“I am a window of opportunity”: Plymouth’s innovative social enterprise sector comes up with Vacancy Atlas, redefining the high street
We have long identified - and been shaped by - the city of Plymouth, in the UK, as a powerhouse for creative community action. One of our models for what a cosmolocally-oriented CAN (community agency network) could be is The Plymouth Octopus (POP).
Their most recent newsletter shows their everyday inventiveness in full flow. From POP’s director Matt Bell, noting first the dangerous elections, resource challenges to families, and ongoing wars:
It feels quite ‘dark’ but I think this is the age we’re living in. The biggest issues (for example, migration, housing and homelessness, financial inequality, climate crisis, trauma, health and wellbeing) are increasing in scale while, at the same time, we have fewer resources with which to tackle them.
Yet although we have all we ‘need’ globally, we face a geographic and cultural problem with some areas of the world being more affluent – in money & resources – than others. We need to make better use of all that we have.
And this is why POP does what it does. We believe that by working together, and by making use of each individual’s unique strengths and powers, we will find the solutions we need.
And this is exactly what’s happened with Vacancy Atlas, an amazing ‘retail’ initiative that set out – and succeeded - to do things differently. It is yet another example, in Plymouth, of people and projects trying a different approach - testing, taking time and slowing things down - to try and discover what might better serve us.
More on Vacancy Atlas:
Imagine a shop which transforms itself from one day to the next. One day it’s a blank page for story tellers; the next a mini-brewery before the tide turns and it’s a safe harbour for shanty singers. Such a place exists, right here in Plymouth. It’s called Vacancy Atlas and it has one purpose, to never be vacant.
It began more than four years ago as an academic project by architectural students, Jason Skelton and Elise Wilkes-Brand who wished to find new ways to make use of our empty civic spaces.
During two years of learning, talking and collaborating, they explored how they might connect landlords and spaces with people and activities and found artists and creative people wanting to sell their work; test their ideas and engage with the general public.
“We wanted to find a new way to accommodate those people who had the ideas, in the places they needed to be in, in the city, without the financial risk”, says Jason.
After graduating, Jason and Ellie continued to look for ways to simplify the process for landlords and leaseholders. This led them to set up their own initiative, Vacancy Atlas, which then became one of the delivery partners for the innovative Meanwhile Use project. Run by Plymouth Culture, it enabled seventeen different projects to take up temporary residence in ten different empty buildings in the city centre.
The Meanwhile Use project was a success and, as part of its legacy, Jason and Elise were handed the keys to 107 Cornwall Street and Vacancy Atlas set up shop. The property, says Jason, was ideal.
Since September 2021, it has been repurposed more than fifty times with the ‘shopkeepers’ paying for the space they need by-the-day. As Jason explains, Vacancy Atlas allows people to test their ideas and come to market without any of the traditional – and significant - risks involved:
“A big part of what we do is to listen to what people want and find ways to help them make it work. It doesn’t always work, but that’s part of the appeal. We enable people to take their own risks, test them and come back and try again.”
Now, in an exciting new development the keys are being handed over to Alice, one of the resident temporary artists [see rest of PDF - ed].
Meanwhile, Jason and Elise, having learnt a shed-load of stuff about civic spaces are now collaborating with their original partners as well as urban strategists, Incremental Urbanism, to explore a radical new economic model in the hope that our city centres can be more than pretty vacant. Watch this space!
It’s the can-do tone, as well as the strategic ambition, that is always most impressive about Plymouth’s social enterprise sector. We will (always) be watching!