Shift: “I really had quite long bit of my life struggling with just the way that the system is. It’s just really nice to see an alternative and people gaining strength in that as well. I think it’s really important, and I’m just so happy that It’s there happening.”
In this interview Shift speaks to Helen and Martyn from Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust about community owned housing, affordable and sustainable housing, co-ops. As part of the project ‘Who Owns Brighton?’ Martyn and Helen highlight some of the community led research and workshops they are running as part of the project which enable the local community to be better informed and involved in decisions around housing and development.
Please see transcript below:
[00:00:01.590] – Shift
Welcome, listeners. I am Shift. And today we’re going to be having a discussion about Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust, the Who owns Brighton research project, and just the housing issues in general. I have recently started becoming more interested in how land has become a commodity rather than a resource that a community can share. I found out about the Brighton & Hove Community Trust and attended an action day who owns Brighton Research Project, where I met Helen and Martin, who are with us today.
[00:00:39.530] – Helen
Hello. Hi. Hi.
[00:00:41.340] – Shift
Firstly, I was just going to say thank you for joining. Us.
[00:00:45.850] – Martyn
Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for inviting us.
[00:00:48.040] – Shift
Yeah, it’s good that you’re open for an interview. I was just going to say, if I ask any questions you’re not feel comfortable with answering, that’s totally fine. Just say, pass. As I said, I’ve not prepared any of the questions in advance, guys, for these guys to answer, so it’s straight off the cuff. Yeah, you both seem very confident on the day, and I felt like you knew your stuff. On the other hand, if I say anything that’s not correct, please just feel free to correct me because I’m new to this. If I say anything that’s not correct, just let me know. Yes. First of all, would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your job roles? Cool.
[00:01:36.950] – Martyn
Yeah. My name’s Martin, as you said. Thanks for having us along. I am involved in the Who Owns Brighton project as one of the project leads, along with Helen and someone called Anca and someone called Becker. Anca is from the University of Sussex and Becker is from the University of Brighton. And together we’re the project team on Who Owns Brighton, which I think we’re going to be talking a bit more later. I used to also, I’m a member of the Community Land Trust. It’s a membership organisation. I also used to be on the board of the Community Land Trust, but I stepped down when… Well, just before I got a job, my first proper job. So I worked for the council. Oh. Yeah. Interesting. And actually I work in the Regenerations Department, and my role is to look for opportunities, sites to bring forward for affordable housing, essentially. Oh, lovely. So Okay. The council has its own direct delivery programmes. So it builds council housing, essentially, and mostly social rent, but some affordable rent as well. And it also has a joint venture. It’s called with Hyde Housing Association, where they build out affordable housing as well.
[00:02:47.890] – Martyn
And they’ve been some of the larger projects that have happened over the city.
[00:02:52.760] – Shift
What’s capital housing, sorry?
[00:02:54.800] – Martyn
Sorry. You say capital housing? No. Affordable housing.
[00:02:58.310] – Shift
Okay.
[00:02:58.970] – Martyn
So it’s either… No, it’s fine. So the JV builds out either… There’s a 50% shared ownership and 50% social rent. And then the council builds its own homes as well from New Homes for Neighbourhoods programme, which are generally either social rent or affordable rent, depending on viability. So I work in the council, but also I’m a member of Housing Co-ops. So the way that I met Helen, it’s going to introduce yourself in a minute, was through Housing Co-ops, through an organisation called Chibba, which is a voluntary organisation of Housing Co-ops in the city that get together, just to get together once a month to talk about housing co-ops. And as a new housing co-op, it’s somewhere where you could go to get advice from people that had done it already because it’s a bit of a daunting task starting a new, and it’s forming an organisation and all of that. So that’s where I met Helen. So my history throughout Brighton is of being in housing co-ops. And then through developing… So I’m part of Bunker Housing Co-op, and we’re building our own affordable housing in the city on small council sites. So there’s It’s a winding path through housing in the city.
[00:04:02.900] – Martyn
And then I got a temporary job in the council. So it was one year. Now it’s been two years working there. So I’m understanding how it works on both sides. So that was quite an interesting It’s a interesting thing to do.
[00:04:17.480] – Shift
And they’ve given you an extra year, by the sounds of it. They have.
[00:04:19.800] – Shift
So that’s great yeah.
[00:04:21.550] – Martyn
Well, as we know, I think the new government has said one of their priorities is building a million and a half new homes.
[00:04:28.930] – Shift
Yeah, How are you- how are you going to do that?
[00:04:30.580] – Martyn
Well, exactly. In the city -, also where. We’re quite land constrained in the city. Land is expensive, as you mentioned. It’s commodified. And also things are expensive now. Cost of living crisis cuts across everyone, right? And it’s now much more expensive to build anything, especially whether you’re a Co-op or the council, if you want to provide affordable rent because you’re doing it. If you want to build well, it costs more money. And if you want to charge less rent, you’ve got less money coming in. So it’s a more difficult circle to square. I’m seeing it on both sides now. It’s quite interesting.
[00:05:06.850] – Shift
That’s great. Lovely. Thank you.
[00:05:10.000] – Helen
Cool. I’m Helen. I’ll start from the housing co-ops as that was where I started this journey in housing in my 20s when Brighton was becoming more unaffordable. I was working as a part-time youth worker, and I didn’t have very much money. Some of my friends were in housing co-ops. I’ll explain what housing co-op is because it’s like the co-op It’s like a shop in a way. It’s like an organisation of business that’s run and owned by its members but applied to housing. One of the things that it means, so it’s houses, be those single houses or groups of houses across cities that are collectively owned as the cooperative. As a member of the cooperative, you are both a tenant and the landlord of your property. I joined the housing coop as a more affordable place to live, but it’s also somewhere where you get involved in I’m running that organisation and making sure you’re the landlord as well. You have to maintain the homes and keep it going as a business. I lived in… There’s a housing co-up in the city called Two Peers, which has 78 homes across the city and different shared houses and flats.
[00:06:15.140] – Helen
It’s the oldest co-op. I think it’s the oldest co-op in the city, isn’t it? I lived there for a few years, and then me and some friends set up the co-op I live in now, which is a small LGBTQ plus, just a shared house. We set that up because we wanted to take home. It’s a way of taking homes out of private ownership. We saw a city that was getting more expensive. We were like, People are being pushed out. We knew that if we created a co-op, and we got some funding to do it from the government, from their empty Homes programme, if we created a co-op and we ran that well, it would provide affordable housing, not just for us, but for generations to come.
[00:06:49.320] – Shift
I love it.
[00:06:49.500] – Helen
Yeah, really great. Out of an alternative to that private ownership. Also a different way of owning it. We’re not individual owners. We own and run it together. But it means that we have… It’s totally It’s very different from being in rented accommodation where you don’t necessarily have very much control and provide security, but also we make decisions about what to do, so we can decorate how we want and we run the budget.
[00:07:11.870] – Helen
If we need a new kitchen.
