The entrepreneurs taking over empty buildings as shops abandon the high street

Store closures are leaving space for start-ups to move into town centres, writes Hazel Sheffield

Rachel and Ian McInnes are the co-founders of Technology Box, a tech company based in a community-owned workspace in Hastings (James Clarke)

Hastings might be a small English seaside town but it has a wifi network to rival a smart city – thanks in part to local entrepreneurs who have turned a former office block into a state-of-the-art workspace.

In 2016 Ian McInnes, a co-founder of technology company Technology Box, was looking for new premises. He had moved the business he co-founded with his wife Rachel out of their home after they had two small children, and ended up in a co-working space called the Creative Media Centre, which had been established as a hub for IT businesses in Hastings and nearby St Leonards. But McInnes quickly became disillusioned with the space.

What he really wanted was a place to work that offered two simple services: space for his business to grow and super-fast internet. One day he met up with Jess Steele, a local activist who was involved in the campaign to save the Hastings Pier, to look round an old office building on the Trinity Triangle, a part of the town centre that has suffered from lack of investment, not long after the building had been successfully brought into community ownership under the name of Rock House.

“The building was falling apart, but people were staying in it because it was cheap. I was walking around saying, ‘This is how I would do the wiring!’” McInnes says, “And Jess was supportive of the idea. We basically put in the network that we wanted to make it all about fast connectivity.”

Three years later and Rock House is packed with local businesses, including i-Rock, a mental health service for young people, record label BBE Music and Ten66 Television, an independent production company. Vidhya Alakeson, chief executive of Power to Change, a Lottery-funded charity that supports community businesses, said that Rock House and other organisations like it offer hope to town centres at a moment when major retailers are deserting high streets and leaving units lying empty.

“Mass store closures by big retailers are coming thick and fast, and each one is another blow for hard-pressed towns around the country,” Alakeson says. “This is a moment of transition, and a chance to reimagine high streets as centres for civic life – as places not just to shop, but to live, to meet, to work and to interact.”

Power to Change is calling for the government to back communities to own more high street properties, lowering the number of empty shops and boosting the local economy. It has already worked with many businesses who are doing just that. In Scunthorpe, Café Indiependent has brought music events and new energy to a local high street. In Chesterfield, local business Monkey Park has turned a disused high street shop into a community cafe, bike workshop and co-working spaces. In rural areas, community-run pubs are bucking the trend for pub closures up and down the country and often single-handedly keeping the lights on on village high streets.

The government has already recognised that high streets need to be reinvented as more than just centres for retail. Its 2018 High Streets report makes the case for community involvement in putting together bids for a new fund for high streets, while an interim report from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission has called for a community-centred vision for high streets as “a marketplace of meeting, being and interacting – the public agora”.

In Hastings, the tenants of Rock House now co-manage the building, making the space more responsive to their needs, who communicate with each other on discussion boards. They have installed CCTV, switched to renewable gas and electricity and improved the recycling system.

McInnes has extended the superfast broadband to other nearby businesses, jumping the connections across rooftops to Hastings Works, a nearby not-for-profit, and a small film company that does visual effects. “There is an ecosystem around here that can use the wifi,” McInnes says. Steele say that Technology Box has been as asset to the building and helped other businesses to grow: “Fast, reliable, well-serviced broadband is as important and as basic as roads and drains.”

Rock House now uploads some of its bandwidth to Hastings Online, a town-wide wifi network that was installed by Technology Box after it won the tender from Hastings Borough Council. The network is available to all tourists, residents and local businesses through a system of routers installed across the town on an old CCTV network. Through this network the council is able to track visitor footfall for events, including bonfire night, annual Easter music festival Fat Tuesday, and Pirate Day, when people flood to the town dressed like pirates.

“There are about 20 routers and we can see where people are connecting, right from the car park to the seafront,” McInnes says. The network is already used to live stream events, including eight-hour long live streams from a local piano concerto competition, and the annual Battle of Hastings BMX competition, where 60,000 people connected to the live stream from the town’s subterranean skate park. McInnes is keen for the network to be used in increasingly innovative ways, including augmented reality and virtual reality applications.

Hannah Brookshaw, regeneration manager at Hastings Borough Council, says Rock House and its entrepreneurs are part of the town’s unique selling point. “This trend of community ownership and productive use of otherwise wasted buildings is helping to improve the local economy by revitalising areas of the town centre and encouraging others with the same ethos to set up here,” Brookshaw says.

Steele goes one further. She believes says community ownership does more than just sell the town – it protects it for the benefit of residents. “Community ownership halts gentrification in its tracks,” she says. “We take property out of the market and cap the rents forever, ensuring there will always be affordable workspace and homes right in the town centre.”