This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 1 (North of England, UK)
This CTP refers to the decision to move premises from the initial organization space into more costly but welcoming premises in early 2016. As described in CTP1, the hackspace changed from being an online-only forum to inhabiting physical premises in early 2015. Their initial home was a small empty shop in the middle of the town that the group was able to rent at a cheap rate via a local council scheme. Over the course of 2015, it became apparent that these initial premises were not suitable for the hackspace: “It was an awful place in a very rough area. We got a lot of drive-by kids popping themselves in, drug addicts and alcoholics wandering in, mainly to see if there was anything they could steal”. The group also had problems with utilities, and with having direct contact with the landlords. After raising some money through paid hacks, one of the co-founders serendipitously stumbled across new premises in a much larger ex-industrial space in the town, which had recently become available. As one of the co-founders described:
“We found the space randomly. My wife noticed that there were some lettings happening in this old place. It was a two-storey building, with a basement below. The space had been derelict before being acquired, and then renovated back. It was really pure luck – I’d had a particularly bad day at the other hackspace and got home and had a big rant at her: ‘We’ve got to get out of this horrible horrible place with piles of rubbish pouring out the back’ and no water and all that stuff. So I got that off my chest and looked at the space she’d found and thought ‘right, what do I do now?’”
With a larger, more welcoming space, the group were able to construct the large workshops that they envisioned, and grow the community from a small group of technology-focused participants, to a larger group with more diverse interests around the nature of “making”.
This CTP was co-produced by the availability of the new premises, itself shaped by the economic difficulties of industry in the town. As described in other CTPs, Leigh is a small ex-mining town, home to previous industries including a sizeable cotton industry in the twentieth century, and a coal-mining industry, building on underlying coal seams after the town became connected to the railways and canals. However, both of these industries were lost, with the mines and factories closing over the mid- to late-twentieth century. The mainline train station closed in 1969 when service to the collieries was no longer needed, making the town one of the largest in the UK without a railway station. One result of this history is that there are a number of large mill buildings which have been reclaimed for use by new industry and as part of regeneration projects, such as Mather Lane Mill, a Grade II listed building (ie. Is place on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest, and thus cannot be demolished, extended or altered without special permission from the local planning authority). The new premises for the hackspace was in one of these former cotton mills. Whilst it had been converted into a number of office and studio spaces, the weak local economy meant that filling the spaces was challenging, as one of the co-founders described:
“I rang up the guy who owned this place and it was just before Christmas. That very week, the company that had been renting the space had given their notice to leave. So he was already thinking ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ and then he found us. And he was glad to find us, because he was concerned that it was going to be left empty. There’s a lot of empty lets in Leigh because it’s an economically unattractive town. He was concerned it was going to to take a bit of time to get back on the market, so he gave it to us for a bit of a bargain”.
Whilst the co-founders were able to get the new premises more cheaply than they had initially anticipated, they had already saved money for a deposit selling equipment which had been donated but was not needed; and through a taking on a number of paid hacks, such as one for a marketing company to “hack a Pepsi machine, so it could be like an Internet of Things Pepsi machine – you’d put your money in, get a can out, and then it would count the money to a cloud package. We did it with a Raspberry Pi and a little bit of electronics”. The £1500 fee for this work allowed the hackspace members to be able to kit out the new space with machines, and contribute to its redecoration.
This CTP was co-produced by the availability of the new premises, itself shaped by the economic difficulties of industry in the town; and generating money for the new space.
The move into the new space was borne of frustration and tensions around the operations of the first premises, and in particular with the lack of contact with their landlord. The original space was managed in part by a third party, which made it very challenging to gain direct contact with the landlord themselves, as one co-founder described: “We used the space for a year, but in that whole time, we didn’t manage to get them to switch the water on. We had wrangles and there was always some other blocker in the way, and there was always some different agency involved. After a while we just thought ‘This is never going to happen’”.
The co-founders, however, did not report any particular tensions between themselves, bar the personal frustrations described earlier. Instead, the success that they’d had with the paid hacks gave the team the confidence to understand that they deserved better – “It gave us the impetus to say, look, we’re better than this crappy little shop”.
As described above, the desire to move to better premises had been bubbling under for some time; but the actual sourcing and acquisition of the new space came about through happenstance.
Through their experiences in the first shop space, the co-founders had learnt about the limits of those particular premises and what would be needed in a new location – more space (“It was a bit cramped”), more agency and control with the landlord, and a more welcoming atmosphere: “We decided, let’s get a proper let where we’ve got a direct relationship with the landlord, and we’ve got power, at least we’ve got a bit of control over what’s going on”.
In the absence of this CTP, it is unlikely that the hackspace would have stayed in its initial premises, given the frustrations expressed by the co-founders; but it is uncertain whether they would have been able to find such a suitable space as the old mill. The increase in workshop membership (35 at the time of interview) was also unexpected.
This CTP allowed the hackspace of fulfilling its transformational aims of having a physical space which was suitable for the complex needs of a machine shop with a number of different areas of specialization (as described in later CTPs). The previous industrial history of the building has suited these aims particularly well: “It’s an old turn of the century mill that’s been renovated, so we’ve got these great big high end pillars and everything. In terms of an old industrial building now becoming part of a new industrial revolution, it fits very nicely. It looks cool, it’s a really nice place.” Whilst the size of the space made it costly to heat - at the time of interview, in winter, the premises were heated by many infra-red lamps – it also enabled the members to have many different workshops and facilities. Within a month of moving into the space, the team had built a darkroom for photography and film work, bringing in donated equipment. These types of resources were important in fulfilling the hackspace’s transformational aims of enabling activities that would be difficult to do, without training, alone:
“We have people who do digital work, but that’s easy to do anywhere, you just need a laptop and a digital camera. Film is something that without a little bit of guidance to get going is suddenly hard to start doing. Here, we’ve got a camera library with loads of donated cameras, so if you want to have a go with film and didn’t have any of the kit, you could have a go with that”.
This taps into the organisation’s long term aims of having better-equipped workspaces: “Our game plan is, 3 years from now, to have a much wider selection of good tools, and particularly the tools people can’t have at home, either because of the space they take up or because of the cost of them.” In addition to new activities afforded by the premises, the move to the new space also created a more welcoming atmosphere, fulfilling the organisation’s transformational aims around inclusivity by bringing in more members:
“We’ve had a big upswing in people taking up membership since moving into the new space. The other one was a bit forbidding – you’d walk in and it was pretty small, and there was rubbish lying on the ground outside. Whenever we’d clear that up, there’d just be some more. There were dodgy characters hanging around. It just wasn’t that nice. People just didn’t want to bring their kids and leave them at this space, or even bring them at all.”
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