Community shares
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Goldfinch Community Ownership
Alton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
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Aim
To buy and refurbish a building to house a bookshop, events space and creative hub that will be forever in community ownership.
Let's build this thing!
Goldfinch Community, born of Goldfinch Books, is an inclusive, creative community hub with an independent bookhop at its core. Its purpose is to provide a space to foster inclusion and connection, debate and discovery, around a beating heart of literature and the arts.
We’ve launched this community share offer to raise £300 000 towards the cost of buying and refurbishing a building on Alton’s high street – a bookshop, an event space, and a creative hub that will be forever in community ownership.
The remainder of the funds will be found through grants and a loan to achieve our dream: a community hub that helps bring people together.
And yes, don’t worry – we’re doing this all officially, with solicitors, architects, advisors and mentors who specialise in community projects just like this one.
The vision: Goldfinch 2.0
It's all connected. Our culture, our community, creativity, the protection of our environment, climate change, our wellbeing, mental health and our standard of living are all interdependent and intricately linked.
At Goldfinch, we believe in the power of community and human connection to effect positive change. The hollowing out of our high streets is not an inevitability. We don’t have to submit to the idea that businesses exist to extract wealth from the community – often for the benefit of people who don’t even live in it. We don’t have to leave our kids to experience life through the vagaries of the algorithm and the billionaires who control it. We can all come together, in person, to read, create, talk and argue together, disagree and come to compromises in third spaces that enable and foster human connection.
Goldfinch is already doing this work. We currently service thousands of visits per month, but we are at capacity and the financial model is one of extraction. We have to make enough to pay our landlords and there’s never enough left over to do all the things we want to do for the town. We want to change the way we work – put ownership in our hands, in your hands, and increase those thousands of monthly visits – and all the benefits that come with gathering in real life – to tens of thousands.
Whether you are a local user of the current or future Goldfinch, a supportive and community-minded friend from afar, or an artist, musician or writer keen to see a project like this succeed, please consider joining the Goldfinch family and investing in our Community.
Full details on our proposals can be found in our Community Share Offer at the following links, and you can read on below for details...
Let's dream a little bit...
What do we have, right now?
A beloved asset: An independent bookshop, cafe, and events space operating on the high street, delivering hundreds of community events and thousands of incidental connections.
A fragile position: Rising rents, empty shops nearby, short planning horizons, lack of local government power, and outside ownership make long‑term planning impossible.
Community energy: Creative volunteers, arts enthusiasts, climate activists, and local independent partners in other community groups already deliver culture and outreach, but lack a secure, community-owned asset and social enterprise of this kind to anchor, share, and scale this work.
What could we be?
A high street premises freehold, community‑owned and run as social infrastructure. A permanent, affordable hub that pays staff, hosts a range of programming, partners with schools, and incubates local creative enterprises. A place where children reclaim curiosity, where older people find company, and where live music, literature and poetry thrive.
Goldfinch Community will use trading income, community investment and partnership funding to keep the venue affordable, programme-rich and accountable to members (those who buy community shares).
So what will we do?
Put our community first: We will place community benefit at the core of every decision: programming, hiring, finance, and asset acquisition and use.
Raise funds: We are running this community share offer to raise funds, alongside grants and matched public funding, establishing a robust financial foundation capable of anchoring our core space and supporting future town-wide collaborations.
Ensure accessible programming: We will continue and expand free and low‑cost events, deepen schools partnerships, step up volunteering schemes, and support artists.
Create governance safeguards: We will embed a member‑elected board, a conflicts policy, a protective asset-lock, and a structure that prevents private extraction.
The Four Pillars of Goldfinch
National research shows that when communities step up to own their local spaces, they play a huge part in tackling major societal problems. By launching a community share offer, Goldfinch is explicitly linking a local vision to four vital priorities:
Economic Resilience:
Wealth shouldn't leak out of Alton into the pockets of distant corporate landlords. By running a successful commercial mix of books, coffee, bar and events, trading income stays local. It pays fair staff wages, fuels civic benefit, and helps keep the high street economically vibrant during uncertain times. We’ll keep money circulating locally, using local suppliers, employing local people, and connecting with other local businesses for local benefit.
Our part to play in combatting the UK high street crisis will be realised by our inward-looking localisation, i.e. keeping money circulating locally. According to tracking in the sector by Power to Change, community-owned businesses are extraordinarily stable anchor institutions. Even amidst high inflation and cost-of-living challenges, community businesses prioritise keeping wealth within their immediate neighbourhoods and engaging local people in democratic governance. While traditional small retail startups have a notoriously high five-year failure rate, Plunkett UK's structural sector research shows that share-backed, community-owned enterprises maintain a long-term survival rate of over 90%.
Social Cohesion:
Our growing and continued isolation is the product of so much time online and so few opportunities to gather in person. Goldfinch, with community partners, works in opposition to what might seem the inevitable decline of community ‘as it used to be’.
The Government’s Social Cohesion Action Plan – Protecting What Matters acknowledges that the strength of our social fabric is at best fraying – and that social cohesion must be urgently and actively nurtured to repair it. The report outlines how social cohesion underpins democracy, shapes people’s sense of happiness and belonging, reduces loneliness, combats extremism, and impacts community resilience. Meanwhile, the Neighbourhoods Commission, in recent research, identified that neighbourhoods with fewer public spaces are significantly more likely to suffer from civil friction and severe isolation.