[00:07:13.400] – Shift
It’s nice to also have it as for that particular group of people as well.
[00:07:16.990] – Helen
Exactly.
[00:07:17.600] – Shift
Because I don’t think that was there before, was it?
[00:07:20.130] – Helen
No, exactly. Set that up. It’s our 10-year anniversary this year. I’ve been really involved in Co-ops. I’m now a member with Martin in Bunker. We’re building new homes in the city that are individual units. Then the Community Land Trust. Housing Co-ops is one form of what we get terms as community-led housing. Community Land Trusts are another way of taking land into exactly what you were saying, like common and collective ownership and holding it in common collective or community ownership in perpetuity. Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust was established formerly in 2017, and it intended to support new groups, new co-ops or other co-housing groups, other forms of community-led housing, and to act as an umbrella in the city because there’s already different forms of… There’s already a bit of a history of that form of housing. I, like Martin, joined as a director initially, then got a job, and that was raising investment, which we used by a property that we leased to a student house in Co-op, so students It’s running their own homes, ran the hub, which was supporting groups to set up and run for a couple of years.
[00:08:39.140] – Helen
Then the land trust grew quite quickly, and then the funding went away, so it became much smaller. It became a voluntary run organisation. I’m now the director. We still do work about supporting co-ops and forms of community-led housing in the city. But one of the big projects that we’re working on is this Who Owns Brighton. The idea of that… Co-ops Community Land Trust are all about different forms of ownership, but there’s this whole picture of what’s happening in the city, isn’t there? This whole picture of development, of building, of construction. That’s the really big picture. That’s what’s going on everywhere. We really started from that question that I think, we really started from that question of that development, who’s it for? What’s being built and who’s it working for? Who’s it city for? That It was mine. Both lots of paths and lots of paths, I think, for both Martin and I through, but totally voluntary stuff, through work-based stuff, lots of crosses and overlaps in that wider picture of what alternative projects can do, how housing could look differently if you run it in ways like housing co-ops or community land trust, but also what is the situation on the ground at the moment?
[00:09:56.200] – Helen
Because sometimes it feels so big, doesn’t it? It’s so massive. It’s Like, oh-
[00:10:00.740] – Shift
Very overwhelming.
[00:10:01.790] – Shift
Very overwhelming. So it’s like we spend a lot of time building alternatives, I think, don’t we? But we also spend a lot of time thinking about like this. I think you have to know the system to try and I want to say break the system, but maybe we’ll say challenge.
[00:10:14.900] – Shift
Work with, maybe.
[00:10:15.680] – Helen
Work with, work against.
[00:10:17.620] – Shift
Work against.
[00:10:18.190] – Helen
Work somewhere. Just help somehow. I think challenge is probably good.
[00:10:26.010] – Shift
What exactly is your job role? What’s your actual job role? How are you-
[00:10:32.190] – Helen
My job role. Actually, the Who Wends Brighton project, we got some funding from a great organisation called the Civic Power Fund, who support community organising and building power. There’s been a little bit of funding coming through that that has been used to pay us. My actual job role, my main job is different to that, and it’s with an organisation called the Confederation of Cooperative Housing. There’s the again. I coordinate a nationwide programme that is about building resident engagement in social housing. It’s a programme that’s designed to inform social housing residents after some of the horrific, horrific tragedies that there have been in social housing to ensure residents across the country are informed of their rights. It hold their landlords to account because… Okay. Yeah. That’s it.
[00:11:19.100] – Shift
Is that within an organisation?
[00:11:22.010] – Helen
Yeah. That organisation is called the Confederation of Co-operative Housing. Martyn’s the chair of that organisation. Another crossover. Again, that organisation is the Trade Body for Housing Co-ops. But 4 Million Homes, which is the name of the programme that I manage, is it’s like how resident empowerment in social housing works. Because one of the things about housing co-ops is that because you’re the tenants and the landlords, it’s all about engagement and empowerment. You’re running your own homes, you’re running your own organisations, etc. It’s taking some of those principles. Some of those principles have existed in social housing. There’s loads of amazing residents panels and residents’ organisations, very active tenants, but trying to broaden that more.
[00:12:01.880] – Martyn
I think it does bring out the difference between housing co-ups because a lot of the largest housing co-ups throughout the country are, in fact, registered providers. Basically, they provide social housing. They come under this. They are part of those four million homes. Whereas a lot of the co-ops in the city of Brighton, where two peers is different, that is an art, a registered provider, isn’t it? So it operates under the same regulation. But a lot of the co-ops are small individual homes that are just collectively owned and run as a alternative family situation in a way. But the bigger co-ops out there, they are providing. You see that generally, tenant satisfaction is better. Outcomes are much better because people have control over their housing. They get together and they collectively make these decisions. So they’re looking after themselves and each other at the same time. I think it demonstrates a bit. There hasn’t been a very rigorous bit of research done for a while, but the last time there was, the Co-op scored really high in terms of how people felt secure, safe, listened to, engaged, all of that stuff. So my route to come to Co-ops is a similar one to Helen.
[00:13:13.170] – Martyn
So basically, I was living in private rent at the foundation, self-employed. My partner was self-employed, so we couldn’t basically afford to buy a home, even if we wanted to. We couldn’t afford to buy one, couldn’t get a mortgage, but couldn’t afford it because it’s too expensive. Luckily, had been living in the same place for a long time, but at any moment, we could get two months notice, and we knew that we’d have to leave the city because we wouldn’t be able to afford the rent in a new place or the deposit and all the other crazy stuff that’s going on at the moment. So we looked for an alternative, and that’s how we came across co-ops.
[00:13:45.320] – Shift
So that sounds great. I mean, you’ve pretty much answered a lot of my questions without me even answering, asking them. We can really talk. Yeah, which is a good thing. I was also thinking about the environment because I always think about the environment when it comes to housing, because obviously you’ve got the environment already there. I’m really concerned about animals, really, and species, and just the interaction between the relationship, I should say, between us and the natural world. I really feel that we need to incorporate that within the housing. It’s not just about housing. It’s almost like we really need to have that natural space for mental well-being.
[00:14:32.860] – Helen
It’s really interesting you saying that because during COVID, one of the projects that the CLT was involved in was looking at people’s… It was that first one of the first times in maybe living memory, not for individual people, but collectively, that we were in our homes. One of the things we did was we reached out amongst the membership and out wider to see what people’s experiences of the lockdown were. It referenced national frameworks as well. But experiences of lockdown really depended on what your home situation was like, and how many people you had in your homes, and what the noise was. Really, really critically, which is linking into what you said, That access to open space and into nature and things. If people had access to a garden or could get out and walk somewhere quite easily, it really like their experience of lockdown was very different to people who were up in flat. We can think about that. I don’t mind dense places. I quite like densification of things. But I think when you dentify, you also really have to think about the open spaces that are also available to people. I think that’s really important.
