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Take a walk through Braunstone, an area woven with social housing on the edge of West Leicester, and you’ll soon spot the neighbourhood’s gathering spaces.
An award-winning health and social care centre is buzzing with activity; an energy-efficient community hub comes alive with library visitors and adult education classes. You’ll find a well-used foodbank and pantry, and an affordable ‘pre-loved’ second hand shop in a former post office. A cluster of small businesses and social enterprises share a large hub with a dance academy, as kids spill in and out of the football pitch.
None of these arrived through a private developer’s masterplan. The patchwork has been assembled over 25 years by b inspired: a charity and community anchor that stewards a dozen buildings in and around Braunstone.
Over this time, they’ve gradually transformed derelict or underused assets into a neighbourhood-scale community property portfolio: a web of spaces making local life thriving and affordable, incubating community businesses and reinvesting profits locally. They’ve revived 12 properties, unlocking affordable workspace for 50 small businesses, activities for thousands of residents, and quality, affordable housing for four families. Many of these assets were transferred from the city council or negotiated at below-market sale prices, then painstakingly retrofitted through patient fundraising, each building becoming a catalyst for the next.
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In an area long ranked highly on deprivation indices, b inspired’s story began in the early 2000s with the New Deal for Communities programme. But its longevity comes from the people, like CEO Angie Wright, who refused to let that decade of investment evaporate and worked to reverse the decline signalled by boarded-up shops, empty council buildings, and disappearing local services. As Angie says, “When buildings are neglected, it makes it look and feel like there’s no creativity or potential in the neighbourhood. But there absolutely is.”
This is what it looks like when a community begins to own and shape its own land and buildings for the long term. And it’s not an isolated story…
In London, Stour Trust is acquiring and transforming spaces in gentrifying Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and Southwark, where community organisations are being priced out and long-standing cultural venues evicted overnight. Founder Juliet Can and team have secured multiple virtual freehold leases, including a peppercorn lease of 999 years. That model, says Juliet, “secures affordability for communities in perpetuity, ensuring life-affirming infrastructures continue to exist outside of the market economy.”
Across England, this movement for community asset development is growing. Local leaders are taking on not one, but several, buildings – and turning them into long-term tools for economic justice, social infrastructure and ecological resilience.
So, what does it take to start the journey from one precarious lease, or no space at all, to a portfolio that transforms a neighbourhood?
1/ Build your partnership
The groundwork is relational. Trace back the origin stories of various community property portfolios and what do you find? Conversations. Coalitions. People coming together around at-risk community spaces, threatened venues and new developments. Or sharing experiences of racial and spatial injustice, or local responses to climate and housing pressures. You also find local authorities and developers wanting to do regeneration differently.
In Darnall Ward in Sheffield, home to a large migrant community, a coalition is taking form. A number of properties have sat empty or underused for years: from an old B&Q to a historic pub, as well as civic spaces. The neighbourhood is shaped by long-term underinvestment, industrial pollution and a critical shortage of social infrastructure.
“[This is] putting the health of the Global Majority at risk for the economic benefit of people who don’t live locally. I believe these communities are best placed to begin reopening the doors of high street shops and landmark buildings, with local people making decisions,” says Kisha Bradley from Sheffield-born social enterprise Brightbox.
Brightbox is convening a group of local residents and organisations with experience of spatial injustice to “decentralis[e] power and financial flow”. They’ll co-shape an alternative vision, collaborating with Sheffield City Council and select private asset owners.
With new core funding from the National Lottery Community Fund (as part of Platform Places’ pilot Local Property Partnerships programme), the group is negotiating its first two buildings and ensuring local underrepresented people have a seat at the table. Kisha says that the funding has been “transformational”: “We’re now able to think and act long-term.”
In Liverpool City Region, Kindred LCR commissioned research from University of Liverpool finding that 70% of the city region’s socially-trading organisations (STOs) cite a lack of secure, affordable space as a key barrier to viability or growth. In response, Kindred has been collectivising: convening STOs and making the case to the Combined Authority to shift funds to this sector. Through the Local Property Partnerships programme and in collaboration with St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council, they’ve secured, and are now activating, the “Street and a Half”: a row of spaces being reimagined with social impact and creative organisations, with a view to a 30-year lease. As Erika Rushton from Kindred puts it, “Clustering STOs means greater impact.”
2/ Secure funds
Even the strongest partnerships need money, and rarely does it arrive all at once. Funding tends to be a story of careful layering, with three broad areas:
(Visit the ‘Resources’ section of the Platform Places website for examples of funders)
Wandsworth Town Property Partnership began with a £10,000 grant from the local council, followed by £30,000 in further seed funding from Legal & General. By convening stakeholders over a joyful dinner and mapping who owns Wandsworth Town, they started co-creating a new vision and strategy for local regeneration. This early groundwork led to a National Lottery Community Fund grant, alongside Kindred and Brightbox.
b inspired shows what layered funding can achieve. Over time, their growing portfolio has made them largely self-sufficient, with around 60% of income coming from trading, space hire, and housing, enabling them to offer affordable space to small businesses and avoid hand-to-mouth grant cycles. Their trading company’s surplus flows back into the charity, which owns the buildings.
