Radical new collaborations for local economies
How enterprises and communities can work together in radical new ways, to make the high street an engine room of mutually supportive activities and commerce.
together in radical new ways, to make the high street an engine room of mutually supportive activities and commerce. Integrating buying goods and services with sharing, making, fixing, learning.
Attracting and developing inventive commercial and social activity into the high street.
Everyone participating Everyone in transforming participating in the local high street into a thriving transforming Sidcup into a local economy. thriving local economy.
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Greengrocerʼs Shop
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Strategically connecting shops with exciting new local activities
local growing and harvesting projects
Public Jams Los Angles, US Part of the Fallen Fruit project, the Public Fruit Jam invites everyone to come with homegrown or street-picked fruit and make jam together. People who have never met before sit down to make experimental jam combinations. Working without recipes, so every jam is a creative negotiation among its makers.
Hardware Shop
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making and fixing projects
Abundance
Men’s Sheds
Repair Cafe
Sheffield, UK
Australia, worldwide
Worldwide
Menʼs Sheds are community owned and run workshops – permanently resourced with tools and materials for building and making. They offer a space for men to gather and talk, get involved in their community and retain a sense of dignity and self-worth through practical projects.
Repair Cafes have tools and materials, and repair specialists to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery or toys. Together with the specialists people start making their repairs in the Repair Café.
Sheffield Abundance helps harvest both private and public fruit, and redistributes the excess amongst the community on a non-profit basis. For example, fruit for meals with homeless people at the Sunday Centre; or shared allotment meals.
Book Shop
Charity shop
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informal learning and DIY book making
Trade School
DIY book making
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resource and time sharing
Ecomodo
Time Banks
New York, worldwide
Online
Online
Worldwide
Trade School is an alternative learning space, where anyone can teach. No money changes hands, instead teachers say what theyʼd like in exchange for giving their class, and pupils sign up by agreeing to bring a barter item. Experience, practical skills and big ideas are all valued equally. Swap food, advice or materials for a class in anything from bread baking to bike mechanics.
Print on demand is a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received. Print on demand fuels a new category of publishing (or printing) company that offers services directly to authors who wish to selfpublish.
Ecomodo is a resource sharing site where participants can lend, rent for a fee, or rent for a charity donation. In a high street situation the shop could become a place for sharing and lending between local residents.
An alternative monetary system that bases its value on units of time rather than on commodities or other items of value such as cash. Time banking focuses on the value of one hour of labour, and was developed during the 1980s in order to increase social capital by focusing on the value of the individual rather than the value of a hard currency.
Perhaps a community store for rarely used items like drills, tents or ladders.
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Imaginative connected models for retail & social investing
Local residents investing in shops
Shops investing in local residents
Shops designed to fund social projects
Integrating for customer convenience & enjoyment
Crowd sourcing investment is a useful new way of getting a business started. Innovative ways of paying dividends include ongoing receipt of the shopʼs products. Itʼs also a great way for residents to support the types of shops they would like to see in their local high street.
Innovative shop keepers are seeing the value of genuine involvement with local residents for developing a responsible and sustainable business model, but also in terms of building long term relationships with people who become both customers and friends.
Social projects looking for long-term financial stability developing retail models to support their work. This leads to more local engagement and to some interesting and imaginative product offerings and brings new life to the high street.
Joining up existing services offers potential to make experiences more enjoyable and productive. Integrating services into a single shop in unusual combinations offers great potential to reconfigure whatʼs already there in exciting new ways.
Loaf
Cook with me
Pirate Supply Store
Laundromat Cafe
Birmingham, UK
Rotterdam, NL
Los Angeles, US
Copenhagen, Denmark
Loaf is building community through good food – with a community supported bakery. People join the bread club and pay a set amount each month. This creates a guaranteed income for the baker to invest in equipment, supplies and labour. In return, you get fresh, locally made, bread each week.
In a professionally equipped training kitchen in Rotterdam, primary school children are learning about food, cooking and healthy eating. The project is a collaboration between a social entrepreneur and an organic chef who wanted to create a community restaurant. Students go harvesting for ingredients, learn to plan and cook meals, and during the 10 week course. At the end of the course, children share their recipes with parents and local residents at a neighbourhood dinner.