[00:15:43.300] – Helen
I think it’s a time as well if we link into national structures that people are… There’s a lot in the government, isn’t there? About building homes and building more affordable homes. I’m really happy. I’m always really happy when people say we’re building especially more social homes. That’s what we need, like those social rented homes, and that’s important. But I think there’s not so much. I think we were talking about this the other day. There’s not so much at the moment about the importance of the spaces and how they link in terms of what the spaces are available. Because it’s not just about the housing, it’s about what about the areas and cities and communities? How do we make those? How do we make those places? And placemaking is one of those really annoying things that people talk about, and it’s a bit of a word, but obviously, the how the communities, neighbourhood, cities that people live in, it’s bigger than just the houses. Yeah, absolutely. House building is one of the biggest impacts in terms of the climate and what it’s producing. In terms of housing and poor housing, some of the stock in the UK, the houses we’re building at Bunker are beautiful, super energy-efficient, aren’t they, Martyn?
[00:16:58.220] – Helen
Really high quality. But what that impact of that poor stock. We’ve got some of the worst housing stock in Europe. There’s all of these multitude of the questions that comes into, do you build more things or do you occupy the spaces that are already there, which is a really good question. Lots of big questions that link into who we are and what our homes are individually and for our families and for our communities, but also how they link into bigger neighbourhoods and cities and the environment and the planet and Ido that in a way that, I don’t know, pays attention to all of those different levels. I think when you’re involved in housing, like you said, it’s quite overwhelming, also because you’re thinking about all of those things.
[00:17:44.980] – Shift
That’s what I like about it. I think I read something on the website about a bit of area in Coldean that had chalk. Was it chalk? Chalk area? How did that come? Has that happened?
[00:18:02.070] – Martyn
No, it hasn’t happened.
[00:18:03.310] – Shift
It hasn’t happened? No. Okay. I was going to ask you about that.
[00:18:08.360] – Martyn
Well, I guess it’s on a fundamental level. There is a tension. I mean, obviously, we’re developing something that’s got a building on it already, which is what’s called Brownfield development. Okay.
[00:18:19.240] – Shift
Did it have something like that? I wasn’t sure.
[00:18:20.700] – Martyn
No, that didn’t. But I mean, when you’re looking, like I said before, we are land constrained, right? We’re also lucky to be surrounded by fantastic National Park, for example. There’s lots of actual parks in Brighton. There’s lots of green spaces. We’ve got the beach. You can’t get much more open than that. I mean, we can’t build on the sea. I mean, it’s always going to be there. It was interesting in lockdown as well, but there was one place where people did go to the beach because it was somewhere that was for everyone. You could do that. You could really see a difference there. I think that there is that tension because we do need to build more homes. The Coldean site that you’re I was talking about was a site that came up from something. There’s various ways that the city identifies, that’s the council identifies potential sites for development. There’s an ongoing history.
[00:19:09.880] – Martyn
There’s something called the City Plan. Part of that was something called the Urban Fringe Assessment, where basically Consultants looked at all the different spaces there are within the city boundary because the South Danes National Park actually comes right into the city. It comes into the Hollingbury Golf Course as part of the South Downs National Park. We’re quite constrained and looked at the remaining and where would be suitable for housing. Some sites were identified. They were called urban fringe sites. Then they were looked at in terms of what were the ecological sensitivity, what are the constraints, are there ecological, ecological, different things. Then the report was produced and areas were identified where houses could be potentially built that wouldn’t do undue damage to or risk the aquifers or anything like that. There were two sites. No, there were more actually, that came out in Coldean. One has been built out by the joint venture. That’s now… What was that site? Which one was that, Coldean, anyway? I can’t remember.
[00:20:09.930] – Helen
21ab or C.
[00:20:10.690] – Martyn
I think it was Site 21. That is now affordable housing, brand new affordable housing, half social rent, half shared ownership. It’s done now and people have moved in and really happy with it. Next to that was a smaller site called Site 21A, which is the site I think you’re talking about. So one of the things that the Community Land Trust did, and still does actually, works as a conduit for the council. So the council were basically looking for sites that could be potentially used by community-led housing groups to build homes. And this site came through, I think it was identified actually by a group of people before, wasn’t it? But it officially became a potential site for community-led housing. And so the urban fringe assessment also gives a indicative number of how many homes it thinks it could have. And it’s generally pretty low because they’re based on big three bedroom double drive properties. Actually, like most of the developments, we don’t have those big homes of gardens or anything anymore, especially not if you’re a community-led housing developer. Maybe if you’re building a million pound homes for people that want two cars or whatever.
[00:21:27.010] – Martyn
But anyway, I think it was a small number, like 12 15 or something like that. And so that then came forward, and then there was an local person involved who was an architect and looked at it. And then there was some money that came from the government and the community led. The Community Land Trust got involved, and it went through something called to the Urban Design Panel that then basically said, oh, no, actually, you could get 80 homes or something like that on here. So there’s a really big difference, obviously, between 15 and 80. And it then got stuck, didn’t it? In a bit of a- I think it shows because even within, we talk about community-led housing.
[00:22:08.010] – Helen
In the UK, very specifically, it’s quite a small sector, isn’t it? It’s quite small. It’s not loads of us. But obviously, we have different approaches. We had different organisations, quite a local neighbourhood-based organisation in the CLT, who both had quite different aspirations for the site. One who had for a much smaller, much more like… It wasn’t much more… Just a much smaller A smaller scheme, 12 to whatever houses, and then the idea of a project that would maybe provide 55 to 60 homes that would meet more of the housing need. But it weren’t within… A lot of those questions that are coming out at the moment that are about, should you be building on this land? And if so, what should you build it for? If there’s an area and there’s a site there, is it for that local neighbourhood or should it be the city for a while? And that site got caught in all of that. At the same time, it’s quite a big site, although small compared to the next one. There were different areas that had different ecological value. So there was some chalk grassland. Really interested with chalk grassland because it was only the process of doing some work on the site that revealed that it was chalk grassland.
[00:23:19.030] – Helen
There’s lots of interesting things that I think just bring up some of those questions that you have around-
[00:23:26.490] – Shift
Has it been preserved?
[00:23:28.840] – Helen
Nothing’s happened yet.
[00:23:30.930] – Helen
No. Yeah, nothing’s happened. The site’s still allocated for housing. Obviously, the big thing about what Labour is saying at the moment, that’s exactly the site that they’re talking. When Angela Rayner is talking about the targets are going to come back in, the target is going to have to come back in. Some of this what they’re calling grey belt land, but also the green belt land. Some of these sites, what we’ve seen in Brighton recently, I would argue, is reluctance of the council as the councillors to deal with some of those complicated urban fringe sites because they are complicated. They raise this quite strong, there’s some quite strong community opposition to them. But I think in a world in which those targets are going to come back, people are going to need to be building homes. That dialogue about that site is going to… I think we have to be able to engage in conversations in the city that say we all identify that there is a need for certainly more affordable housing. We all established that there’s a need for more affordable housing, places that think primary schools are being shut down because families are having to move out the city because there aren’t these bigger homes.
[00:24:40.070] – Helen
All of those things, all of those things that we know are going on. Then there’s some difficult conversations, but there’s also a lot of people who are like, Well, I know that affordable housing is really, really important, but I can’t be here, here, or here. Then there’s a question, isn’t there? That is like, Okay, how do we have those conversations that say, Okay, but where? I guess that’s what Who owns Brighton is about. It’s It’s about saying, How can we collectively… Is there a way that we collectively can be more involved in decisions that shape our city and not just the neighbourhoods that are local to us, but the look at that city-wide level?
[00:25:14.360] – Martyn
Yeah. I think it’s not… I guess the thing is, I think the urban fringe, if all of those sites were built out, that’s only 7% of the urban fringe. It’s still massive. It’s not like anyone wants to concrete. Is it? Yeah. It’s only 7% of the urban fringe is allocated for housing. That’s such an interesting. It’s a tiny amount. Obviously, that feels like a lot if it’s right next to where you are, but none of it’s using all of it up. I mean, to be honest, even if Site 21A was built out, you’ve got a bridge across, you’ve got the whole of Stammer Park. In Australia, Stammer Park. And down. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you’ve got to literally walk another five minutes and you’re there. It’s not like the plan is to concrete over. But I do think there are questions around what we do and who does it. There are mechanisms in place.
[00:25:58.880] – Shift
And incorporating the environment within In the ground?
[00:26:00.900] – Martyn
Yeah, I mean, there are. Yeah, but I mean, again- Would be nice? Yeah, you can. I mean, there are certain mechanisms that are there. There’s something called biodiversity net gain that is now a thing. Every development has to demonstrate that it basically leaves more. It does Biodiversity has to be richer than before the development started, which is basically meaning that some sites aren’t able to be developed because basically the cost of doing that is prohibitive. It becomes not viable to do it. There are of mechanisms, but I think it’s also around how you’re doing it. I think this is where who owns Brighton comes in, because actually there’s development going on all the time, but it’s largely done in an extractive manner. That’s not about building places for people. It’s about making money profit for shareholders.
[00:26:46.550] – Shift
You’re not doing what you’re saying you’re going to do. There’s that, too.
[00:26:49.940] – Martyn
But I mean, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that it’s not being built for the people of Brighton. It’s being built to make money for the people who are investing in that. It’s a money-making process. It’s building commodities. Every bit of that process is about generating revenue for people that have no connection to the city. The global finance doesn’t care about you or me or Helen or what happens in our town. It’s not about that. And I think that’s the big difference is who owns Brighton was set up to say, look, if we look at one example, one development and ask who did it, who profited, who got, the idea when it started off, it was going to be 100% affordable housing. Then it ended up being arguably none. What were the forces at play here? How does it work? But also not just in the way of… Because actually, at the moment, we can stop things. It’s like 21A didn’t happen. There are other developments. Look at the Gasworks recently, the strong local opposition. And that’s good. It’s good that we as citizens can stop things. But really, what we want to say is, how could we be involved in getting things to happen that we want to happen?
[00:28:01.290] – Helen
How can we shape things?
[00:28:02.560] – Shift
How can we shape things, yeah.
[00:28:04.860] – Shift
And in a way that moves. I’m really keen to move beyond very local focus. I think local focus is I think people are doing amazing work in small neighbourhoods. But I think that looking like citywide. So looking at us as a citizens of a city, not just the neighbourhoods where we’re in, because I think it becomes really, they’re not in my backyard. It really speaks to that. It really speaks to that, doesn’t it? It’s just like, oh, it can’t be here. And there’s a lot about neighbourhoods being able to shape the neighbourhoods that they’re in. I think that’s really, really important. I think that’s really important. But I think when we look at housing, when we look at housing, we have to look at the wider. We have to look across it. That’s one of the really interesting things about what’s come out of Who owns Brighton, isn’t it? We looked at Circus Street as a specific development that happened, and we chose that because it was an interesting it’s a interesting site for a variety of reasons. But what’s being built at Circus Street in the same way as we’re sitting on London Road in the Just Life hub here, this road has got student housing.
[00:29:12.920] – Helen
There’s one just opposite, there’s one like 50 metres down, isn’t it?
[00:29:16.870] – Shift
And one over there and all the.
[00:29:18.910] – Helen
Those are all… Those housing is being run by the same massive companies. They’re following the same model. People are just rolling things out. If you go to Leeds or if you go to Liverpool or you see exactly the same buildings, not necessarily built out by the same construction company, but funded by the same people making money for the same shareholders. It’s not just a commodity. It’s also like this… What’s the word for it? When something’s just replicated everywhere? There’s no response to just being just totally standardised. And everywhere.
[00:30:00.930] – Shift
In your opinion, do we need all these? Do we need all the student accommodation? Because some people might say, well, we need student accommodation.
[00:30:09.790] – Martyn
Do we need any more? I think we’ve got a lot now, right?
[00:30:12.290] – Shift
Yeah. I mean, all this Lewis Road is all student as well, isn’t it?
[00:30:15.190] – Martyn
All this purpose purpose-built student accommodation, yeah. But I guess the thing is, the reason why it’s happening as well is because it was a way of basically generating. If you’ve earned a piece of land, where you want to make some money, then purpose built student accommodation is a good way of doing it because essentially it’s got a higher value. You don’t have to do affordable housing, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. It’s a good investment.
[00:30:38.660] – Helen
Health and safety, things are a little bit different.
[00:30:40.630] – Martyn
It’s the same with like co-living or some of the other novel tenures that are happening at the moment. The reason they’re getting built is because that’s where the money is or build to rent. I guess it’s that do we need it? I mean, there is an argument, and we’ve talked about this, that basically building purpose-built student accommodation means that a lot of the other houses of multiple occupation or HMOs within the city where students live now will go back to becoming family homes. Okay. Yeah. Is that true? We don’t know.
[00:31:11.950] – Helen
I would start as well from the point, do we need student? We’ve got two universities in the city, and those universities are great. Students, young people are fantastic. They’re part of what makes Brighton what it is. Do they need places to live? Yeah, totally. They do need places to live. Do they need the places to live? These incredibly expensive places to live that are just not really about the students and in fact, are so expensive that lots of students from low income families, et cetera, can’t afford them. They’re attracting a certain type of student. I would argue that students definitely need somewhere to live. There has been a problem in communities of the larger family homes being converted to houses of multiple occupation, which have meant people have moved out. That is a problem. Whether building these means those go back to family homes, that’s always the argument. I don’t think it’s clear yet. I would say, yeah, we need to find a way that students who are part of our city are part of this process of defining what the city is. I absolutely do not think that these things that are being built are the answer to the questions.
