INTRODUCTION

My business is called the SPACE Organisation...and I blush somewhat to confess that 'SPACE' is an acronym for the Society for the Promotion of Artistic and Creative Enterprise - which is, roughly speaking, what we try to do.

SPACE now runs eleven projects - including the Custard Factory in Birmingham - which, altogether, provide workspace, warmth and comfort for about 1,000 small start-up companies. Actually, I’m not sure it's right to call them companies because quite a lot of them consist of just one or two people. In fact the total number of people at work under the SPACE umbrella is not much more than 2,000. But even so, I guess that's quite a lot of jobs for a small private organisation to create, especially when you compare it with the sad statistics of the much heralded and highly spun £3.5 billion New Deal and Welfare to Work programmes!

In their different ways, all the SPACE projects are based upon the principle of creating coherent ‘working communities’ - and then helping to release and nurture the tremendous energy that always seem to flow from them in order to bring about urban revitalisation. At the same time, most of the SPACE projects involve the recycling of old buildings. So to begin with, this chapter runs through some general 'how to do it' principles. Then it recounts the story of the conception, gestation and birth of a few typical SPACE projects. But to repeat - the purpose of every one of them is to bring about regeneration through the creation of 'working communities' of one sort or another.

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THE SEVEN STEPS

Broadly speaking, there seem to be seven crucial steps to all the SPACE projects. However, before running through them, it is worth issuing a warning about the way in which the accumulation of uncontrolled professional fees can sink all but the largest of tight budget projects. Each one of the seven crucial steps is simple enough, but they all demand a degree of specialist knowledge. So beward of spending too much time in smoke-filled rooms taking advice from solicitors, planners, surveyors, architects, bankers, marketing people, accountants and tax experts, interior designers, politicians, graphic designers, energy consultants etc...for each of the hundreds of hours spent they will be hitting you for something between £20 and £200 an hour. And not many of these specialists speak the same language. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that many of them know so much about so little that they end up knowing everything about nothing - which is a fat lot of use to you when you are trying hard to work within what is usually an almost impossible tight budget and an equally tight programme.

In practice, to get things done well and economically, of course you need lean and mean access to the best advice. But you also need a really good generalist to coordinate this advice - a 'jack of all trades' who can talk to specialists with confidence and make decisions on the run. As things stand, there is no formal training for the would-be urban regeneration generalist. The obvious professional to take on that role is the architect and I believe that the sooner architects are trained to do so, the better it will be for the whole area of regeneration. Meanshile, you must glean what you can, inadequate though it be, from the few people like me who are already active in the field.

But let us return to the seven basic steps necessary to mount the project. These are: the initial concept or Big Idea; finding the money; getting the permissions; doing the design; construction; marketing; and last, but not least, manageing the project.

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THE BIG IDEA

The first step is the big idea - your vision of the project-to-be, half closing your eyes and imagining and thinking through what it is that you’re going to achieve. Usually the big idea comes first and then you find the place to do it. Occasionally it’s the other way round: you find a cheap neglected building, sometimes old, sometimes less old, but always potentially interesting and atmospheric, and you figure out ‘how can I bring this place back to life and fill it with interesting people and activities?’

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FINDING THE MONEY

Finding the money is usually the most difficult step. To get to first base you need to define your goals, complete your designs and costings and establish some sort of business plan. Bankers tend to ask inconvenient questions like, ‘What market research have you done?’. Very often with an innovative project you are in uncharted waters. This means that you are asking people questions about a concept or commodity of which they may know nothing. Sometimes you may have tobluff your way through while you work on instinct.

Most of the time you have to borrow the money from financial institutions of one sort or another - sometimes supplemented by public funds or grants. The trouble is that most banks dislike mixed-use development almost as much as they dislike old buildings, short leases and start up businesses - in fact all the necessary ingredients in the sort of urban revitalisation that makes a difference. They can take an awful lot of persuading.

The public funding process, when it is needed, can be just as bad – endless and impenetrable bureaucratic rituals lasting for months on end, form-filling, artificial criteria and, worst of all, the seemingly inevitable need for the new breed of public funding consultants. They can charge up to 1,000 a day, and I believe that they often make public funding inaccessible to the local groups and other people who might make the best use of it. And of course linked to this are the millions of pounds which have been wasted on absurd feasibility studies for doomed lottery projects. 'Oh to be a big name architect now the lottery is here...' Thankfully (but sadly for the big name architects) this particular fat fee-feeding frenzy has almost come to an end.

