COMMENT For every five jobs in the capital, one of them is in the creative industries, according to recent research from City Hall. That is more than 1.1m people. An increase of more than 200,000 since 2016, making it London’s third-largest sector after finance and real estate.
The city’s reputation as a creative powerhouse is one of its greatest economic strengths – and one of the key reasons that London has just been placed first in Resonance’s annual “World’s Best Cities” rankings for the ninth year in a row. It is also one of the most significant factors that keeps money pouring into the city from all over the world.
We are really, really good at being creative. The London of 20, 40 or 60 years ago cemented itself at the top of the global creative pecking order, thanks to an abundance of artists and makers dominating the city’s culture. But over the past 20 years our “genuine” creatives have been pushed to the fringes, and even the more established ones are struggling to stay in expensive districts. Artists, makers and manufacturers are being priced out, while London has concurrently lost more than a quarter of its industrial floorspace in the past two decades – 64m sq ft, or the equivalent of 840 football pitches, according to Centre for London.
Embed affordable spaces
As asset owners and managers, we need to look at the facts: an ever-increasing proportion of London’s workforce is in the creative industries, and yet their physical presence in the city centre continues to diminish. Meanwhile, we are looking at growing vacancies in prime locations and grappling with how to bring life into business districts beyond the peak occupancy of Tuesday to Thursday.
For us at General Projects, there is an obvious solution, which not only gives space to creatives, but also makes for more exciting and dynamic places to work. This, in turn, secures other occupiers. There is an opportunity to embed structures within new workspaces that facilitate small creative businesses, while building a more animated and unusual offer for our core occupiers.
Crucially, this is not about void mitigation – we’re not plugging a gap by bringing in something temporary on the cheap. The idea is that, by embedding these small creative businesses from the start, at rates they can afford, we will create a place that can thrive in the long term, with an ecosystem to which larger businesses are drawn by the opportunity to be part of a creative community.
Developers like us have a fantastic opportunity to facilitate creativity in our buildings by delivering an environment where occupiers can support and learn from one another, whether through accelerator and incubator programmes or simply by taking an enlightened approach to clustering creative businesses within space that is designed to inspire.
This is something we have put into place across many of our schemes, either by making it the sole focus of a development or by embedding it within a mixed-use project. In Haringey, for example, we are working on the transformation of our industrial campus, Florentia Village, into one of London’s biggest creative maker hubs. We are more than doubling the floorspace and we are bringing the whole development under the management of our services arm, General People, providing small creative businesses with the support they need as they develop and grow.
In central London, we have just submitted plans for our latest office reuse project, Fox Court. Situated just off Hatton Garden, where the number of jewellers has begun to dwindle as rents hiked, the development will provide affordable studios for independent jewellers, as well as high-quality office space.
And at Walworth Town Hall, our soon-to-be-completed workspace in Southwark, we are repurposing the 50,000 sq ft disused civic building into a creative-led workspace and community hub. At the centre of this development is a new purpose-built community space, operated by a not-for-profit organisation, that can host events curated by the local community, for the local community.
The case for investors
While we really believe in the importance of all this and are passionate advocates for the power of creative production to enrich all of our lives, there is a commercial imperative here too. We must justify these projects to our investors, and the case remains clear: investing in space for the creative industries makes for better performing, more prosperous places.
If we want UK cities to maintain their status as creative superpowers – a crucial factor in attracting FDI, talent and tourism – then as developers we have a responsibility to provide space for creative businesses to flourish.
Jacob Loftus is founder and chief executive of General Projects