Goldfinch is already seen as a place of safety and belonging where divided or isolated communities come together. Expanding our space creates more opportunities for older people to find company, artists to find a home, kids to find a third space haven, and neighbours to meet face-to-face. It’s all part of the physical social capital needed to keep Alton safe and connected.
Wellbeing:
A healthy town requires spaces that nourish mental and civic health. Goldfinch isn't just hosting arts events; it is a public health intervention that reduces long-term strain on the NHS by creating a sense of local belonging. The Local Government Association's (Common Ground) Framework links physical proximity in cultural spaces directly to improved mental health and reduced clinical loneliness. Recent research (The Cultural Role and Value of England’s Independent Bookshops, 2024) by the Booksellers Association, commissioned by Arts Council England, revealed the range and depth of bookshop contributions to health, culture and society.
Place-Making:
We are transforming a standard high street shop into a permanent creative community hub. Culture shouldn't be a luxury; it should be living public infrastructure that makes Alton a safer, prouder, and more attractive place to live. By taking direct action against the systemic sell-off of high street infrastructure, we are aligning with the government's official mission to restore Pride in Place. National data from Locality (https://locality.org.uk/) exposed that a staggering 4,000 publicly utilised council buildings and spaces are sold off on the open market every year. Goldfinch 2.0 is in keeping with the government's strategy to "invest in the spaces and structures that bring people together" to reverse decades of public realm erosion.
The Project
What we’re doing
You can see our plans for the new premises in our business plan, but in brief:
The bookshop will take pride of place with a bigger footprint than the current shop allowing us to both expand the range and increase the space.
The cafe, bar and event space will be the largest area with planned event capacity for 110 seated guests. The cafe will be open all day and the bar into the evening, regardless of whether there are events.
That flows into the garden area, which will be an overflow and seating space from the cafe-bar, with a firepit, benches and an outdoor community kitchen that can host BBQs, family activities and kitchen learning opportunities.
We’re also planning a work zone which can be used by digital nomads and people working from home for a couple of days a week who want to break the routine and interact with other people in the flesh rather than in video meetings. We envisage this space may be regularly used by other community groups – we see members of ACAN sitting with Walk Alton and someone from the Arts Festival team whilst they work from home, discuss initiatives, and have those accidental conversations that lead to brilliant ideas.
Then there are secondary spaces for which we are still exploring options: spaces for meetings for groups who want a dedicated room or designed as a study centre or for sound recording facilities.
What it costs
Our target building is under negotiation, and we can’t say too much about its specifics here. The total budget for the project is £655,000 to secure the freehold and undertake a major internal refurbishment.
As well as this community share scheme, we’ve applied for (or are applying for) additional grants, including from the Arts Council, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government , Historic England and the National Heritage Fund among others.
How are we going to do it?
Well...we have a fabulous team! And we have you!
Our Share Offer Document gives details on the team and our advisors that have got us to this stage and will see us through to meeting the project goal. Beyond that, the community is leaning in. Many people are providing support, advice, and valuable information to shape and drive this project. Our local council, district council, county council, and central government representatives have all provided support, encouragement, and in some cases funding to seed and support the work to get this project to this stage. Local groups including the Curtis Museum team, the Kings Arms Youth Project, our Libraries team, Social Prescribers, Community Centre and Assembly Rooms have all been encouraging and responsive to our project plans. People see Goldfinch as a cog in the community machine, and a cog of growing importance. This project has a huge wave of support and encouragement behind it, and that means everything to us.
Securing the building is at advanced stages of negotiation. Everything is in place, ready to complete the deal. The space is more than 4x what we have now. The refurbishment work is fully scoped and a conceptual design has been produced with budget costing. Elements that could be developed further with community input are lined up and ready to go. When we get to the next design stage, we want more community input to the development of options for the arrangement of the space, and how we finalise design to make the best use of the space. We anticipate display boards in our existing Goldfinch space where people can come and see and contribute to the developing ideas and options.
As the Community Share scheme closes in December, and the grant funding is secured, we will commence refurbishment on a schedule that has Goldfinch moving in and opening the doors at the end of July 2027 – not that far away.
So, please join us!
This is an invitation to invest and become a Member of Goldfinch Community which is issuing withdrawable Community Shares. Membership is on the basis of one-person, one-vote, irrespective of level of share investment.
As well as investing, there are many other ways you can help this project reach its goal and come to life, such as making others aware of the scheme and persuading others to buy-in to the vision. Talk about it, rave about it, make TikToks about it, tell your friends!
Once you are a member of Goldfinch Community, you can influence decisions at our AGM or stand for election on the board. Volunteering is always encouraged!
Community ownership has the potential to change the face of our towns in the coming years. We don't have to live with deteriorating and shrinking social infrastructure. Wouldn’t it be incredible, just for once, to have a bit of agency in this, to have a say, an actual stake, one that might prove a model for other buildings on the high street, cementing together our community, and then perhaps as a model for other towns, other communities and wider regions of the country.
We are ambitious for our town and passionate about this model and the principles of ownership by the community. We believe communities deserve better, and we believe we can do our bit.
Join us!
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 27th December 2026 at 12:00pm