide decisions on why, what, and where the spend should go. This led to the development of the Investment Framework by regeneration consultants PRD, who had supported the creation of the Margate Town Investment Plan, and subsequently the Trust itself.
This framework is central to how we evaluate potential acquisitions and why we might choose to invest in certain properties over others. You can explore the framework more here: [Link to full Investment Framework].
Having evolved from establishing the organisation, developing strategies, building a team, and searching for space, we are now transitioning into delivery. But things can change quickly, so we need to be responsive to the needs of the local creative sector. This summer, we have been running a pilot Property Support Offer, which has been targeted at existing creative workspaces. It provides a budget to pay for things like legal fees associated with renewing leases, survey work to establish the condition of the buildings the studio providers own or are renting, and advice on how they might devise a business plan or fundraising strategy to enable them to stabilise and expand. We will close this initial round of funding at the end of August, but we will evaluate the requests we have received and feed this into the next wave of support to the sector. Do check the page on our website for more information on any future activity.
We are close to concluding the legal work for our first acquisition, with others in the pipeline close behind. Preparatory work for developing the buildings runs alongside this. We are keen to move quickly and collaborate with the creative sector to deliver the right type of space, complementing what is already there rather than duplicating or competing.
A formal announcement will follow, but we are excited to get stuck into this next stage of the Trust’s development. It feels like both a marathon and a sprint!
The Investment Framework groups our interventions within the property sector into three core themes:
