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regeneration

August 2024 by Fergus Trim

Broadoak Director John Seager shares his thoughts…

Unless you enjoy a particularly dry kind of holiday, it’s unlikely that when you visit a new place you’ll be struck by its commercial property sector.

Naturally as I’m walking around a city I’ll notice where new development is happening, or how busy its economic centre feels, but the thing which tells you about a place is its cultural offer. These are the places that engage and draw you in, they’re the places that matter.

In the opening pages of his book ‘This Must Be The Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better’, the author Shain Shapiro talks about how cities like Austin and Nashville decided to sell themselves to the world as ‘music cities’.

It’s true that both of those cities have long, rich histories with the music industry, but the initial conditions there weren’t necessarily any different to anywhere else – what they did was take it seriously and embed it in broader policymaking.

You could substitute out music for any cultural or creative industries as these are the things which give places their identities, make them somewhere worth living and worth investing in.

Images of buildings and areas with potential for regeneration
Examples of regeneration opportunity areas, Newcastle UK

Newcastle University and The RSA (The royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce) published research last year that underpins the investment case. It shows that creative industries are growing at 1.5x the rate of the wider economy, contributing £108 billion in GVA annually. And employment in these industries has grown at 5x the rate of the rest of the economy since 2011. Given those significant figures, it’s difficult to understand why the investment world is still treating the creative industries so tentatively.

Something I’m passionate about is understanding how investment in real estate can be truly impactful. So that the investment is used to deliver not just income return for investors, but actually help solve wider societal challenges.

When you broaden your aims out to include things like wellbeing, social value, inclusivity, job security or job creation as well as pure income, you get a much more exciting proposition, and you can start to think about the way assets are really being used.

Publicly owned land and buildings are a good place to start this, as their common ownership naturally takes in the “doing good” thought space. Local authorities often own multiple properties across their patches – everything from homes, to old schools, to leisure centres, libraries and offices. Many of those already serve important roles as civic and community hubs, but there’s also huge untapped potential in these assets.

By focusing investment and the use of existing assets, it’s possible for local authorities to create thriving communities of creative and cultural practitioners with spaces which suit their needs and encourage them to work together.

Creative Central Newcastle is the city’s emerging creative and cultural zone, centred around Clayton Street and extending across much of the city centre. It is a prime example of a combined approach of putting culture and community building at the heart of urban regeneration.

The sad fact is that many property owners have a narrow myopic approach to property ownership – get a tenant in and take the return with little or no thought to future value or heritage preservation. There’s very little aptitude within the investors or their advisors to look outside of that field to see where added values might lie – hence the continued existence of vacant or under used spaces and deteriorating buildings. And yet there are many creative and cultural organisations who could make fantastic, income producing use of these spaces.

I’ve been fortunate to work directly with various organisations in the creative sector. What’s particularly interesting is that, in working with these organisations, I’ve learnt so much about different approaches to tackling problems. They are used to spinning many plates to make their visions become reality. And their scope of vision tends to be much wider reaching.

Take New Writing North – who support the development of writing talent across the North, and have done for nearly 30 years. They are aiming to create a world-first Centre for Writing and Publishing in Newcastle. It has broad aims, including content creation across writing for books, film, TV and digital, enhancing people’s skills and employment prospects, tackling loneliness, bringing communities together, and shining a light on talent from the region so that Newcastle takes its place nationally as a centre of excellence for writing.

As an organisation that has grown their work and influence through working in partnership with others across a broad spectrum of industry, they are very focussed on drawing partners to their vision through strong storytelling. Being able to tell a story about what the centre will enable and change, has been fundamental to getting the region behind it as an idea. It’s underpinned by a sustainable business model that will also add value to the surrounding area.

I’ve also had the pleasure of working with Boho Arts as they explore how to create a new inclusive creative arts venue in Newcastle. They’ve relied on crowdfunding, grants and the generosity of specialists to get the ball rolling, but there’s huge potential for the space they’ve identified in a former wholesalers in the centre of the city.

What is so obvious is that both venues, once delivered, will bring so much to the city in terms of vitality and social economic value, they will be transformative for the areas around them, and yet we’ve had to work incredibly hard to unlock finances to make progress.

That shouldn’t be the case, and the argument for action is clear. The difficulty is that it requires huge collaboration and innovative thinking around how that investment can be funded, particularly how we can attract large scale private sector investment, to become a reality.

The search for funding shouldn’t come with the immediate thought of the need for philanthropy or cultural grants, Andy Haldane, CEO of The RSA, has been talking recently about creating Urban Wealth Funds. Something like that, delivered correctly for the North East could be a huge opportunity to unlock the potential of the region whilst also creating an investment fund that delivers financial and social returns for its citizens.

The RSA recently published a report on Northern England’s creative industries, which found the sector accounts for 3% of GVA in the North, compared to 10% in London and the South East.

Growing the sector’s contribution to just half that of London would result in a boost of £10 billion to the North’s economy annually.

It’s an internationally focused industry too, but one which is under-utilised.

In the North East, we have around 3% of total UK Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but just 1% of creative industry FDI.

