Bank Job by Powell Hilary; Edelstyn Daniel;

Author:Powell, Hilary; Edelstyn, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

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A former high-street bank in Walthamstow has become a hub of cultural action leading social and economic change. Hoe Street Central Bank employs and trains local people, shares knowledge through public events and has bolstered the local economy through art sales supporting a food bank, homeless kitchen, youth project and primary school, and destroying £1.2 million of local debt.

Rejecting repetitive narratives of communities moved on by capital forces, the building is now an asset of community value (ACV) and we launch an ambitious community share offer to buy and develop the building. The ‘Rebel Bank’ will become ‘Power Bank’ – a space where culture leads debate and action on the economics of climate breakdown. A beacon of hope in a dense city in its sustainable, solar-powered design and hyper local and global community engagement. It will grow as a space that houses public print, darkroom and make space, flexible venue, bar and kitchen, artists’ studios and social enterprise offices and top-floor live/work artist residencies.

So declared our application to the Mayor of London’s regeneration programme the Good Growth Fund.

We drafted and redrafted business plans, architecture briefs and funding applications. We fell down another rabbit hole investigating ownership models, enlisting the help of an expansive pool of expertise from Community Share Offer advisers, financial and business modellers, quantity surveyors and a team of student architects mentored by our friends down the street, architects Kristin Trommler and Tilo Guenther.

Our landlords, as the new owners of the building, were supportive of our tenancy and open in their intentions to sell. For one of them, it was divine intervention, a gift from God that we did not want to stand in the way of – well aware of the cuts that have decimated vital legal-aid provision. The building had been bought for just under £600,000 and was now on the market for £2.5 million. The gift of speculative financial forces would come to distort all relations. Money would be all that talked. A sales agent named Malachi proudly proclaimed himself a ‘messenger from God’ in a black sheepskin and fedora. For us, he was a messenger of the power and violence of capital, and the unfortunate social relations it creates. This all-consuming negotiation and fight for a building became a big part of our Bank Job – revealing most clearly the financialisation of everything and the speculative property bubbles at the heart of the personal debt crisis. Unable to secure the assurance of being able to be given time to raise the money required to bid, we moved to the Localism Act 2011 and quickly realised its inadequacies. This law allows communities to apply to local planning departments to get buildings listed as ‘assets of community value’ thus ensuring the ‘community right to bid’ within a six-month moratorium period where the owner cannot sell to anyone else, but it does not oblige the owner to accept the bid or deal with the ‘community’ in any way. What it did achieve was to rupture our good relationship with the owners.

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