One of the most important things that the government could do to encourage urban regeneration is to lubricate the pathways to public funding. It would certainly result in much more efficient and effective targeting. And, bu the way of a spin-off, it would give private sector lenders more confidence in the funding of regeneration projects.

GETTING THE PERMISSIONS

Once you have found the building and lined up the money, you have to get planning permission and all the other approvals for a project which does not always chime with the local plan for the area. All of this has to happen more or less simultaneously. It's touch but not as tough as it used to be. Since the 1960's and the 70's most planning authorities have emerged from the dark age doctrines of Corbusian zoning and all the rest of the Utopian post war ideals. These days they do tend to recognise some of the virtues of dense and diverse mixed-use inner city development and of a flexible collaborative approach to regeneration. In fact, at SPACE we have enjoyed a remarkably energetic and creative relationship with planners, particularly in Birmingham. I like to think that received planning wisdom now takes into account the destructive absurdities of the planning strategies of the recent past.

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DOING THE DESIGN

Now, you have reached the stage of detailed design and the pattern of eventual management is very much in mind - and so are the costings. Given the fact that regeneration projects frequently involve the reconstruction of existing buildings, you also have to strike a balance between the logistical advantages of settling every single design detail upfront and the alternative advantages of keeping things flexible and being able to exploit the possibilities that often emerge when you open up an old structure. You will certainly need a highly accomplished, experienced and VERSATILE architect to help you sustain this balancing act. Maybe you do it yourself; at any rate it needs to be someone who can think on their feet. You will also need an excellent and thoroughly thought-through and well documented relationship with an intelligent contractor who will not try to make a financial killing on every design variation. Again, this is a huge subject and one that I can hardly begin to cover here. One thing I can tell you though – on no account assume that all will be well if you merely take the conventional route and employ a squad of highly qualified specialist professionals and leave the whole thing to them. You must delegate only with great shrewdness and sensitivity. And you must be able to hold your own with the 'Arthur Daleys' of the building trade. That is something they don't teach you in architecture school - but they should!

CONSTRUCTION

With most regeneration projects the cost of construction is critical. You will almost certainly be working in marginal areas with low rents. But construction costs will be not much less than they are in the West End of London, so cost engineering becomes a crucial factor. How can you make every penny look like a pound? It's not a good idea to rely entirely on your quantity surveyor. If you are the architect, and especially if you are the generalist, you must be highly cost conscious - not so much 'hands-on' as 'fingers-on'. You must know today’s price of '2 by 2' timber and plasterboard and all the other materials you specify. You must know how many doors a good 'chippy' should hang in a day. You must make the fullest use of recycled and second-hand materials. You must know if there's some cheap copper tubing available at the bankrupt plumbers' merchant on the other side of town.

Of course, very few good design architects deign to know such things. Its not dignified. But if you are to prosper in the gritty brown mud of the urban regeneration game you must cast your professional dignity to the winds, and do so without a second thought.

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MARKETING

So far, so good. You've refurbished your building. Now you have to fill it - and appropriate marketing is crucially important. How do you do it? In my experience, established estate agents are the last people to market projects like the Custard Factory. There, as the reconstruction works of phase one drew to a close, we were on a roll. So we decided to eschew the agents and do the marketing ourselves. We wrote, designed and published an elaborate and fulsome manifesto, singing our own praises. It cost thousands but by the time it arrived from the printers we had let every square inch of the 80,000 square feet project simply by word of mouth. Somehow the spirit of the Custard Factory had broadcast itself in the right way. And I had the distinct feeling that people positively enjoyed by-passing the conventional routes to finding the spaces they wanted. Perhaps there are lessons to be learnt from that experience. Perhaps people who want to become part of a 'working community' tend not to look for it in estate agents' windows.

But marketing doesn't stop at the launch – with all of our projects to date it has gained momentum as the emphasis has moved from marketing the project itself to marketing the people that work within it. At SPACE we are shameless advocates of what we do - we can never resist the chance of haranguing any audience that cares to listen about the power and the pleasure of working communally.