Unlocking that potential will require us to do what Shain Shapiro talks about and consider “how music impacts building codes, zoning, education, climate action or citywide strategic planning, recruiting and retaining talent and workers, the granting of planning permission or tourism and marketing plans”.

These are all areas that, as property and place professionals, we should be the experts in. And we need to take it upon ourselves to be at the forefront, spotting the chance to achieve multiple aims whenever we can, and making sure we use our understanding of the stakeholders and places we work in to bring the right people together and unlock the potential.

Filed Under: Uncategorised Tagged With: culture, Newcastle, regeneration

May 2024 by Fergus Trim

Broadoak Director John Seager shares his thoughts…

The city of Newcastle is layered on top of itself.
Its history is there to see.
Sometimes you’ll turn a corner and there it is, peeking out between more modern buildings, and sometimes it still takes pride of place.

It’s a tribute to the city that the built icons of Newcastle can be both so old you count their age in millennia – as with the sections of Hadrian’s Wall still hidden amongst the city – and so young you can count on your hand the years they’ve been around.

I’m very lucky to have an office on the Newcastle Helix site, one of the younger icons of the city.

It’s one of the key projects I’m assisting with on behalf of the Newcastle Helix partnership of Newcastle University, Legal and General and Newcastle City Council, to look after the estate and help it thrive.

From the corner of the site you can see Newcastle’s medieval walls while standing next to a piece of the Scottish and Newcastle Breweries building which once occupied the land, complete with famous blue star.

The Helix buildings themselves are each visually striking.

There’s The Core – with its living wall – and the honeycomb-look of The Catalyst, or the burnt copper framework of The Lumen.

They look like a merging of ideas, nature and industry and they’re occupied by organisations who are merging ideas and bridging divides too – between research and business, between public and private sector.

The 24-acre site was conceived as an innovation district where all the different engines of progress can sit next to each other.

There are university buildings, offices inhabited by all sizes of business – both locally grown and international – and there are community and event spaces for everyone to meet in.

Helix’s stated mission is to help us all live better lives, and it’s a natural home for three National Innovation Centres – one for Data, another for Ageing and the final one for Rural Enterprise.

Very soon, the site will also actually be home for hundreds of people, creating energy-efficient, low carbon modern homes for residents of the city – putting the better lives mission into practice.

Like all projects that look to do things differently, Helix is a place for experimentation – we host several urban innovation projects and research taking place here has begun to have global benefits.

We can see the economic and social benefits happening already – job concentration on the site is up 40%, commercial space concentration and commercial rents are both up, and we’ve seen overall economic activity and general health improve in the catchment around the site too.

Helix is very much part of the city, both in those outputs and in its physical location, with one edge against Newcastle University Business School, St James’ Park and looking down towards Central Station.

But at the site’s other edge is Arthur’s Hill.

It is one of the most diverse parts of the city, with nearly 40% of the population born outside the UK.

But it is also one of the most deprived parts of the city, and in 2019, it was ranked amongst the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods in the country.

It’s important for Helix to face effectively in both directions. It must be welcoming, and draw the city in, acting as a fully inclusive place that attracts talent, inspires and creates opportunity for anyone from the region through the education, research or career opportunities here.

The ultimate outcome must be a place where there is a thriving ecosystem of opportunity.

It should be a place where the public sector and large institutional investors enable academic research, commercialisation of ideas, and the development of skills and talent.

It should acknowledge the past, embrace the present and define the future, all in one place, in one innovation district.

Achieving that means careful and continued engagement and building of the community on the site, and a different approach to asset management – one that the Helix team have plenty of experience in.

It’s not enough to fill all the space and make sure income is generated, because there’s a need to build connections too, and ensure the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and the bigger mission is being served too.

We see our role as much as an enabler of that mission as fulfilling the traditional roles of an asset manager in making sure spaces are fit for purpose and tenants are happy.

Our local knowledge means we can see where Newcastle Helix sits within the future narrative of the region, and we can see where others can feed into it.

The community engagement work on the site tells the stories emanating from there – the research stories, the business stories and the people stories. We’ve drafted in the huge expertise of journalist Charlie Charlton and film maker Chris Taylor into unearthing those stories, inviting others to write and share their own tales. In the past 10 months we’ve hosted events with over 1000 people on site – each event aimed at attracting a broad audience to engage in discussions about important topics from climate change to finding a work-life balance as a parent.

We’ve also hosted more than 50 different tours from regional/national and international study tours to diplomatic visits. Attendees might be coming here to find out what’s happening in the region, or to be exposed to new thinking, or they might be schools and their pupils discovering the career opportunities on their very doorstep.

The feedback and engagement from our events, films and socials has been overwhelming. The important thing is that those conversations have continued to foster collaborations on and off-site.

Our LinkedIn posts alone have engaged with an international audience of more than a quarter of a million people – and counting. To achieve this level of visibility, discussion and feedback within the sector is inspiring. When you get to that sort of scale the level of collaborative innovation is inexhaustible and it really makes me feel that we can achieve anything that we focus all that resource on.

The lesson is that buildings alone are not always enough – when they come with a purpose, and when they gather community around them, they can create a thriving place.

Filed Under: Uncategorised Tagged With: impact, innovation, Newcastle, Newcastle Helix, regeneration

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