This month’s spotlight is on Anna Francis and The Portland Inn Project in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Anna is an artist and Professor of Art and Society at the University of Staffordshire, whose work for the last 20 years has centred around regeneration in communities. Between 2006 and 2013, Anna focused on the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) Pathfinder scheme and her work evolved from documenting regeneration processes to thinking about how artists can intervene in these contexts, to support communities to think about what they want to see happening.
When the Pathfinder scheme was scrapped in 2013 and Stoke-on-Trent Council announced the £1 home scheme (where you could buy a house for £1 if you committed to invest in the community and stay for at least 10 years), Anna saw an opportunity to actively use her skills to improve the community she lived in. There was a lack of social infrastructure in the neighbourhood, with the shops and community centre closed and a difficult local environment that experienced problems with fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour. In 2015, a year after moving in, Anna met with Rebecca Davies and began to work collaboratively with other local residents to set up the Portland Inn Project, with a view to take the derelict pub building in the neighbourhood into community ownership.
This involved working on the planning, community-led design of the pub building and then later fundraising to transform the derelict building into a creative community hub. In October 2024, having raised £1.6million to go towards the pub revamp, work began on the retrofit of the building. In the process, they set up a Community Interest Company that has since supported youth clubs, creative activities, gardening and sports. Not only that, but Anna explained the neighbourhood itself started to change. There was less fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour, people felt more connected to each other and the neighbourhood, and the area had become more desirable to live in.
The team is now looking forward to completing the building project and opening the building as a new social enterprise hub and creative community space in October. It’s a process that the whole community has been involved in, right down to choosing the materials that create a healthy and sustainable building. Through this project, the team and community have learned a lot about retrofitting a Victorian terraced property and is looking at other opportunities in the neighbourhood. A lot of people in the area live in rented housing and these can be in poor condition, with absentee landlords not always properly maintaining them, and tenants afraid of making complaints (eg about mould) for fear of being made homeless. The team is looking at the possibility of using their knowledge to create a community land trust, where the housing is owned by the community and wealth is retained and reinvested back into the community and local economy.
This project is a beacon of what community-led change can achieve. The question is how do institutions support communities to take the lead? Anna explained that for Stoke-on-Trent City Council, the shift was a matter of urgency. Working with tighter budgets and in an area that had serious issues that they struggled with addressing, working with the community has allowed them to turn things around. They set-up
monthly service meetings, where all the public sector partners, local stakeholders and community members would come together and talk through the issues people living in these areas experienced. Rather than having meeting notes, they have an action plan. At the end of each meeting, the relevant organisation would take the lead on a specific issue and bring back an update at the next meeting. This meant that the priorities were set by the community and it catalysed local partnership working.
While the Portland Inn Project has been a success, the group of residents have encountered challenges that they needed to overcome. Funding is a recurring issue for a lot of community groups, such as working to tight funding deadlines and having limited time and resources to make and submit funding applications. Short-term funding is also a significant issue as it doesn’t allow for the breathing space and the long-term planning that communities really need, forcing groups to focus on short-term fixes that fail to provide sustainable solutions. Through funding from programmes such as Creative Civic Change, the Portland Inn Project was able to take a longer term approach, and now with its The 100 Year Plan the community is taking a multi-generational approach to thinking about the future of their neighbourhood. This is their way of ensuring that each project they receive financial support for feeds into a wider narrative of what their neighbourhood can become.
When we asked Anna to share what councils can do to support similar local neighbourhood-based community groups, Anna’s answer was that councils need to see themselves in an enabling role, to work with local residents and groups and support them, such as help with funding applications, and brokering relationships with public services. Anna also talked through the painstaking legal process of the transfer of assets and how more legal support and quicker response times would have helped to make the process smoother for them.
We’re all aware this is a difficult environment for councils to operate in, with funding and resources being stretched at a time where demand is very high. What Portland Inn demonstrates is that investing, listening and supporting communities to build social infrastructure and social capital is worth the investment in order to change the real dynamics, aspirations and ambitions of a local area. It will allow councils to move from fire-fighting to prevention and to be guided by the experts out there: the people who live in their communities.