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MANAGEMENT

Now you have a project on your hands. You've done your marketing, allocated the space, it's full of interesting people doing interesting things. And you have to run it - to plan the management. In an ideal world there will be continuity of responsibility - the development of the project will merge seemlesslyl into the process of managing it. In a very real sense, if you've done it in the right way, you will be midwife to the birth of a lusty working community. In the early months you will attempt to nurture and also to guide the anarchic infant. But as people get to know each other and as they develop all sorts of fertile relationships, the project - like any new born creature - will begin to establish a spirit, an identity and a direction of its own. Meanwhile, however, you must engender and maintain discipline and structure of a high degree - but you must do so without a smidgen of the appearance of bureaucracy. It is a tall order indeed.

Those are the seven characteristic steps leading to the creation of a working community in the inner city. You might think that all this seven crucial step business is rather formulaic and, in a way, I suppose, it is. But you must remember that flexibility within the formula will be the key to your success. After all, you will be dealing with and needing to please large numbers of creative and independent people who by definition dislike formulae and bureaucracy.

So, now let us move on to see how things work in the real world by looking at five of the SPACE projects. It’s all anecdota, but instructive to see what actually happens as you go through the process of identifying the projects, trying to make them happen and finally bringing them to maturity. If nothing else you will get an insight into the fevered mind of one entrepreneur.

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ALFIES ANTIQUE MARKET

I suppose Alfies Antique Market is a particularly unlikely example of how the establishment of a working community can lead to urban revitalisation - all the more so because this is a working community of antique dealers. But antique dealers are people too. And Alfies cost not a penny of public money. Do I will tell you the story anyway.

Alfies occupies an ex-department store – in fact a rather beguilingly tatty terrace of Victorian and 1930s buildings at the eastern end of Church Street in Marylebone, north-west London. In recent years Church Street and the area around it has changed quite a lot. Until the early 1950’s a fairly coherent traditional working class community lived there but then it all began to go downhill. The commercial and shopping focus of the area has always been Church Street itself, which is enlivened by a 150-year-old Saturday street market and a large number of local shops which line both sides of the street.

In 1976, with money borrowed from a high street bank, the SPACE Organisation took over the derelict Jordans' premises. The idea was a modest one - to turn the terrace of buildings into a no-nonsense unpretentious antique market with very low overheads and a no nonsense unpretentious name – Alfies. It worked like a dream - and within a matter of weeks nearly one hundred antique dealers had been recruited to the project. To begin with we used only the ground floor and opened on market day Saturdays, but we were so successful that within a couple of years Alfies had grown to fill all four floors of the building and expanded trade to five days a week. Since then we have built two major extensions to accommodate the demand for space and quite a few of the antique dealers who started off with a stall in our market have moved into the once disused neighbouring shops. Now the eastern half of Church Street has become one of the best enclaves for antiques and collectibles in London. Moreover, since Alfies was launched, the whole immediate area has become revitalised in a very interesting, unyuppified and organic manner. Old buildings have been renovated, all sorts of small businesses have sprung up, there is now a healthily diverse mix of people living and working in the area - and many people think that Alfies Antique Market has made an important contribution to the process. Naturally, I like to think they are right.

Just to round off the story of Alfies, I must point out that among the 200 or so dealers there is a sprinkling of tenants from the neighbouring Lisson Green estate, some of whom have made the transition from being unemployed and on the dole to becoming self-sufficient antique dealers - following a trade which they seem to enjoy.

All in all, Alfies represents a splendid, albeit rather unusual, example of the way in which the birth of a dynamic working community can make a real difference to a run-down inner city neighbourhood.

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DanceWorks occupies a rather awkwardly shaped but elegant listed 19th century building in central London. In 1981 it lay empty and derelict and the owners had no ideas of what to do with it; they approached me, knowing that I had had some experience of dealing with ‘difficult’ buildings. I looked at the building, I liked it, but initially I had no ideas for it either. The planners said that office use was out of the question, nor was it right for housing.

In the end my idea for the building was influenced by my young daughter Rosie’s passion for dance and movement.

DanceWorks opened to a full house on April Fool’s Day in 1982 and has been there, buzzing with energy, ever since - not that it's ever made much of a profit, I'm sorry to say. Nevertheless, from the beginning Danceworks has provided accommodation for more than thirty teachers of dance and movement, and subsequently another eighteen or so healers and teachers of natural therapies. A strong working community has built up. We give over 100 dance and movement classes a week, hold lots of professional auditions and rehearsals and provide complementary medicine for a large and growing number of people. In fact DanceWorks has become something of an icon in the world of dance. The project is sustained by a flourishing working community of firty or fifty self-employed teachers, healers and choreographers - and enjoyed by upwards of 2,000 members.

