In an era of squeezed public finances, soaring construction costs and wasting infrastructure, the renovation of buildings around Cambridge Road by the Hastings Commons (HC) group of trusts and companies has been, in many ways, a beacon of hope for the future of the town. 

Retaining the basic fabric but redesigning the spaces within, the group’s property development arm HC Neighbourhood Ventures Ltd (HCNV) has acquired, restored and repurposed Rock House, Harper’s Caves and, so far, four out of the six floors of the vast Observer Building. Plans for renovation of two other major buildings, 12 Claremont (next to Hastings Library) and Eagle House (opposite ESK), are moving forward. 

HC’s phenomenal success in raising funds from public and charitable sources – around £28 million over the last ten years, according to HCNV finance director Bob Thust, though not all this has yet been expended – has raised eyebrows amongst some observers of the Hastings economy. How have they done so well?

A trust with over 550 community members, HC Community Land Trust, has a one third shareholding in HCNV. The trust is intended to take over the ownership as well as management of all these buildings once the portfolio becomes financially self-sustaining, i.e. paying for itself. Further subsidiaries, HC Leisure and Learning and HC Living Rents, already respectively manage educational/youth provision and residential housing units within the buildings.

DRIVING FORCE 

But there’s no doubt that the driving force behind all these ventures is the self-styled community entrepreneur, Jess Steele. She would be the first to declare that she is part of a team, and has pushed her entrepreneurial ideas forward in partnership with others, particularly her co-directors Eddie Bridgeman of Meanwhile Space and John Brunton, the General Manager of HCNV. She will explain with animation that she represents a thriving and essentially democratic community. But is she not gaining privately in this amassing of HCNV’s property empire? She herself is effective owner of one third of the shares in HCNV through her personal company Jericho Road Solutions (Jericho Road). Is that not proof that there is a capitalistic motivation behind it?

Steele is adamant that’s not the case. The trustees of the community land trust come from, and were appointed by, the membership. Anyone can become a member for a basic £1 share purchase. Steele herself is not on the board. She did put £85,000 of her own money, raised from a re-mortgage of her Hastings home and channelled through Jericho Road into the initial 2014 purchase of Rock House by HCNV (under its original name White Rock Neighbourhood Ventures). Jericho Road took one third of the shares in HCNV alongside a non-profit community interest company Meanwhile Space, with the community land trust being granted the other third. But HCNV’s articles, which state its purpose “to promote the common good”, contain an assets lock which prevents transfer of its property assets except to another asset-locked holder, including on dissolution. Although Jericho Road is entitled to a return on its investment, the socially-driven aspects of the development – capped rents, public spaces etc – will limit its market value, as will the ongoing charitable and community objectives. The objects of HCNV are clearly set out: “to benefit the community in Hastings” by 

• bringing difficult buildings back into positive use; 
• providing affordable housing, work spaces and leisure facilities;
• growing the local economy;
• generating positive social benefit that contributes “to a fair, inclusive and ecologically sustainable society”;
• offering an ‘open access resource’ for children and young people to advance their independence, education and social responsibility.

DEPTFORD TO HASTINGS

Steele has an impressive background in community activism and urban regeneration, originally in Deptford, where she founded a creative outreach charity Magpie leading a bottom-up regeneration programme. She worked for national organisations including the British Urban Regeneration Association and Locality. Through Jericho Road, incorporated in December 2012, she offered coaching to community groups throughout the country dealing with at-risk buildings in the neglectful ownership of private interest or cash-strapped local authorities. A particular programme was styled CADO – the Campaign Against Delinquent Ownership.

Her first community venture in Hastings, where she moved in 2004, was as a founder member and treasurer of the Hastings Pier and White Rock Trust. It gathered in £14m from National Lottery and other funders, as well as over half a million pounds from local subscribers, to rebuild Hastings Pier. It’s a rueful irony not lost on Steele that, after tireless work for nearly a decade to take control of the fire-wrecked structure and complete its award-winning restoration for community use, the Trust ran out of money and found it bundled into the private hands of Sheikh Abid Gulzar, whom some see as the ultimate practitioner of delinquent ownership.

Steele was awarded an OBE in 2016 for two decades of community regeneration work nationally. (“I was conflicted about accepting a gong that’s associated with the Empire, but my dad was proud, and I think it’s good that community work is honoured,” she says). Since then she has concentrated all her efforts on Hastings, and more specifically on the area in and around America Ground, whose one-time declaration of local independence still reverberates two centuries on.

OBSERVER BUILDING 

The fulcrum point is the Observer Building which, she points out, had 13 different commercial owners between 1984 and 2019, many of them making a monetary profit with a series of planning permissions, then selling on as the fabric continued to deteriorate. “That’s how our property system works. But we have a different approach: we are here for ever, these buildings will never be sold on.”

There remains some local scepticism as to whether the HC renovations, and the ideas that go with them, are worth the huge amounts of public money being expended. The town’s last major public regeneration programme channelled funds, first through SeaSpace, then through SeaChange, into the erection of the gleaming glass-and-concrete office buildings of the Priory Quarter now largely vacant and unkempt, the beachside restaurant of Azur that’s crumbling into ruin, and the Bexhill link road whose controversial mission to open up office and industrial development on precious green space has suffered a series of legal and financial challenges. The benefits derived in each case have been disappointing, to say the least.

Steele makes a good case for why the HC vision – “bottom up rather than top down” will be more effective. “I believe in collective caring, in mutualism and entrepreneurialism”, she says. “True entrepreneurs set out to do something when they don’t control the resources but have to harness what’s there…We should stop asking what ‘they’ can do, and see what we as a community can achieve. We build power through large numbers of people.”

She is more than a little hurt when her motives are challenged. “Some find it so hard to believe that people might do things that aren’t just for themselves”, she says. But she finds the vast majority of locals supportive and “happy that we’re doing it”. 

Anyone in the South East with ‘bright ideas’ for a community business can apply for a share of the £3.2m being made available by independent charitable trust, Power to Change – and that includes Hastings! (see HIP Issue 125 on Power to Change)

The Bright Ideas Fund supports new business ideas from the start-up and planning stages right through to the implementation stage with grants of up to £15,000. The fund will open for new applications on Tuesday, 6 August and will close on Monday, 30 September.

The fund gives community groups the early stage finance they need to carry out consultations with local people and develop their community business idea. Support is provided over a three-year period through Locality, the national membership network for community organisations, in partnership with Co-operatives UK, the Plunkett Foundation and Groundwork UK.

Energise Sussex Coast, a community benefit co-operative set up to accelerate the transition to a low carbon future, received £9,690 in June 2018 from the fund.

Richard Watson from Energise Sussex Coast said: “Bright Ideas gave us the help we needed to develop a community-owned solar model for the Ore Valley, the 10th most deprived neighbourhood in Britain. The project has grown far beyond our expectations. This scheme will deliver £7,500 of savings per year to the College and a community fund worth £100,000 over 25 years.”

Between September 2016 and December 2018, the Bright Ideas Fund supported over 80 groups with £1.85m. So far this year alone, 30 applicants have been accepted onto the programme and are currently working through a tailored support programme.

Locality Chief Executive Tony Armstrong said: “Community businesses generate jobs, tackle social isolation and boost the local economy.”

Kate Stewart, Director of Programmes at Power to Change, said: “We’ve had some incredible applications come in already but we believe there are even more bright ideas out there, so please do get involved and apply.”

• For further information about the fund, visit mycommunity.org.uk/bright-ideas-fund