Take a look at the Forest Hill, Sydenham & Kirkdale Village bid for the Portas Pilot Fund. Please support our bid by viewing the video and liking it. The more support we get the better our opportunity of being selected as one of the Pilot Towns. Selected towns will be announced in May.
The Portas Pilot fund for those that don’t know is a fund of £1m that the government are going to allocate to 12 towns across the UK at a maximum of £100k per town. The towns will form part of a pilot scheme implementing the recommendations made in the Portas Review, an independent review of failing high streets carried out by high street guru Mary Portas and published in December.
In the video you will see me speak about my intention to open a pop up shop in the area. For some time I have been interested in high street regeneration and specifically how to bring empty shops back into use.
The Pop Up Shop Project
My proposed initiative is to renovate a unit that currently stands empty and let it out to a variety of carefully selected retailers on a weekly basis. The retailers should appeal to the local demographic and should be complementary to existing businesses. When it isn’t being let to retailers I’d like to make it available to arts organisations at a subsidised rate.
A major part Bake will play will be to market the pop up shop so as to create a buzz around the project and to generate footfall which will benefit the tenants and the locality. The initiative will offer income to the landlord at a notoriously difficult time to let units, and provide an opportunity for retailers to test the high street shop format. As there is a high amount of interest in pop up shops at the moment there will also be a lot of press coverage which will be beneficial to both the landlord in terms of future rental opportunities and of course to tenants.
This project will be a ‘pilot’ scheme for Bake, and if it proves to be successful we intend to roll the model out to other empty units across South London.
I am interested in speaking with both landlords in Forest Hill and Kirkdale Village, and to possible tenants so please do get in touch if you’d like to find out more information.
Louise