In the first two or three years of running DanceWorks I came to know a lot of people working in television and film, people who came to rehearse shows and hold auditions. In the 1980s Channel 4 was beginning to act more as a publisher than a producer. The company was encouraging commissioned work from outside, in contrast to the BBC and other major television companies who produce much of their own material. This led to a proliferation of small production companies as people working for the BBC or ITV decided to set up on their own. This phenomenon leads me to the next project I want to discuss - Canalot Production Studios.

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CANALOT

The mid-1980s saw hundreds of little production companies and facility houses hunting for somewhere to work. But, unhappily, it was also the time of the great property boom and there was very little affordable space in London's Covent Garden or Soho or Camden Town - the places where such enterprises traditionally operate. As a result these little companies were reduced to setting up in Potters Bar, Morden, Brixton and 'Metroland' - and all sorts of exotic places in the London suburbs!

It seemed clear to me from the people I was talking to that a major focus was needed for their activities - a large building with a good feeling, not too far from the West End, where a large number of small film and TV enterprises could work. In fact another working community. I began to look around for such a building but it wasn’t easy. In the end I found it purely by chance.

One misty spring morning in 1985 I was jogging along the Grand Union Canal towpath in North Kensington when I was confronted by a small and aggressive man with two even more aggressive Rottweilers. They went for me. I had two options: one was to jump into the canal, which was filthy; the other was to scramble over the towpath wall—which I managed to do, the dogs snapping at my heels. I found myself in a vast and derelict factory. A tramp approached me and with great courtesy demanded to know what I was doing. We fell into a Pinteresque but friendly conversation. and he ended up giving me a conducted tour of his 70,000 square feet home. He was probably the first of London's loft dwellers - 10 years ahead of all the trendies who now pay a fortune to live in old factories. That morning I knew that I had found the building I was looking for. It was to become Canalot Production Studios.

In those days, North Kensington was a designated ‘Taskforce Area’, of which there were perhaps twenty up and down the country. These were the urban areas which were considered to be the most deprived, socially and economically, in the country. And in 1985, the 15 acre Kensal Basin part of North Kensington, between the canal and the elevated motorway, certainly lived up to its reputation—it was like a moonscape. It was and still is dominated by vast 60's social housing estates and there was and still is a great deal of violent crime, vandalism, drugs, unemployment and all the other unrelieved misery which disastrous 60s planning left in its wake.

Even so, it seemed to me that Kensal Basin had a number of assets and held great regeneration promise. First there was Goldfingers Trellick Tower—the only decent piece of modern architecture for miles around—plus a sprinkling of amiable run down older buildings of which the red brick turn of the century Canalot factory was by far the most interesting. Then there was the Grand Union Canal—water is always a good and soothing presence in inner city areas if you can get rid of the muggers who haunt the towpaths. There was also a squalid little park to be considered. Although its only use at that time seemed to be as a Rottweilers’ lavatory, it was easy to visualize it as the plesaurable green space it has now become.

So—back to the Canalot project. What to do? The building was big enough, it was affordable, it was 10 minutes from Marble Arch, it was on the Grand Union Canal and it sat opposite a park. Plus there was the local population. Although it was all too evident that some of the young people living around and about were heavily into petty crime, many were also highly talented, fascinated by film and television and full of energy. It was an irresistible mix and I decided to go for it.

At that time [1985] the building was owned by a publicly funded organisation called GLEB—the Greater London Enterprise Board. They had acquired it two years previously to turn it into managed workspace. But, serendipity of serendipities, they had just come to the conclusion that it couldn’t be made to work. I, on the other hand, believed that it could and after a lot of argy-bargy, and to my bank manager’s consternation and accusations of madness all round, I managed to buy this huge empty derelict factory.

Originally built as a chocolate factory, the Canalot building has had a colourful career. It was used as a textile and clothing factory in the thirties, it was used to produce light armaments during the war and then it became a laundry. More recently it had been occupied by a company called Oliver Toms who made kitchen catering equipment. They left in the 70's and then it stayed empty.

The use I had in mind was of a different nature. It was something the planners hated at the time because I wouldn’t say exactly what it was, other than ‘studios’. It wasn’t specifically offices and it wasn’t specifically workshops. Those two terms were too specific to describe the diverse facilities that people in the film and television industry wanted. Happily we got the planning through because that was the year that the government changed the use class categories and introduced the B1 category. As a result, they no longer distinguished between offices and workshops and they allowed a more flexible use of space. Subsequently, I might add, the planners were delighted with our proposals.

