We are a community interest company working to secure buildings in Bedminster Town Centre for community and social use – and keep them that way. We identify vacant and underused spaces, broker relationships between property owners and local organisations, and help community groups get the secure, affordable premises they need to operate and grow.
We sit in the space between community need and the property market – translating, brokering and building the trust needed to make new things happen. We work with property owners, developers, the council and built environment professionals, as well as the grassroots organisations and social traders who make Bedminster what it is.
The commercial market in Bedminster Town Centre is predominantly privately owned, development pressure is intense, and the routes into community control are rarely straightforward. On the high street, we work to reactivate vacant shopfronts through social leases and brokered agreements – building towards a genuine mix where retail and civic life sit side by side, and East Street serves the whole community, not just the market. And as new buildings go up across the Bedminster Green and Whitehouse Street regeneration zones, we work with developers and planners to negotiate community space within new schemes, helping local organisations access those spaces on long-term, affordable terms. Large-scale development brings large-scale opportunity with the right relationships.
We don’t promise easy answers. The property market is hard. Development timelines are long. Relationships take time to build. Ownership structures are complicated. What we can promise is commitment to Bedminster, and to the people who live and work here.
Bedminster Works is one of five places nationally selected by the National Lottery Community Fund to participate in the Platform Places programme – a three-year initiative testing new approaches to securing buildings for long-term community use and ownership. Across the five locations, the ambition is to bring around 15 buildings into community ownership. Our work in Bedminster is both locally grounded and nationally significant – contributing to an emerging body of evidence and practice that could shape how community asset development is approached in town centres across the country.
Our principles
- We are rooted, accountable and community-led
Through our board, community panel, members and community engagement, we are grounded in local realities and seek to ensure that those most affected by change in Bedminster Town Centre are meaningfully involved in shaping priorities.
- We strengthen what already exists
We build on existing strengths, assets and energy in Bedminster, adding value rather than duplicating or displacing local effort.
- We collaborate to make things possible
We convene, connect and broker relationships between communities, owners, developers, agents, public bodies, built-environment professionals and funders.
- We unlock buildings and build the infrastructure around them
Buildings are our starting point, but not our end point. We support the wider infrastructure required for community and socially trading use to succeed, including strong relationships, governance, finance, operational models and activation.
- We work with complexity and towards long-term change
We recognise that change happens within complex social, economic and property systems. We test new ways of working together across community, ownership and development that may contribute to longer-term change in how space is accessed and stewarded in Bedminster Town Centre.