Art needs somewhere to take root.
Bradford, designated UK City of Culture 2025, is no different. Home to a vibrant creative community, many artists in Bradford are experiencing the same affordability crisis afflicting countless neighborhoods in the UK.
The People’s Property Portfolio (PPP) was founded by members of the local creative community to create affordable, accessible, and secure spaces. Their long-term goal is to create a network of community-owned buildings and assets that serve social needs.
PPP’s founders saw an opportunity for this vision in the shared needs of community members and artists experiencing volatile, short-term tenancies in buildings that weren’t accessible for all or fit for purpose. Many of those buildings were also left vacant. In 2022, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now MHCLG) reported at least 3,416 homes liable for council tax in Bradford had been unoccupied for at least six months.
“You have these underutilised buildings, and then you have this young, growing and eager local creative scene that doesn’t have access to spaces that can meet their needs,” Carys Fieldson, a Director of PPP, said.
“A tale as old as time”
Far-off investors speculating on community assets are a big part of the problem. Research conducted by PPP in 2022 revealed that nearly 1400 properties in Bradford city centre are owned by external or offshore companies. Many own more than five. Absentee landlordism is sucking wealth out of the community and sending it to faraway shareholders.
This extractive model makes it harder for artists in the City of Culture to build a livelihood. A 2024 report by the Bradford Producing Hub confirmed what many local artists knew, stating that creative workspaces are often insecure and unaffordable.
Sarah Bird, a sound artist and Director of PPP, says this state of affairs is common across the UK.
“It's a tale as old as time,” she said. “It’s happening everywhere. Nationwide, it’s all the same narrative. It's heartbreaking.”
What affordability really means
Community ownership models like PPP are a local alternative to extractive landlordism that raises rents on artists. PPP is a Community Benefit Society (CBS), which is a democratic way to hold buildings and land, and ensures that investment, assets, and profit go into the local community. Unlike other co-operatives, their core function is to operate for the benefit of the wider community, Fieldson said.
PPP also enlists the partnership of a range of local actors. This includes public institutions (Bradford’s council and West Yorkshire Combined Authority), social initiatives (Local Access Bradford and Impact Hub Bradford), and tenant and user groups. The creative community is heavily involved, too. Castles in the Sky, an LGBTQIA+ creative company, Common/Wealth Theatre, and local radio stations are trying to set down roots locally despite rampant short-term tenancies.
“As a social landlord, we see buildings as vital hosts for supporting all kinds of creative and grassroot community activity,” Fieldson said.
“It’s important that affordability is relative to the average local income for artists and creative freelancers. A lot of people talk about affordable workspaces, but what does affordable really mean when it comes out of your bank balance every month?”
Affordability should also mean reinvestment in the community, so wealth stays put locally. Rather than flowing to offshore tax havens, revenue from PPP goes back into the community. Fieldson says far-off investors have a habit of buying cheap, waiting for the asset to appreciate value, before selling to benefit shareholders – which contributes to high vacancy rates and underutilisation in Bradford's city centre buildings.
A people’s land bank
PPP’s mission doesn’t end with one building, Fieldson said. The goal of PPP is to create a people’s land bank or portfolio that would allow PPP to create a network of assets that can support and cross-subsidise each other. Not only will this bring more buildings back into use, it’s also an investment model that doesn’t leave all eggs in one basket. In the longer-term, this might mean more stable assets could make it easier to take on riskier, less income-generating but more purpose-driven endeavours. It’s similar to how an investor builds a portfolio to reduce risk, but for people, not profit.
PPP has plans to launch a community share offer which creates an opportunity for communities to financially invest in the business.
“Creating the opportunity for local people to actually invest financially into the vision also increases the likelihood of long-term success, because people will only invest in something they believe in, and have a collective stake in making a success of it,” Fieldson said. It also creates a wider constituency of advocates and community members benefiting from a people’s portfolio that will help community ownership expand.
PPP’s current focus is 17-21 Chapel Street, formerly Bradford Resource Centre, a centuries-old Quaker School that has been an important hub for community organising and mutual support in Bradford since the 1980s. The building sits in Bradford's UNESCO World Heritage Site for Film, within Little Germany Conservation Area – an important historic quarter in the city that experiences high vacancy rates.
PPP’s business model for this site will carefully balance financial return with community benefit, reinvesting surpluses. Once the building is purchased and renovated, it will serve as a hub for artists, cultural, and community organisations, Bird says.
Fieldson explains that it takes time to get community members on board and develop credibility. It’s important to have a clear vision first – “to build the dream before the building,” she said.
Bird agrees that steady determination over the long haul is key to gaining community support and developing the stamina required to get a project through feasibility studies and into the community.
Ultimately, however, these projects will contribute to a city where artists and residents can afford to live, create, and build the relationships that create strong local pride and develop community resilience. Instead of underused vacant buildings and profiteering real estate speculators, community members will own and guide the development of use of their buildings to create long-term security for artists.
“A key thing is that sense of security and being able to put down roots,” Bird said.
“The real fear of precarity impacts your creative practice and your bottom line. It's about being able to know that you can trust, rely and be fully embedded in a place and in a community and really establish relationships with other people that are at home in a building.”
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PPP will be launching their community share offer later this year. Follow their journey on Instagram or head to their website and sign up for email updates.
Nick Pearce is a writer and researcher interested in climate, political economy, and democratic decision making. He holds a Master’s of Global Affairs with an environment speciality from the University of Toronto. Previously, he was an award-winning journalist in western and northern Canada.