[00:32:21.740] – Helen
I don’t think it’s about… I don’t think that’s about what the students… I don’t think it’s about what the students need. I don’t really think it’s about what the city needs, although sometimes it’s positive at that. I think it’s about they are making those things. They’re making 13.5% turnover for their investors. That’s this massive, massive- Say that again. 13.5%. The student housing that we look at, Circa Street, which we’re looking at who owns Brighton, Kaplan living, 13.5% return to its investors. That is such a high return. They are just ways. Basically, if you boil it down, they’re Like their ways of making money off young people who just want to study, which makes me feel a bit ill, to be perfectly honest. Living grants, if you look at the rent of them compared to, for example, what I like, I don’t think it’s called a maintenance allowance anymore. Like a student loan is. The student loan doesn’t even cover the cost of the rent. It’s not okay. It’s not okay. You shouldn’t have that because you just you want to study. I studied a degree at university. You shouldn’t. It impacts who’s able to access it.
[00:33:27.900] – Shift
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, part of Who owns Brighton, that’s part of the research, right? Yeah. You’ve gathered all this research. I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit more about that, what else you found and what are you going to do with the research? How is it going to help? What’s your plan?
[00:33:44.500] – Martyn
So shall we talk a little bit about the project, what we did? Yeah, that’d be good. And then about what we found. So like Helen said, the idea came… It had been bubbling around for a while, and different threads to it, really. One of which came through a different campaign that we did at the Community Land Trust called Push Back Brighton, which was basically… There’s a film called Push, which is great if anyone wants to watch it.
[00:34:10.480] – Shift
Yeah, watch it. I haven’t found it yet. You got to pay for it.
[00:34:13.610] – Martyn
Yeah, you have. It’s not that much, I don’t think. No, it’s not that much. But also someone can pay for it and then you can share it. I didn’t say that, but obviously, you can do that. But anyway, it’s a really interesting film, and it followed around who was Lianin Fahhi, who was the UN repertor for housing at the time. It follows her around as she went around different parts of the world, looking at the financialisation of housing, the commodification of housing, and what impact that was having on different people, what forces were at work, and how people were pushing back against that. So it’s a very interesting film anyway, because it talks about how that financialisation works, who are the big players, why are they doing it, what does it mean to the places where it’s happening, which is everywhere. And then off the back of that, they created something called The Shift, which is an organisation that tried to change the conversation around housing. Because at the moment, for example, it’s very much talked about in terms of need. So housing is allocated within the city, especially affordable housing in terms of need.
[00:35:17.300] – Martyn
Whereas this organisation was looking at redefining it in terms of a right. Housing should be a right. It is a right. It’s written into every country’s in our… We accept that United Nations resolution that housing is good, affordable, secure, safe. Housing is the right of every citizen, but it’s not talked about. It’s a very interesting thing of how if you turn that around and start talking about it in terms of rights, and then they talk about how different legal organisations and organisations could come together to do it. It’s brilliant as well because there’s examples in Barcelona of and the organisation that she was part of, then became mayor, but they were basically changing. How people are changing things around the world and different mayors got involved in Berlin. It was very interesting. On a Brighton level, we did something called Pushback Brighton, where we got people who are… Because I think the thing is, it’s not just about people who are in housing, precarity, fighting for their own housing. What we need to make a change is solidarity. There’s people out there who own their own homes, who are part of it, who think that everyone should have a right to a home.
[00:36:25.890] – Martyn
It’s not about us and them. It’s about us as a city working together to say, this isn’t right. This is how it is. Things can be different, and this is an alternative. Yeah, lovely. What we did is we had estate agent signs that said push back Brighton, and they had different things on them that people had told us about their housing. They can’t afford to pay the rent or it’s this or it’s that. People had them outside their house, didn’t they? Okay. Then we created a walking trail and people went around. That fed into a bit about who owns Brighton, didn’t it, Helen?
[00:37:00.240] – Helen
Yeah. Out of that, we finished it in a people’s assembly. We finished it in a people’s assembly where we were like, Right, we’ve done this campaign, so what are some of the ideas of where we want to go next? That further look into what’s happening in terms of housing, that concept of the financialisaton of housing was something that then just bubbled around. I think it bubbled around. Pushback Brighton was in like 2001, I think. It bubbled around, not 2001, 2021, 20 years later. The idea, shall I say a little bit about what we did with the project? It bubbled around for ages and we pushed it back and forward. Then we applied for different bits of funding. Sometimes you just need that little bit of funding to kickstart something, right? Going along. We got some funding, as I said, from this organisation, the Civic Power Fund. The idea was to The strap line for the project is to explore what’s being built in the city, who it’s for, and how we as citizens can more actively participate in the process. But we wanted to do that from a research basis to start with. So that idea that, again, to challenge a problem, you need to know about it and what happens when you gather a group of people to look in-depth at something that’s happening in the city.
[00:38:26.000] – Helen
We decided to focus on Circus Street, which is a I’ll just… If anyone’s listening, who doesn’t know it. It’s a development that’s happened recently. I think it opened in November 2022. In the Edward Street part of the city, it’s where the old municipal market was that was built in 1937 and ran as a market. I can’t remember when it ran as a market. It ran as a market for lots of years and then that building was still there. It had been allocated for affordable, for social rented housing that the council were going to build out back in 1998, and that didn’t happen. Then it was one of the sites that was identified on the local plan. It was owned, so we’re really interested, I think. To start with, we’re really interested in land that’s owned by the council, that idea of public land, because if it’s public land, we can say that’s all our land. It’s public land, so it belongs to all of us. What’s happening there? It was owned by the council and Brighton University. It was what’s called a public-private partnership, where the council worked with Brighton University and identified a developer.
[00:39:38.860] – Helen
That happened in 2007, I think. This project took quite a long time because we obviously had the financial crash in between, which had a massive impact on what happened with development and regeneration afterwards. In quite an interest, that’s a whole another thing in quite an interesting way, I think. It was always going to be to provide housing. There’s a dance venue that’s part of it. There’s now, which wasn’t there at the start, 463 student venues. There’s 162 flats, of which 28 are categorised as affordable. Their shared ownership. Shared ownership. Yeah, their shared ownership, which brings so many… It’s such a big issue in the media at the moment in terms of whether shared ownership Well, affordable shared ownership, whether it’s shared, whether it’s ownership or whether it’s affordable, are the three questions that there are about that. 463 student bedrooms, student rooms. There was going to be an academic building, but at some point the university pulled out and there’s a dance venue that South East Dance run. It was interesting for lots of reasons. The council owned it. It was this public-private partnership quite recently built. What we wanted to do was gather people to to find out more about that.
[00:41:03.070] – Helen
We launched the project in January. We had an online launch event. What we tried to do within that was we tried to situate it within this concept of the financialisation of housing. There’s lots of ways you can look at development, what’s being built. But we wanted to look at it as that housing having become more of a commodity and what that means in terms of where the money is going, who’s benefiting from it, but also the impact that has on people’s everyday lives. We launched the project. We ran a series of three workshops that focused on the people, the process, and the money. We brought people for days at a time to look at if you wanted to find out about this development from the perspective of the people, what skills would you need to know, what would you go and do. The process was looking at planning from when sites are identified through to when they’re granting planning and development. The money looked at who’s owning the companies. Also, some of those things, lots of those questions about what is affordability and what is viability. When people say, Well, it’s not viable to build affordable homes, what do they mean?