The Pirate Supply Store is a small shop selling all types of pirate gear from beard extensions and glass eyes, to posters, t-shirts and a cure for scurvy. But behind a secret door is 862Valencia, part of a network of organisations that support young people with their writing skills. In 2002, founder Dave Eggers wanted a space for a tutoring centre where local writers could spend time offering one-to-one support for children who needed extra help. The pirate store front creates a culture of creativity and adventure which attracted local residents and children – feeling very different to most places associated with ʻbeing helpedʼ.
The Laundromat Cafe opened in 2004 in Copenhagen. The front of the shop is a welcoming café, with communal book shelves and free wifi. But rather unusually, at the back of the shop is a laundromat, with large washing machines. The idea was to create a space where people could multitask in comfortable and original surroundings. So you can order coffee and toast, read, surf the internet and do your laundry all at the same time!
In the initial start up the founder created 10 bonds of £1000 each, and the 6% (£60) dividend is paid through year in the form of bread.
At other times, the high end kitchen equipment is hired out for professional catering and events.
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Radical new collaborations for local economies
Sidcup is full of people with skills and resources, aspirations and ideas that could be brought to life on the high street. Some people are just beginning to think about starting up something new, some are looking for the right opportunity and others have already begun. Part of the In Store for Sidcup project includes a retail incubator. “Incubation” offers those growing projects or businesses a supportive and learning environment. It brings startups together to share costs, to learn from each other, and to generate ideas and collaborations. We are exploring new ways that shopkeepers, residents, local organisations and entrepreneurs can work more closely together and create opportunities which support high street activity. For example, lowering the barriers to doing a first sale – enabling people to ʻtest-tradeʼ and try things out before taking on a shop lease; or offering access to various experts and mentors – people who have direct experience and can give advice. There are many different ways to support and nurture high street business. We are researching what type of incubation would be most interesting to residents in Sidcup.
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Collective spaces to stimulate ideas, start-ups & trade
Innovative collaborative platforms
Working and socialising in stimulating environments can be a great way to cultivate and test projects, whether they are social, commercial or a mix of both. Sharing resources and having a space to bring people together creates good conditions for collaboration leading to both social projects and businesses.
Matthews Yard
PieLab
HUB
The Living Room
Croydon, UK
Alabama. US
London, worldwide
Rotterdam, NL
Matthews Yard was opened by local resident and entrepreneur, Saif, who wanted to see more variety and activity on his local high street. It includes a co-working space and café, and hosts events and activities including a local makers market and Trade School Croydon (an open learning space where people exchange resources, advice or items for new knowledge). They have just successfully crowd-funded for the UKʼs first new independent theatre and cinema, and put their success as a new high street hub down to their mixed model of community and enterprise, where not everything is immediately commercialised and there is a sense of shared ownership.
Ideas + design = social change. PieLab was an experiment by a group of friends in Alabama who decided to offer free pie as a way for more neighbours to meet and chat. From these small beginnings, PieLab now occupies a space on the highstreet. But it is still more than your average café –with bike repairs, catering apprenticeships and an open community space.
Incubating good ideas is about more than just the provision of cheap desk space. From its beginnings on a warehouse floor in North London, The Hub has become a global community for social entrepreneurs, a network of 28 spaces worldwide, and a model for exchanging ideas, know-how and a shared sense of purpose. The idea for the HUB came from the recognition that entrepreneurs were often being held back by a lack of scale and resources. Memberships vary in price based on the number of hours per month usage someone wants. Rather than sell the space, this shared economy model ʻgives the spaceʼ to a community of members with common aims.
The Living Room is a community run space in a former shop. Residents joined together to redecorate and now offer £2 a month to keep it running. People from the neighbourhood share meals, hold events and look after their children together, in a shared and open living room. Professionals also know they are welcome to stop by including council officers or neighbourhood police. It is a place where everyone can do what they are best at and feel comfortable.