Getting governance right is vital in order to raise funds and hold the lease or freehold. Legal entity options range from CICs to CIOs to Community Benefit Societies, but a single entity can rarely hold all the risks, assets, and funding streams across multiple properties. Hastings Commons has developed a governance ‘stack’ of four different organisations working in consortium: a social enterprise company limited by shares, a charitable CBS, a registered charity and a subsidiary housing body. Expert advice is important to find the right model(s) for your organisation (look for pro bono support or funding to cover this).
3/ Negotiate your first space
Bedminster Works in South Bristol (another pilot Local Property Partnership) is mapping and matching a network of spaces with community organisations, enabling feasibility studies and securing high street homes for groups like Share Bristol: Library of Things. They’ve researched local ownership, selected strategic properties, and begun convening public and private landlords through different tactics. James Perrott from Bedminster Works notes that the area is experiencing “significant gentrification pressures", so acting quickly is crucial, “before buildings are lost to mainstream development.”
Planning obligations can help. Stour Trust partnered with a housing developer through a Section 106 (a planning condition requiring developers to contribute to community infrastructure) to secure their 999-year peppercorn lease, double the size of their original space. Wandsworth Town Property Partnership recently agreed a ten-year social value lease with a local developer (a template Heads of Terms is available on the Platform Places website).
At b inspired, the key was not just persuading the council to transfer assets but shaping the terms of that transfer: pushing back on clauses that banned subletting and insisting on longer leases to more easily unlock funding. CEO Angie explains that the process gets easier each time: “Now we’ve got that foundation of trust, councils and funders can see you’re serious.”
Portfolios unlock deeper change
Many communities have fought hard to save single buildings: a library, a pub, a swimming pool, a hall. These victories are vital. But zooming out to the scale of a neighbourhood or town, it becomes clear why portfolios matter.
For one, taking on multiple buildings brings economies of scale. Insurance, audits, repairs, staff salaries: all the unglamorous but essential costs are easier to bear when shared. Surpluses in one building offset liabilities in another. A broader asset base reassures councils with property to offload that community organisations can shoulder the risks.
Portfolios also deepen impact. Instead of isolated islands in a hostile commercial landscape, you start to see joined-up ecosystems: a youth hub connected to a café, a café whose customers feed into a health centre, a workspace whose tenants collaborate with social enterprises down the road.
Clusters of community buildings are also harder for power-holders to ignore or dismiss than individual ones. They signal: this place belongs to the people who live here, for the long term. They spark ideas and confidence in other community innovators. “Scaling brings resilience,” says Angie. “It brings deeper impact, with an interconnected network of spaces that support each other.”
The language and structure may vary. In many places, from Downham to Brighton & Hove, it’s a ‘Community Land Trust’; in Bradford, the People’s Property Portfolio talks about a ‘people’s land bank’; in Hastings, a ‘commons’. But the principle is the same: land and buildings are democratically-governed, for community benefit, not picked off by speculative capital.
Shifting the system – and peers supporting peers
Campaigns like We’re Right Here, backed by Power to Change and many others, have helped secure new devolution commitments, including a ‘Community Right to Buy’. Councils such as Sheffield are creating new Community Asset Transfer policies, acknowledging community leaders as essential partners in local regeneration.
Community property portfolios are replicating nationally through peer networks like the Mycelial Network for Community Asset Developers (CADs). With our ‘civic’ partner organisation Footwork Trust, Platform Places is bringing together early-stage CADs, to pool knowledge and enable resourced peer mentorship and visits. We’re also collectivising mature CADs to build power with funders and policy-makers: lobbying for long-term core funds and capital funds to purchase, retrofit and transform assets at neighbourhood scale.
Buildings as the means for locally-led neighbourhood transformation
When Angie looks back on 25 years of b inspired, she doesn’t start with valuations, lease lengths or floorplans or even the impressive 75,000 sq ft of space they steward. She talks about continuity and community, about local children growing up knowing there will still be a youth club in five years’ time, as well as a football pitch, library, and health centre that sees them as more than a number on a list. She talks about being able to imagine the next generation taking the reigns:
“After 25 years, we’re here to stay. I grew up in Braunstone, and hope future generations will ‘b(e) inspired’ to bring their own ideas to life. Having community stewardship of assets is crucial for that to happen.”
Visit platformplaces.com for more tips and mycelialnetwork.co.uk to find many more amazing community asset developers doing this work. Also, book yourself a place on Stir to Action’s upcoming ABCs workshop on developing a community property portfolio.
Lead image: Stour Trust's Oriba Hub Building © Stour Trust
Helena Cicmil is part of the founding team of Platform Places, where she leads on communications. Platform Places is a national cross-sector collaboration to unlock town centre buildings for amazing ideas that help us live affordably, sustainably and together.