[00:42:04.360] – Helen
We did three days of training. It was amazing. Some of them were pretty technical, right?
[00:42:09.590] – Martyn
Some of the things- We didn’t deliver those. We did little bits of them, but what we did is we brought in speakers, didn’t we? We were experts. For the people when we had someone who was actually part of the Community Land Trust before, Dot, who was a community organiser who came in and basically talks about how do you design the listening campaign? What does it mean? What are you looking for? Basically, Basically, the group there looked at, so what do we want to know? What are the questions we want to ask? Who do you ask? How do you ask it? How do you do that safely for everybody? Then for the process one, we had a planner and an architect talking about the planning side of it. And then we had someone who was a very active member of the council, was a local councillor who used to be on the Housing Committee and Policy Resources, who spoke about how the decision making process works inside the council. And then for the money one, we had Helen. And we had Becker, who basically showed how to use these great software tools to follow the money.
[00:43:08.960] – Martyn
You can look at what company is owned by who, and then you can start making connections and following that money back. And basically from Circus Street to Wall Street, it’s Wall Street. It’s essentially global finance based in Wall Street that is extracting all the profit. That’s where it’s going. I mean, lots of people get paid along the way. Some of them quite well, I’m sure. But the actual lump of profit, the unearned profit, let’s say, is extracted and taken into the global money sphere. It’s gone. It’s never to be seen again. Sorry, I interrupted you too much. No, no, no. But I think the idea feel is to say what happens if us as ordinary citizens… So we obviously know bits of this stuff already, but it wasn’t just about us teaching and other people learning as well. If we all come together and we do these workshops together and we find some people might be interested in the money side of it, the people side of it, or the process side of it. But what happens if we start learning this and discussing this and start picking it apart? Then suddenly, some people are learning so many things.
[00:44:12.520] – Martyn
When we had the initial day, didn’t we? It was so interesting. It was interesting to go from that initial day that we had to the action day that we had that you came along at and how it was already such a mixed group of people, wasn’t it? People were there who knew nothing, people were there who knew something, people come because they wanted to know more, people came because they were angry, people came because they were curing I’m curious. People came for all these different reasons. But it was incredible to watch that knowledge build and the anger and the understanding and the what are we going to do about this as people went through the process. It went on. Then groups formed around those different subjects and went off and then did research, didn’t they? Sometimes on their own, sometimes with us, because we got involved in the groups as well. Obviously, we’re housing nerds, however you want to put it. It was such an amazing learning experience for everyone, wasn’t it? I think. Then we got to the Action Day where people who had done that research then presented that to the wider group.
[00:45:08.100] – Martyn
So not everyone that came to all the workshops got involved in all the research part of it. Then we all came together at the end, didn’t we? The people who had done that research presented it to the wider group. Then everyone in the wider group got together to form… Well, it’s going to be five posters. It’s basically five posters saying, summarise the process and what people found out. But But then the final poster was the other half of the day, which is what next? What do people want to do next? What are the actions that are going to continue after this? And there were lots of them, weren’t there? We basically made it a participatory process, so everyone had to narrow it down, because you can’t end up with 100 things to do, and no one’s going to do any of them. It was basically like, we’ll narrow it down, narrow it down, then you’ve got to put dots next to one that you want to do, because obviously, it’s very easy to say these things should be done. But It’s about us collectively coming together and doing those. That’s the important thing about this.
[00:46:05.540] – Martyn
Because essentially, we don’t want to repeat in research what happens in housing. Sometimes research is an extractive process. It comes in, it says, we want to find out what these people think, and it just comes in and it takes that information and it goes off into academia and that exists over there. But this was not about that. It was about us as citizens gaining that information, feeling that together. What do we want together to take this forward. It just really took in its own legs, didn’t it?
[00:46:36.500] – Helen
Yeah, definitely. I think seeing the other thing that happened, so groups went off and did the research, but we also connected using- we also set up a WhatsApp group that was intended just to be a tool for the group to set up, but actually it’s become this real source of people sharing information that’s going on locally and nationally and talking about that. So exactly, been really amazing to see. And we’ve been surprised, I think as well. We’ve been surprised by which bits of tech… because we really had, like I said, we had no idea we were like, we’re really interested in this. Are other people going to be interested? Are people going to come to the workshops? Are people going to do the research? We know that people care, but sometimes you don’t know how the approach is going to work. But yeah, it feels amazingly exciting and some really, I think, interesting and quite different courses of action. There’s one of the things that came out of Circle Street, right next to the development, there’s a row, there’s a lot of some of the older council housing in the city. One of the groups of people that we wanted to meet with, we spoke, so we did a lot of going out and speaking to people on the streets, and we’re listening to people.
[00:47:59.060] – Helen
We spoke to people who lived in the flat and spoke to some of the students. We also went and spoke to some of the people from the mill in the flat. A lot about that development, both the process of the development, how it was picked, but also the impact it’s had there, I think has had quite negative impacts on them. They’re feeling quite upset and angry about the consequences of it and how the process works. I think one of the actions that’s come out is to do more work around how we can… whether there’s a way that we can support them. Quite practical, very people-based actions. But then some of the actions are around how can we disseminate these results and how can we feed them into wider thinking about the issues, and how can we link them up to national and international networks? Because these things that are happening, the same way you see that building being built in Leeds. These are processes that are happening all over the world. They look slightly different in different places, but they also look very similar in different places. How do we join in with those.
[00:49:03.270] – Shift
I was a little bit concerned about the shared ownership because apparently, they’re not able to afford the service charges. I was wondering what’s going to happen to these people because they’re stuck, aren’t they? Apparently, it was supposed to be a scheme to bring them up onto the ladder so they can afford their own homes. But it seems like the research seems to come about that that’s not actually happening and it’s not actually going to be affordable for them. And it’s almost like they’re stuck because they can’t sell a flat, but then they can’t afford the fees because apparently they’ve 170% increase or something ridiculous. I’m like, are these people are going to become homeless? How is this? What’s going to happen?
[00:49:59.960] – Helen
I mean, in terms of… Yeah, I guess it’s one of the difficulties. In a way, shared ownership has its individual things. But obviously, at the moment, with all mortgages, that’s one of the things that we have at the moment, isn’t it? Anyone who’s in debt at the moment, everyone who’s in debt is really struggling. There are homeowners who have mortgages. It impacts. It was a lot of the impact of right to buy that was never necessarily said. You had a secure council home that you were paying a cheap rent on and you bought it. If you bought it with a mortgage and then the mortgage went up, people who had really secure homes through the right to buy became homeless through buying their own homes. There is a lot of there is about those individual people. I know that it’s one of the other groups that I think we’d like to work with. Again, it’s something shared ownership is really on the agenda at the moment. A lot of people are saying it. There’s a lot of news reports that are talking about these massive increases in service charges. Actually on the council’s shared ownership that they work in partnership with Hyde, they have a means of capping those service charges a little bit.