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Collective spaces to stimulate ideas, start-ups & trade
Innovative collaborative platforms
Shared Concept Shops
Box Shops
Common Room
Cockpit Arts
Beam & Anchor
HUB Shop
Croydon, UK
Alabama. US
London, worldwide
Rotterdam, NL
The Common Room is a new type of shared space, made and shaped collectively by the community, and run on the principles of collaboration, connection and resourcefulness. People have access to the space, to meet people, experiment with ideas and start new projects for a small regular membership cost. More than a coffee shop, restaurant, gallery or theatre alone - more than a traditional community centre, club house or office. You might pop in to make yourself a cup of tea have a chat and read your emails. Bring a dish and share a meal with others. Learn how to fix your bike, or the toaster. Or try and build your next big invention.
Cockpit Arts is a creative business incubator, named after its location in Holborn where it began in small business units around Cockpit Yard. It is a combination of affordable studio space; business and skills development workshops; Open Studio events and other showcasing and selling opportunities; and accessible business loans. Cockpit Arts is a social enterprise which also considers part of its role is to support the whole environment which helps designer/makers succeed, not just formal business support. This includes welcoming residents to open studios to meet makers and learn more about the process and value of local crafts.
Beam & Anchor is a shared workspace and shop run by a small group of designers and makers. There is an upholsterer, a painter, a silk maker, a cabinet maker and a furniture restorer. They share a joint workshop on the first floor, and run a retail shop on the ground floor. The shop has products that they make themselves upstairs or items made by other people that they think will fit well and that they choose together. The group also host events in the shop such as music nights or dinners so the space is welcoming and social and creates new connections and loyalty with local residents.
HUB shop, Rotterdam is a collaborative boutique which helps small businesses bring their products to the market. Members can rent boxes of different sizes for between £40 – 80 per month. This gives them the opportunity to sell their products on the high street in a low risk way, without having to take on a whole shop themselves. The income from the boxes covers the building rent and each box member takes responsibility for stocking and decorating their box. The shop is run by a shopkeeper who takes care of the space, arranging box rental, manning the till, looking after the small café and gallery space and encouraging people to visit by raising the profile of the shop and spreading the word.
including the Ministry of Stories behind the
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Collective spaces to stimulate ideas, start-ups & trade
Shops Collaborating
Markets Indoors and Outdoors
Box Shops
Popuphood
New Windows
FEAST
PopUp Britain
Oakland, US
Willesden Green, UK
West Norwood, UK
Kew, other UK
Popuphood was started by a local entrepreneur and resident who were concerned about the number of vacant shops in their neighbourhood. They wanted to find a way to create a thriving and diverse retail block. They create networks of neighbouring shopkeepers who support each other to decorate their spaces and draw crowds. They work to broker agreements with landlords to offer short-term periods rent free or with reduced rent to lower the barriers to new business. By working together, shopkeepers and local entrepreneurs can increase the effectiveness of their actions, and share the risks of starting up in a new shop.
New Windows was a programme of activities including curated window animations, local events and meanwhile shop use. Local shopkeepers paired up with emerging designers to create new window displays; residents were invited to Christmas events including lantern making and a children's cinema; and shop renovations were undertaken by students from a local college as work experience. 13 businesses were selected to share 8 small retail units in a parade that had previously been empty for 5 months. Entrepreneurs had the space rent free for 6 months to test-trade and build interest. Some of them went on to individually negotiate a long term lease with the landlord when the programme ended.
The West Norwood FEAST is a monthly street market organised by residents and volunteers. It spreads the length of the high street with clusters of stalls around food, gardening, vintage, fashion and craft. The group organises social events and activities for families alongside the commercial stalls, and has just launched a Young Enterprise scheme to organise work experience for young people in high street shops. At between £30-50 the market stalls offer an affordable way for new start-ups to sell on the high street.
The PopUp Britain shop is part of a national campaign to support British made brands. It hosts six enterprises for two weeks at a time, then six more move in. Each person contributes towards the rent for two weeks in exchange for their own section of the shop to look after and sell their goods. Shared short-term ownership of a section of shop gives entrepreneurs with a 'shelf-ready' product the chance to showcase their brand, and meet and talk to potential customers or stockists in person.
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