Community hubs: can they help regenerate town centres?
- Maggie Hall
- Jul 31
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 11
By Maggie Hall
Maggie is a retired teacher of speech and drama, a former
Chair of Brighton Humanists, a member of the Humanists UK Dialogue Network, and a Humanists UK School Speaker. In this article she looks into one possible way to help regenerate our town centres.
No one can have failed to notice the increased number of shop premises now standing empty in our town centres. In 2024, a total of 13,479 shops ceased trading in the UK due to the effects of Covid, the cost of living crisis, and sky high business rates. According to the latest figures from the Centre for Retail Research, store closures could hit 17,349 in 2025, exceeding the 17,145 recorded in 2022 after the pandemic support measures were scaled back. During the pandemic, many people became used to shopping online and an insufficient number of us have returned to traditional bricks and mortar retail units in order to sustain them.
Unless new uses are found for these premises, our town centres, which were once the heart of the community, will become empty and derelict. One thing the owners of these premises can do is to use something called “meanwhile leasing”, which means leasing the property to a not-for-profit or charitable organisation for community benefit. These organisations can then run projects and activities that meet local community needs in a sustainable way, and the owners of the premises can reduce their business rates by up to 100%. The granting of a lease on property intended for use for charitable purposes also qualifies for relief from stamp duty land tax. When you think of the number of charities and community groups who would love to have their own premises to work from, it seems obvious that this should be happening more often.
One use to which some of these empty properties are being put is as central sites variously referred to as eco-centres, climate hubs, or climate emergency centres. These centres work to improve community resilience by focusing on solutions to social and environmental crises. One such centre, with which I am personally involved here in my own town of Seaford in East Sussex, is the Seaford Climate Hub. It operates out of a former NatWest Bank building and is run by Seaford Environmental Alliance (SEA), a loose network linking together a number of local initiatives around environmental and climate crisis-related issues.
One of these linked groups works with the local community and councils to plant and care for trees around the town. Another works towards making the town plastic-free by helping local people and businesses find alternatives to single-use plastic items. They also run monthly beach cleans to gather up the enormous amount of plastic debris littering the beach, and encourage local people to lobby for change by writing to politicians, organisations and corporations. There are many other groups as well — too numerous to mention here — concerned with issues such as biodiversity loss, protecting wildlife, reducing waste, growing your own food, and much more. There is even a “Hope and Anger” choir, rehearsing there once a week. The centre also acts as a community larder in partnership with FareShare, redistributing surplus supermarket food that would otherwise go to waste. In addition, it hosts a baby bank that rehomes pre-loved baby clothes and equipment and serves as a drop-in centre for anyone in the community who just feels like popping in for a cuppa and a chat. There is a regular monthly Climate Café, run by a trained facilitator, where people can share their concerns about the climate crisis, a “Little Green Cinema” project, showing informative films on environmental topics, and many events, workshops and talks on a variety of environmental and climate-related subjects. There are similar centres around East Sussex, including in Lewes and Newhaven, and many in other parts of the UK.
But environmental groups are not the only ones to benefit from being able to access vacant premises. In 2019, the government initiated the Open Doors Project with the aim of supporting the repurposing of empty high street commercial premises. Funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the initiative sought to strengthen communities socially and economically. Working with Meanwhile Space, an organisation that revitalises unused spaces for communities, it ran for one year, with local initiatives set up in Stoke-on-Trent, Bradford, Rochford, Kettering and Slough. The project attracted 47 applications from various community groups, with ten active user groups participating. These included an improvisation group, wellness workshops, and support groups for vulnerable families, highlighting the diverse needs and interests of the local population. The project worked by matching landlords of vacant properties with local groups seeking premises for community hubs. The landlords benefited from the scheme due to the “Meanwhile Leasing” scheme mentioned above. They also received financial assistance in the form of compensation for building insurance costs, and community groups were required to have their own public liability insurance.
According to the Evaluation Report, published in November 2020, the programme yielded positive outcomes for both landlords and community groups, with significant cost savings and enhanced service delivery:
Landlords saved on business rates and utility costs, with three landlords reporting properties had remained vacant without Open Doors.
Community groups experienced negligible costs, allowing funds to be redirected towards service users.
Participants reported increased ability to reach more individuals and combat social isolation.
However, the effect on local business footfall was limited. The report’s recommendations for future implementation include clearer communication of eligibility, better engagement with local businesses, and establishing a network of meanwhile use sites. Participants expressed a desire for the programme to be expanded to more areas, particularly smaller towns. (See link below for the full report).
According to Meanwhile Space: “The enterprises and projects that took on the spaces were wide ranging and hugely beneficial to a broad spectrum of local people. Groups included, for example, Movie Mavericks, encouraging film appreciation in young people, Westbury Workshop, supporting independent living for adults with learning difficulties and autism, Sporting Communities, encouraging the uptake of sport, Kettering Community Unit drop-in for the homeless, Picture the Difference support group for chronic pain sufferers and Bradford Transformed, who discuss local art, culture and politics”.
Back at the SEA Climate Hub, we have just been through a period of uncertainty and anxiety while new owners acquired our premises. We didn’t know whether we would be able to stay in the building, and worried that that all our projects would find themselves homeless. There was a huge communal sigh of relief when the Trustees met with the new owners and found them very sympathetic to our ethos. The large building is being divided into three new retail units and we will be able to occupy the middle one. We will lose a lot of space on the ground floor, but the owners are generously allowing us use of the whole of the very large basement area. We look forward to inhabiting a unit which has had a very much needed refurbishment upgrade, with our own little kitchen and the prospect that excites me the most – new toilets! Up until now we have had to put up with one with a door which doesn’t even close, let alone lock! The choir members have learned to sing very loudly. The rest of us whistle.
Looking around our town, there are many more empty units which could be repurposed in the same way. Any groups or charities which need a physical presence in their local community can find out how to go about applying for one of these under the meanwhile scheme by contacting their local council or the Meanwhile Foundation (see link below).
References and Further Reading
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