[00:51:13.090] – Helen
There are ways that it can be It can be done. There are ways that it can be done that is fair. All costs have gone up at the moment, so there’s that side. I think the share donors did some work with the MP at the time and trying to meet with Savils, who are the managing agent to get more clarity on the service charges. Because as a shared owner, the service charges, without being to go into… The service charges that you get charged are meant to reflect the actual costs of delivering those services. Services have gone up massively. So electricity bills have gone up massively. So if you’re heating hallways of buildings, they will have gone up. There are arguments about whether it was ever made clear to start with when those flats were sold, what would happen them if costs rose. So with those share donors, I would say it’s a really difficult situation, as with many who are facing the same things. I think they’re doing good work, it seems, from what we’ve talked about banding together and trying to meet and challenge Savils. Savils, who are the managing agent, have to provide information on the service charges.
[00:52:20.550] – Helen
More widely, there’s a national discussion and a national consultation that’s going on around share ownership as a venue in some of these huge floors that have been pinpointed around it. I think there’s a need to link up those conversations. Hopefully, that’s something we’re hoping as another group that we can get back in touch with and link in. But at the Home and incredibly difficult. Your heart really hurts. It’s like what primary school teachers, people not necessarily on very high income who have been told that they’re going to have an affordable home and all of a sudden, it’s not. In this country, we sold ownership. Ownership is seen as the ultimate in what homes Labour are still talking about that at the moment. Englishman’s Homes, his Castle, all of that. But it’s really Push, but there are forms of ownership that are less good. I think that the way shared ownership has been developed as… It’s called a housing product, has been developed as a housing product is really problematic and it needs to change. But I would argue that does need to change. I would argue we need to change our whole approach to housing in the city.
[00:53:42.240] – Helen
Not in the city. I would say we need to change our whole approach to housing in the country, and we need to really stop pushing this concept of individual homeownership as being the top of the ladder and everything else not being there. Actually, if I look at a lot of the countries where I think housing is done loads better, and that’s one of the things we can get hope from. There are places where housing is… there are examples here. There are places around the country where housing is done differently, it’s done better. But for me, that challenging, that it should be all about encouraging everybody to buy their own homes, that would be one of the fundamental things that I would.
[00:54:19.980] – Martyn
I think your right better in all ways. Better for the environment, better for the people that live there, better for everyone that lives and works. That’s the sound. I think one of the Well, Vienna is a very good example of that. There’s a lot more cooperative homes people live in. It’s just done at scale. And I think at scale, then it’s possible to do things. And that stays affordable forever. And people are happy to live there their whole life. It’s not a stepping stone. And I think that’s the same with… We had for years, there was a campaign to basically call it social housing. It’s council housing. Make it a dirty word. Make it something that’s just there for the most in need it’s a stepping stone, but it’s not what you want. What you want is to own your own home. That’s what makes you a stakeholder, and that’s what makes you a member of society, a meaningful member of society. That’s where you get your sense of well-being. Your core sense of well-being comes from is the fact that you’re secure in your housing, whereas actually that’s something that could be divided by good, well-managed council housing, can be done through cooperative housing, and it’s affordable.
[00:55:26.810] – Martyn
You know no one’s going to take it away. You can afford to live there. You can save money, you can study, you can do other things. It’s that, isn’t it? Because at the moment, the percentage that people who can afford… I mean, people can’t even afford to live anywhere. We’ve got an enormous problem with people who are living on the street, but also who are living on people’s sofas , who are living in… People are being… And it’s more and more and more every day it happens. The cost of living crisis is affecting everyone, isn’t it? It’s pushing everyone to the brink. And something’s got to change because otherwise, it’s a disaster. And it’s horrible. It’s horrible that people don’t feel that. And we’ve got to change our mindset, I think, about it’s not housing, it’s not a commodity. It’s about homes. It’s about people having a home, having somewhere-
[00:56:11.660] – Shift
I find this culture is quite isolating as well.
[00:56:16.080] – Shift
It’s almost like owning your own home is nice, but it’s quite isolating. There isn’t any community going on there. But then you got the other side of it. Some people are like, you don’t want your neighbours to know you it’s your own business. You don’t want neighbours to know your business. I find that the community in this country is a bit lacking, in my opinion.
[00:56:42.400] – Helen
I think a lot of people I think a lot of people would share that. I think there’s different ways of how those communities form and what they look like and what they they form around and what they should form around. But certainly, some of the people in there within Who owns Brighton would say, I mean, there’s a lot of focus in there. There’s a lot of focus within England on the individual and certainly on the individual in your nuclear units, that idea of you and your immediate family and them being your ties. That doesn’t mean that that’s absent from… No. That doesn’t mean that family that isn’t important in other places, but there are different…
[00:57:33.340] – Martyn
It’s a difficult one as well, isn’t it? Because community is one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think we’re all members of lots of different communities. We have communities that are of taste or like or of music or of location or whatever. But I think what we’re talking about here is neighbourhoods, aren’t we? We’re talking about a city as a larger… It’s a community. We are all part of a community. Everyone that lives and works and visits infact, everyone that’s in the city is a part of that community. Within that community or loads of other communities, but there are also neighbourhoods. There are geographical locations. There are areas where people live. I think there’s… How What makes a good neighbourhood and what makes a good neighbourhood and what makes it not such a good neighbourhood? I think if we’re looking at what’s happening in the city, how can development actually produce good results in the development? Also, how can it improve the neighbourhood that it’s in? The language is there for that. There’s the idea of social value. There are things that the lip service is paid to these things, but does it actually ever do that?
[00:58:43.350] – Martyn
And what it would look like if you had meaningful consultation, if we worked together and looked at neighbourhoods, if we were all a little bit less stressed about spending 70 to 80 % of our income on our housing and everything being so precarious, we might be more up for talking to our neighbours. Yeah, exactly. I think if you take away that precarity, take away that stress, take away all of that stuff. And also then-
[00:59:05.790] – Shift
Mental wellbeing.
[00:59:06.820] – Martyn
Yeah, and have things where cohesion happens. But also, Brighton is a very transient city as well. We have people passing through and going, and yet there are people who are born and live here. But you can come to Brighton, you can spend 20 years here and never meet anyone that was born here. It depends what circles you move in. And if you don’t talk to your neighbours and stuff. And I think that a good example of how How co-op, for example. So when we built our first homes, our pilot scheme up on the Pankhurst estate, we took the community engagement thing. Every developer has to do a community engagement, which normally means you turn up at a place and you say, We’re going to do this like it or lump it.