We then started the design. One of the interesting things about designing a big building and dividing it into lots of small spaces is that every space has to be a winner. Give most architects a big building to design and certain spaces will be second class—that’s where the post room can go, or something similar. Usually that’s okay because when a big company or a few big companies take on a building they take the view that better and worse spaces are perfectly acceptable, such is the lamentable post room/board room divide. But if you’re dividing a building into a hundred different units to be let, every single one has to be aesthetically flawless because somebody’s got to be charmed by the space you create and decide ‘I want to work here’. So there’s no room for lousy space in the workshop or studio conversion of a big building—it’s one of the disciplines in this sort of process. In addition, it’s important in these buildings to have a place where people can get to know each other. It's commercially fertile if they’re encouraged and enabled to do so, therefore in Canalot we have a central space with the wall climber lift and there’s a restaurant by the canal which acts as a social centre.

With the designs complete, the 70,000 square feet were converted for about £12 a foot, not much money even in 1986, but we made every last penny count. We had to be fairly crafty, though, and prepared to cross the conventions of the British building industry to get the product we wanted for a price that made sense of the whole thing. For example, I remember we were told that to put in a central heating system for the whole building would cost £2.50 a foot, a total of £160,000 in a building of that size. But we figured out that if we put in nine domestic systems instead we could do it for a third of the cost, and that's what we did with the added advantage that if a system breaks down eight-ninths of the building remain heated. And the pressure was all the greater in those days because I had never heard of the G-word, that being ‘grant’. It was all done with private finance borrowed from the National Westminster Bank, and to tell the truth we only managed to borrow it from them because we had a track record on other projects. I think that somebody coming in for the first time would probably not have got the funding to do the project. This underlines the importance of careful planning and presentation in a first-time project.

Anyway, next came the marketing. What we did was to have one hell of a party one Sunday afternoon in North Kensington, to which we invited everybody who was anybody in the film and television industry. It was a howling success and within 24 hours—I think with one or two exceptions—we’d granted 9-year leases on every single unit in the building.

As a result the building is a great success with 70 companies providing over 200 jobs. Politicians, such as Kenneth Clarke, Michael Portillo and others, have come to visit us, always trailed by a carefully primed media entourage. There is great political capital to be had from the whole idea of jobs and inner city regeneration and conservation. I believe that anybody getting involved in such projects should mercilessly exploit the sensitivity of politicians to the political virtues of this sort of process. It remains a very hot subject to this day and I hope it will continue to be so.

The last thing I want to mention in connection with Canalot, which I've touched upon briefly, is the importance of making a positive intervention into a very rundown area and at the same time trying to integrate the activities with the local community. We go to considerable lengths to persuade employers to take on local people and also to provide certain local facilities—a children's theatre, to give one example. It’s only in that way that we can make a permanent contribution to the wellbeing of the area in question. In the wake of Canalot something like four or five hundred little media companies have set up in the area—it's really taking off. It is important to make it crystal clear that the new community will in no way exclude or marginalize the existing community outside: your endeavours are there for all to enjoy and share.

As a result of Canalot we got an instant reputation as a pretty hot place: a ‘media centre’. That phrase gained currency in the 1980s—probably because of the way in which local authorities developed a kind of civic megalomania, a desire to become known as the city of media or the city of culture or whatever it might be. This was sparked in some degree by Glasgow establishing itself at that time as a place full of creative activities. Anyway, because of our reputation we were bombarded with enquiries from various people saying ‘come and show us how to do it here’, wherever ‘here’ might be.

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Custard Factory 1992 - when it had just opened

