As you may have heard, there’s exciting things afoot at the CLT.
In April we finished the refurbishment of the flat above the bakery, and most recently Liverpool City Council gave their support to the CLT’s proposal for bringing the empty houses next to the bakery back to life. We’ll be able to develop these plans thanks to grants we’ve been given from Power to Change, and Homes England’s Community Housing Fund. This funding scheme could potentially also give us some of the capital we need to start making our proposal a reality – we could all become co-owners of a terrace!
This is an incredibly exciting time for the CLT and we’re going to work with the both the local community and Marianne Heaslip from award winning architects and workers cooperative Urbed on developing the plan for the nine terraced houses (Marianne worked with us previously on the flats above the bakery).
We know we want to build quality homes for affordable rent that people of all ages can live in. And we know we want them to be energy efficient (giving the tenants a chance to save both some cash and the planet) and we want there to be some shop units so that we can support the growth of our high street.
There’s a lot more that needs to be decided though, and we want other local people to be involved throughout this next planning stage.
That being the case, we’ve got a lot going on over the next few months.
We’re turning one of the properties into a drop-in CLT HQ at the beginning of January, so that you can stop by and share your thoughts and ideas about what we should be working on. There’ll also be a load of other stuff happening online – surveys, social media, fact sheets and blog posts (like this one) – so that you can keep up to date and contribute if you find it hard to get to the site itself.
We’ve also put together a core team of local representatives (CLT members have received an e-mail about this) who will meet regularly and work with Marianne and her team to decide the look and feel of what we’re proposing.
There’s a lot happening, and I’ll be sharing more of it with you over the next few weeks. For those that don’t know me, I’m Tim and I’m going to be writing about what happens over the next few months on this blog as well as the CLT Twitter account and Facebook page (I’ve given myself the job title of Design Process Documenter!). I live 10 minutes from the bakery, on Lynholme Road, and have been trying to support Homebaked when I can for a good while now (most often by buying bread and drinking coffee…)
Over the next few months, the plan is to give you short introductions to everyone on the design team, so to kick us off, this is me and Catherine – who you may recognise from the bakery counter:
A quick recap
‘Community land trusts are local organisations set up and run by (extra)-ordinary people to develop and manage homes as well as other assets, like community enterprises, food growing or work spaces. The CLT’s main task is to make sure these homes are genuinely affordable, based on what people actually earn in their area, not just now but for every future occupier.’
It’s easy to become a member – a co-owner of the community assets we’re developing together – and have real input on the future of the neighbourhood. To find out more about doing this, just e-mail [email protected] or join Angela McKay for a brew in the bakery on a Thursday.