[00:59:46.150] – Martyn
It’s an obligation. They have to do it. They’re legally required to do it for planning. But with community-led housing, it’s slightly different. We actually did. We were there ourselves. We weren’t a developer. We were, but we weren’t a developer coming in saying, We’re going to build this, and then we think these people are going to live here. We were the people who were going to live there, saying we’re coming to live here, and we’re going to do this. And so I’m like, Oh, are you going to do… When people found out we weren’t a developer, we were a thing. Actually, we moved in. We knew loads of people. It was like we weren’t just suddenly being parachuted in something. I think that’s different. Now I know the name, no nod or whatever. Some we have a chat with, some relationships have developed, some have stayed the same. But it didn’t feel like you were suddenly You were just taking something that comes off the shelf. It’s a commodity. It’s produced. I’ll buy one of those, please. Or I’m given one of those.
[01:00:37.480] – Shift
That whole approach is just so much nicer, isn’t it?
[01:00:40.580] – Martyn
Yeah. I think it’s what does it mean for people to actually work together and look at that look at the city as a whole, look at neighbourhoods individually, have that approach.
[01:00:48.820] – Martyn
I wonder, I think with Circus Street as an example and that talking to policymakers, what can that do? Because I think that on the one hand, Circus Street is seen as a success. It won awards, right? And it’s still talked about as a successful development. But when you go there and you hang out there yourself, and we did stuff that were just brilliant listening, it was amazing. But you talk to the people and it’s like, is it all of those things that it said it was going to be? Is it a vibrant new quarter? Has it brought all of this investment, jobs, businesses, all of that stuff? It doesn’t seem like it.
[01:01:22.890] – Shift
So where’s the accountability?
[01:01:25.180] – Helen
I think that’s one of the really interesting questions and one of the things that came out.
[01:01:32.390] – Helen
What does happen afterwards? What tends to happen when, and it’s one of the things that came out of the research, what tends to happen when a development is being conceived and it’s going through planning and the community engagement, whatever that is, is happening. There’s a lot of promises. It talks about, so there were so many things that were said about circus street, exactly that, vibrant new quarter, bring this many jobs, this much money into the city, food growing things. Everybody would get a free bike. There were all of these things, but a lot about the economic wealth and the cultural wealth and the social wealth that it would generate to the city, the amount of homes it would… Actually, what happens afterwards is that stops. I didn’t think there’s any real… There’s some awards and things, but there’s no real question of, well, did it do what it promised? The reason I think that is so relevant is both as a way to reflect on circus, but also because there are other sites we’re constrained, but there are loads of other developments happening. If this one isn’t working, and to be honest, to me, I’m looking at most things and they’re all looking very similar.
[01:02:40.900] – Helen
If this one isn’t working, well, should we not build exactly the same on every site? Where is the accountability? What is the process? How could we be involved? That’s one of the ideas that came out. How could we involve in doing some assessment of developments afterwards that really look at that and say, what has worked? What has What is it doing? What isn’t it? And then feed that into future decisions. So you create that loop because some things, and that’s one of the things that was raised to us, it was just like, well, that’s happened. It’s done. It’s built. And it’s just like, yeah, Sure. But how do we… can we take learning? Can we take learning? That concept that you might just be able to learn from them, so you do them better and differently. I guess that’s it. It’s like how you’re How you’re building more people to come along and say. I guess one of the places we’d like to be is in those conversations, but with not just us. I don’t think it’s just about us, but with the council, with policymakers, with developers at some point because I’m really interested.
[01:03:47.080] – Helen
I’m really interested to have that conversation about, do you think it’s like, tell me you’ve said this. When you listen to, it was the people who built it, Richard Upton is the director. When you listen to him speak, he’s passionate about it. He’s passionate. He’s like, the places that I build are the most important. As developers, we have this commitment. It’s the biggest commitment to build these places that are linked to history, have meaning, et cetera. I walk into the space that he’s company with others created, and I’m just like, this doesn’t feel like anything to me. Or anywhere. It doesn’t feel like anything or anywhere, any place. Yeah, both anywhere and also somehow ubiquitous I could just sleep everywhere. I’m really hoping that we can have that conversation someday that just says, so we stand in a place and we have all talked to people. We have both talked to people within that place. He prides himself on the research. We have talked to people within that place. We have looked into the history and things and our experiences are so different in what’s going on.
[01:04:51.690] – Martyn
That is very interesting because to say that Circa Street didn’t work, it did work, but who did it work for? It worked in terms of you were a shareholder in one of the companies that financed that development. It works, right? It seemingly worked for this person you mentioned, and I think it would be good to hear from them. Definitely. We’d really like to hear from them. But if we look at it, if we present this, and I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? If we say, look, this is happening here. Is this what’s happening over there? There are other big developments going on over the city, and are they going to be the same? Are they present it as something that brings something to the city, but the reality is that it extracts everything. These are the fundamental things. And how can we, as a city, that’s the citizens and the council, all of us together, because it’s our city – How can we do? What could if we do it differently? What would that look like and how would it happen? And what would we… That’s exciting.
[01:05:52.460] – Shift
This is the aim of the project, isn’t it? Say that you can actually have research and you can actually say, Well, we’ve done this and this is what we’ve seen. Let’s have a discussion. I just want to say thank you for all your… It’s just amazing. It’s an amazing project. I’m really happy you’re doing it. Thank you for your work. I just think it’s amazing. I’d like to get more involved, and I’m sure a lot of people who are listening would also like to get more involved. How can people get more involved if they wanted to?
[01:06:26.180] – Helen
Okay, totally. Anyone who wants to get more involved, I think the first stop is probably to jump onto the Community Land Trust, Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust, bhclt.org.uk. There’s information about the project. You can become a member of the land trust. It’s just a pound. Then you’ve become part of the collective. It’s got 850 members, and it’s got the project contact details so people can just get in touch. Everybody is welcome to join us and to get involved.
[01:06:59.460] – Martyn
Yeah, Yeah, we’ll be holding. The thing is, like we said, we’re going to go into dissemination now. We’re waiting for these. We’ve got a wonderful artist who’s creating these posters for us. Then we’re going to go out there and we’re going to talk about what we did, what we found, and what the next steps are. And we want to grow this project, so we want more people to be involved. We want people to come along with ideas of where we can go with it. I think there’s going to be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the future. But yeah, Helen’s right. I think go to the Community Land Trust website, become a pay a pound, sign up. Then as we do things, we’ll say this is happening here, this is we’re going to do that there. Come along. Yeah, lovely.
[01:07:42.270] – Helen
The more the merrier.
[01:07:43.910] – Martyn
Yeah.
[01:07:45.320] – Shift
I just this interview has been amazing. I mean, the amount of information and the discussion is really rich. Thank you.
[01:07:53.780] – Martyn
Yeah, thank you very much.
[01:07:55.330] – Shift
I’m really excited about this. I really had quite long bit of my life struggling with just the way that the system is. It’s just really nice to see an alternative and people gaining strength in that as well. I think it’s really important, and I’m just so happy that It’s there happening. I just like to thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For coming. Thank you. So everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I will put information in the boxes below and links, and I’ll do a little write-up as well so that you can understand more and have access to more information and where you want to go next. Thank you very much. You all have a nice day. Thanks. Bye. Bye.