The high street isn’t what it used to be. But communities are coming together to claim ownership.
by Rebecca Hughes | Jul 02, 2026 | Community & citizenship, Stories
Reading time: 7 minutes
Walk down almost any town centre in the UK and you’ll see the same story told in two halves. On one side: shuttered units, faded fascias, the ghost of a chain that left three years ago. On the other: a bakery that opened last spring, a community pub that nearly closed but didn’t, a music venue with hand-painted signage and a gig on every Friday.
The difference between those two halves, more often than you’d think, is crowdfunding.
The “death of the high street” has been a reliable media headline for over a decade. And the statistics are real; across UK high streets, between 10-19% of shops now stand empty. Retail vacancy rates climbed, chains retreated, footfall dropped. But something else has been happening quietly alongside that decline. Communities have been buying back the spaces that the market abandoned. Not waiting for a developer or a council grant or a chain to move in. Just asking the people who live there to fund it.
The result is a different kind of high street. One that belongs to the people who use it.
What the new high street actually looks like
In Drewsteignton, Devon, locals raised £547,210 to buy and renovate the Drewe Arms, a community pub that had been at the heart of village life for generations. Not a landlord’s pub. Not a managed house. A pub owned by the community that drinks in it.
In Reading, Siren Craft Brew raised £271,732 from the people who love their beer to open an independent venue in the town centre, championing local food, drink, and the kind of social space no chain was ever going to provide.
In Hull, The New Clarence became the city’s first community-owned pub, raising £248,625 to secure its future. In Bristol, Jamaica Street Studios raised over £106,000 to bring a cultural landmark into community ownership before it was lost.
And across the UK, Own Our Venues has raised over £4 million across two Crowdfunder campaigns to buy the actual buildings that house grassroots music venues, so that the next generation of artists has somewhere to play, and the crowds who love live music have somewhere to go.
These aren’t charity campaigns. They’re communities investing in their own places.
Why this is happening on Crowdfunder and not somewhere else
This is the part that matters for anyone thinking about launching a campaign.
Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are built for global product launches. They’re excellent if you’re shipping a gadget to 12,000 strangers across four continents. But if you’re trying to save the pub on your street, a global audience of strangers isn’t what you need.
You need the people who walk past it every day
And it turns out those people show up. Crowdfunder’s data consistently shows that for community projects, the vast majority of pledges come from within a close geographic radius. Local projects are defined as having an average pledge distance of less than 80km. These tend to be projects with great community interest, such as cafes, bookshops, and wellbeing hubs, etc. Our data shows that local projects actually have an average pledge distance of less than 13km, highlighting how localised backers’ interest can be. The crowd that funds a community project isn’t the internet. It’s the neighbourhood.
Crowdfunding, in this model, becomes a mechanism for communities to support each other across postcodes, something no global platform is designed to facilitate, and no donation page captures.
On the flipside, projects occasionally capture hearts far and wide. The Elm Tree Pub in Weymouth, Dorset had a huge number of supporters from across the United States after their social media video went viral.
The urgency that actually makes it work
There’s another structural reason why community projects tend to raise more on Crowdfunder than on platforms built for passive, open-ended giving.
Crowdfunder campaigns have deadlines. That’s not a limitation, it’s a feature.
Every fundraiser knows that urgency drives action. An open-ended donation page tells supporters: give whenever you like. A campaign with a closing date tells them: if this doesn’t get funded by the 28th, it doesn’t happen. That’s a different conversation entirely. It’s why the Drewe Arms raised over half a million pounds. The community knew that if they didn’t act, the pub would close. The deadline made the stakes real.
GoFundMe campaigns, by design, run indefinitely. For personal emergencies, that makes sense. For a community project trying to build momentum and convert passive supporters into active backers, a campaign with a clear start and end is almost always more effective.
It’s not just about raising money
The thing that doesn’t get said enough about community crowdfunding is what happens to the people involved after the campaign ends.
When 400 people back a project, those 400 people have a stake in it. They tell their friends it’s open. They leave reviews. They come back. They back the next phase. The Drewe Arms didn’t just raise £547,000 — it created a community of co-owners who are personally invested in whether it succeeds. You can’t buy that kind of advocacy. You can only earn it by letting people be part of something.
This is what separates a crowdfunding campaign from a donation page. A donation page raises money. A campaign builds a crowd.
And that crowd; those backers, those co-owners, those people who put in £25 because they believed in it, is the real asset. The money funds the project. The crowd keeps it alive.
The government has noticed
In February 2026, the government announced £150 million in funding to revive UK high streets, with community-led regeneration at its centre. The language in the announcement was striking: “decisions driven by people who know their neighbourhoods best.”
That’s exactly what Crowdfunder campaigns have been doing for over a decade.
Read more — Pride in Place funding: how to set up a match fund
What this means if you’re thinking about launching
If you’re sitting on a project that would change something about your town, your street, or your community, a space that needs saving, a business that needs backing, a venue that deserves to exist, here’s what the evidence suggests:
Your crowd is closer than you think. The people who’ll fund it probably already walk past the thing you’re trying to build. You don’t need to reach strangers in San Francisco. You need to reach your neighbours, and it turns out, they’re already there, already invested, and already want this to exist.
A campaign with a deadline will raise more than a page that runs forever. Give your backers a reason to act today, not eventually.
And the money, when it arrives, comes with something more valuable: a community of people who helped build it, who’ll tell others about it, and who’ll come back when you need them again.
Further reading
- Councils and local authorities: How to choose your crowdfunding platform
- Crowdfunding for Community Interest Companies (CICs)
Crowdfunder has helped communities raise over £450 million for the projects they care about.
Last updated June 2026