What makes community buildings thrive?

... this one was a year later, 2014, when CCT's community-led heritage regeneration programme was really getting into its stride...

Sitting in a three quarters-empty local pub with friends recently after a couple of begrudgingly-served pints, we fantasised about taking the building on for the local community.  It seemed to us that with such a half-hearted approach to business, the Royal Bear (all names have been changed) would not be much longer for this earth. 

Of course we’re all far too busy with jobs, kids, commitments generally to have really meant it – which got me thinking, how come so many – increasing numbers – of community-run buildings do thrive in this stressed-out, time-poor era?  How is it that a historic church, pub or village shop can go from being deemed totally unviable, to being the successful, sustainable heart of a community, when local people take it on?  Surely if it’s uneconomic, it’s uneconomic?

Well of course that’s where Beeching got it so wrong.  Blaming a building’s (or in his case a railway’s) failure on loss of interest and lack of customers, passengers or congregations, is simplistic and can ignore the role of other, often more powerful forces involved in a historic asset’s fall into disrepair and neglect.   Take a town-centre historic church where seventies planners built a ringroad between it and where the congregation lives.  Pretty obvious why people stopped going, but it’s the community (‘not enough people going to church’) who get the blame and lose the asset.  Or my local pub, where a total lack of welcome seems to me the main issue, but the owners will most likely cite oversupply in the local area when they shut up shop.  Similarly, top-down institutional and political forces were at play in the 60s rail closures just as much as a change of behaviour by passengers.  Subsequent reopenings by voluntary preservation societies suggests that many of the resulting decisions were tragically short-termist.

At CCT we’ve often seen how a historic church which had been deemed unviable and surplus to requirements can - with a repaired roof, initial support from outside and then community management - come back to life.  All Souls Bolton is the most dramatic example – and took some serious investment –and there are many smaller examples such as Benington in Lincolnshire, where a seemingly lost cause has become the venue for a rural community’s renewal.

This suggests to me that the key missing ingredient must be passion, commitment, the concern for sustaining a local service or building which exists most strongly in the people who use – or potentially use - it.  That’s often the local community.  Which is perhaps why those who have apparently far fewer resources than private or public institutions, can sometimes make a much better business of running a historic building than its previous owners.

Meanwhile I’m doing what I can to keep the Royal Bear in business.

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