The loading bay of the old factory turned into a glamorous lake

One day in 1988 I was visited by Charles Landry who worked for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He'd been commissioned by Birmingham Council to advise them on generating arts and media activities in that much maligned city and in turn he asked if I’d go and have a look. As it happens, I had done a report for Birmingham on an area called Digbeth and so had already got caught up in Birmingham as a city. To me it was a fascinating place because there were so many question marks and contradictions about it. First of all, why was it there? Most cities you look at will have at least one self-evident focus of attraction: they may have ports or major rivers, mountains or goldmines, or at the very least, natural beauty. But Birmingham has none of these things. Indeed, it is a nothing place. The reason it built up was because it is a crossroads—the gravitational centre of the United Kingdom. As a result it became good for communication, and no doubt out of that it developed as a very successful industrial city in the nineteenth century. But of course its raison d’être has always been money and economic success. Brummies are proud of Birmingham largely because of its tremendous reputation as a city of a thousand trades, a place where things are made. Needless to say, then, in the slump of the early eighties Birmingham lost its raison d’être. At one time, something like 40% of the commercial space in the city was empty. It lost its energy completely, depression ensued. Perhaps because of that Birmingham decided to pull itself up by its bootstraps and started a whole new policy of encouraging cultural activities and enterprises to move into the city. The ideas for the NEC and the Convention Centre began to develop and all this new thinking culminated in what I think is one of the great events in the history of urban affairs in this country: the Birmingham Symposium. I always call it ‘whither Birmingham’, although the official name was the ‘Highbury Initiative’. And it was fantastic. 150, maybe 200, people were invited from all over the world: planners, thinkers, philosophers, journalists, architects, politicians and so on. For two or three days they were shown around Birmingham and the talk was of what might be done to improve it as a city.

One day I read in the Birmingham Post that a building in the middle of the Jewellery Quarter had just been sold at a price which seemed to me to be absurdly little. I knew the building. It was pretty hideous but, with 100,000 square feet, it was huge. It had a troubled past: put up by the Norwich Union in 1970 as a flatted factory, it was partly derelict and three quarters empty when I came across it. Several terraces of charming Victorian buildings had been torn down in order to build it. My initial feelings were, OK, at least it’s symmetrical and at least the Jewellery Quarter location is fairly interesting. Then, more ambitiously, I thought that perhaps we could bring the building back to life as a sort of belated apology for the desecration of twenty years ago. I called the estate agent who’d sold it. ‘Why have you got onto me? I’ve just sold it. It’s not for sale,’ he said. I replied that I wanted to buy it from whomsoever he’d sold it to and eventually he produced a very dynamic man by the name of Tom Commander. After much discussion Tom said, ‘Well, in the end I will sell it to you for a profit, but only on condition that you buy a pile of old rubbish that I happen to have down in Digbeth as well.’ I was only too happy because the price he wanted for both lots of property was more than justified by the Jewelry Court space alone. I was going to do the deal without even looking at the ‘pile of rubbish’ in Digbeth – I’d simply assumed that it was some old shacks with asbestos roofs—but he insisted that I see it first. What I found down there is what is now known as the Custard Factory. I would like to talk about that first and come back to the building in the Jewellery Quarter later.

The Custard Factory consists of 200,000 square feet of buildings at the point where the River Rae crosses Digbeth High Street. It is the site of the original settlement of Birmingham many hundreds of years ago. One of the main buildings, a beautiful terracotta affair, was put up by Alfred Bird in celebration his knighthood, gratefully bestowed in recognition of his having invented custard, a significant contribution to the growth of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. I walked in and was stunned by the sheer beauty of the place. It was irresistible. Although it was derelict it seemed to me to have a marvellous sense of place—a sort of resonance. In fact I convinced myself that this was where the lay lines met in the West Midlands. As with the Danceworks building, initially I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. Eventually, however, the solution to the problem arrived in the shape of Hamlet. As I was sitting there in the sunshine that summer thinking how wonderful it was, I was approached by three bearded and beaded youths.
‘Can we please have a space here?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Who are you, and what do you want to do?’
‘We’re actors.’
‘Oh really? Prove it!’
The following night I was given a private mini-performance of Hamlet in one of the upstairs rooms. It was stunning. They were very, very talented and I said, ‘Have the space, what do I care? Two hundred thousand square feet, have it, have it, have it.’
They set up there and immediately called themselves ‘The Custard Factory Theatre Company’. They were subsequently very successful and won an Observer National Prize and performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. Meanwhile, the word got out in Birmingham that you could get free space at the Custard Factory. I cannot express how amazed I was when out of the woodwork of the West Midlands crept literally hundreds and hundreds of people, mainly aged between 18 and 30, most of them wanting to do artistic or cultural things, but ranging right across the board. Before I knew where I was I had about 70 little enterprises working away in the Custard Factory, and we suddenly had something called street credibility in the West Midlands. We were deluged with requests for space but by this time it had become uneconomic to run 200,000 square feet plus for nothing – the space was now occupied so I was having to pay rates, and where the roof leaked they were insisting I plugged it. Clearly it was time to do a proper job in the building).

