Save Aire Street - Summary
Aire Street workshops houses 50 creative small businesses employing over 150 people in the centre of Leeds.
Earlier in the year Leeds City Council made the difficult decision to sell the building in order to help balance the books.
The threat was therefore that the tenants would be evicted and the building sold to the highest bidder (and probably turned into flats).
So the Aire Street Tenants set about putting a plan together to save the building and make it loads better housing even more creatives than we do now.
And we need your help!
Background and About Aire Street Workshops
Aire Street Workshops was built in 1875 as a cloth warehouse. In 1981 the nearly derelict building was bequeathed to the city centre as a space to house and help small industrial businesses.
Since then the building has flourished and over the years housed over 500 different businesses some of whom have gone on to flourish and employ hundreds of people across Leeds.
The Situation Today
At present the building houses over 50 creative businesses employing nearly 150 people. The building provides a unique opportunity for creative businesses to start and flourish in a low rent, city centre environment.
Leeds City Council are in very difficult financial position. They have a significant budget shortfall and have had to make some very hard decisions regarding selling many of the city's assets.
Unfortunately Aire Street has therefore been put up for sale.
The council gave us a few months to see if we, the tenants, could find the money to buy the building in order to keep the businesses there and allow the building to be kept in its current usage.
We therefore carried out an independent valuation of the building and have managed to raise the funds to meet that valuation.
We're not there yet though, the council have told us that they have to make sure they are getting the best value for the people of Leeds and therefore have put the building on the market to see if it attracts an offer significantly above ours.
Environmental Improvements
Alongside the valuation for the building we also worked with Tracey Brabin’s team at the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) to carry out an environmental audit of the building.
The building is 150 years old and is currently not very ‘green’, standing at Category D on the Energy Performance Certificate chart. The energy reduction Plan proposed various suggestions to get the building to Cat B with an estimated cost of £100,000.
And we need your help to raise the funds to make the necessary improvements but more importantly to help make sure the building is saved.
This is where we need your help!
The tenants of the building have kindly offered their skill and time to offer some rewards for those kind enough to support the campaign.
What will Aire Street Workshops be like if the tenants get to keep the building?
In short it will be the same but better!
We will dedicate the majority of the space to subsidised rent for new startup creative businesses. We will make much better use of the available space to create shared artist studio space as well as much better communal areas for collaboration.
We will also formalise the mentoring and guidance programme that so new creative talent will get access to more established people and businesses in their field to help them develop their talent but also become more commercial to help ensure the businesses can thrive.
We will also launch the Aire Street Talent Agency to help outside companies in Leeds and beyond access the awesome talent within the walls of the workshops.
It's a very exciting time and we really hope that with your help we'll be able to make these plans become a reality!
Even if we hit our target, should LCC's decision not go our way and the tenants are not successful in their bid for the building all money will be returned by Crowdfunder.