We started a coherent design programme for the Custard Factory, but since it is such a big site, we decided in the end that we couldn’t do it all at the same time. So we began with the building at the back, called Scott House, in order to create an enclave which people would reach when they had walked through the other areas. We turned the ground floor loading bay of the building into a lake around which we put dance studios, shops, art galleries, a café, a bar, a 220-seat theatre and the reception area. The rest of the 100,000 square feet was turned into workshops, studios and offices. On the inside we had to take a hole out to get the light in and we’ve put a textile roof on the top. Now we have 500 people at work in that building and we’ve had over 2,000 people apply to come in.

We completed those 100,000 square feet for £1.8 million, which isn't at all bad: £18 a foot. Nicely done. The overall cost of the first part was roughly £2.4 million including the cost of building and we got a City Grant (the system is now called English Partnerships) of £800,000—about a third of the total.

I talked a little about marketing at the beginning, and would like to stress the importance of moving seamlessly from development to management. It would not have worked nearly so well if a developer had done the building and then turned it over to the local authority or to an Arts Council-sponsored bureaucratic body. A major advantage of the Custard Factory, which people like, is precisely that it does not have upon it the dead hand of bureaucracy. With the best will in the world, this is something which town halls find very difficult to avoid.

The Custard Factory has kept its grittiness, it has created jobs, and we’ve got a tremendous liaison with local schools and colleges and with organisations such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. It’s been a huge boost for local people in an area which had been perceived as having an atmosphere somewhere between a bomb-site and an abattoir so far as most Brummies were concerned. It is now in a time of change and indeed Digbeth itself has become the jewel in the council’s crown. It is where they’re launching Millennium Point, an educational project with a new campus which has been afforded £100 million of public money. I think that as a direct result of the Custard Factory, Digbeth, once an area of severe urban decay, is now well on the way to achieving a very considerable degree of regeneration.

The development of the Custard Factory has not been without its problems. One of them is our rather confused relationship with Birmingham City Council. Since we do both for-profit and not-for-profit things, they can’t quite figure us out. On the one hand we let the spaces—if people don’t pay up they’re out because without this tight discipline we would not survive—on the other hand, we do lots of pro bono publico things such as the dance studios, the theatre, the art galleries and so on. I think it’s always very important to balance commercial discipline with cultural potential, just as we did with Danceworks. We’re very lucky at the Custard Factory in having the space and the place in which to do all of that. Again, as with Canalot, the politicians have visited on their rounds. In fact Michael Portillo came with the City Grant cheque. He came to the city with some £22 million to dole out to various schemes. Some of these were huge, involving very worthy council estate improvements and so on, but where television cameras were involved, it was to the Custard Factory with his measly £800,000 that he brought them. I think that this was the project that he considered gave him the best advantage politically! And the 1998 G-8 summit, held in Birmingham, helped to bring the Custard Factory to the attention of many international politicians, some of whom were keen to create similar projects in their cities. For example, we have been invited by the Mayor of Milan to make a presentation of the Custard Factory in spring 1999.

But to the more immediate future, the next step in the development of the Custard Factory is a new building around new public open space which is to be called The Green House. The ground floor, like that of Scott House, will be more shops, cafés, bars, and art galleries. The Green House will enclose a new square which will work in conjunction with the existing lakeside area and within this square we’re planning a 12-metre-high statue of The Green Man. He is a legendary figure who has appeared in all western civilisations going back to the Egyptians in the third millennium B.C. He now finds himself the Household God of the Custard Factory. He has manifested himself in different ways at different times, and has been linked to such characters as Robin Hood, Puck and Osiris. The proposal has attracted much criticism from feminists asking why isn’t it a woman? But it’s definitely a man and we’re sticking with it. I think it’ll be a major tourist attraction.

Other future projects of the Custard Factory include a block of 70 live/work flats. For this we're working with Focus Housing Association. The flats will be rented to people who on the whole will be young and working in arts, media, cultural, and design type activities. I think that adding a residential dimension to the Custard Factory will fast-forward its claim to becoming a true ‘urban village’, if I can use that overly-used phrase. More live/work spaces are planned for a triangular site whose current working title is simply ‘the village’. The idea is to create an area resembling a medieval town with a random street plan on a intimate scale around a square. The new buildings will be designed by a group of innovative young architects and built with a variety of materials ranging from brick to straw.

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Big Peg exterior

Entrance to the Big Peg

So, back to the building in the Jewellery Quarter—The Big Peg, so called because a ‘peg’ in the nineteenth century was a bench supplied for the use of itinerant tradesman and craftsmen. It is by the Clock Tower in the centre of the Jewellery Quarter and has now become something of an annexe to the Custard Factory, which has a huge waiting list. People unable to find space in the Custard Factory are going into Big Peg about half a mile distant. We’ve done quite a lot with the building, but it’s a gradual process of turning 100,000 square feet into nice spaces. On the top floor are 70 ‘penthouse studios’—as we say, ‘you can’t get closer to God than in the Big Peg Artists Studios’—and we’ve got an art gallery and restaurant in the basement. There’s also a new entrance—which has sloping glass for no particular reason, but people seem to like it—and we have to get up to as many tricks as we can to focus interest on what’s going on.

The final SPACE project I would like to talk about is back in North Kensington. It is a scheme not so very far from Canalot for an 8-acre site comprising mostly contaminated ground. British Gas sold half of the original 16-acre site a few years ago to Sainsburys, who put up a shed where they sell an awful lot of pasta and pesto, generate about 40 jobs and create a 24-hour traffic jam in the area. That much has already happened to many people’s regret. Between it and the remaining gasometers there’s an 8-acre site alongside the Grand Union Canal and it’s up for grabs right now. Sainsburys want knock up another shed, this time a Homebase, for which they’ve enlisted the help of the Peabody Trust to lubricate the politics of planning. But we’re putting forward a scheme to turn it into an urban village. Similar to the proposed ‘village’ in the Custard Factory, the idea is that there will be 100 buildings with a medieval street pattern. We’ve been looking at the patterns of Italian hill towns in order to get the idea of the chaotic way in which they fall into each other. Each building would go out to international architectural competition, but within a fairly closed brief, so that in the end it would represent something of a museum of architecture for the millennium. It’ll accommodate 1,000 people living and working, playing and learning. But we’ve got a battle on our hands with Kensington and Chelsea, and also in finding the funding because at the end of the day, the revenue from it will generate about 60% of the capital cost of establishing the project. Realistically, I suppose that there is a 1% chance we might bring it off. But it’s another big excitement of the moment.

One of the great things about the regeneration of heritage buildings and putting working communities into them is that it opens up the opportunity for a way of life and a way of working which are positive and through which people will realise their potential. The nature of work is changing as increasingly we’re ceasing to distinguish between work and pleasure. John Prescott has £3 billion to spend on generating a quarter of a million jobs for young people. It seems to me that we could certainly absorb some of that although from where I stand there is a problem when it comes to actually talking to people in government. It’s Prescott’s intention to spend the money within one to two years. This denies the possibility of producing self-sustaining schemes and will probably end up in the pointless creation of jobs which won’t be there in five years’ time. We all know about examples in the north-east where the DTI were paying Japanese companies up to £40,000 per man employed so that people could sit in electronics factories putting things in holes wasting their lives away. Surely just putting 2,000 people to work in a factory in such a way is not a step forward in terms of how our society works. There is simply not enough emphasis placed on the distinction between dead-end jobs and live-end jobs.

I’ll finish with one very short story. A short while ago some of the enterprise people from Birmingham City Council came to me saying, ‘we’d like to go and talk to all the people at the Custard Factory about finance and expansion’. I said, ‘well fine, go and do it’. So they went and knocked on 150 doors and said ‘we would like to come and advise you about VAT and finance, about Europe and other important things so that you can become rich and expand and employ people’. In almost every case, the answer was a two-word phrase: ‘piss-off’. The reason for this is that almost all of the tenants are doing what they actually enjoy and don’t distinguish between making a living and enjoying living. When they finish work—which can be at midnight or at three in the afternoon – they’ll go down to the lake and have a drink and meet like-minded people, and they’ll be there seven days a week because that is what they most enjoy. If we can tie this in with the potential that exists in marvellous old buildings up and down the country, then I think we will realise amazing possibilities. One of the people I admire most in terms of bringing some of this about is Prince Charles. The Prince’s Trust has created 35,000 new companies in ten years—a phenomenal achievement, and with great success. I think that the way in which he has sparked the Regeneration Through Heritage initiative, persuading somebody as clever as Fred Taggart to head it, is marvellous. The Prince’s Institute of Architecture is concerned with old buildings, with the traditions of architecture and the past, with trying to persuade architects to respond not just to the functional needs of the users, but also to their spiritual needs. Prince Charles is a great leader in the area I have been talking about today.