SMALL businesses given a home in a disused building in Oxford are thriving one year after a new initiative was launched to give them a lifeline.
Makespace Oxford in Aristotle Lane started as a group of organisations who felt pushed out of Oxford due to rising rents.
These were local and creative organisations which needed space to make items as well as working with computers.
Together they began to talk to landlords about how to go about bringing some of the city’s empty and underused spaces back into community use.
Transition by Design, an architecture and design cooperative working on social and environmental justice issues, is based at Makespace Oxford.
Lucy Warin, a project designer at Transition by Design, and a member of the Makespace Oxford team, said: “We now have 63 people for whom Makespace is their main workplace which includes 15 anchor tenant organisations and 14 hot deskers.”
In February last year, the steering group of Makespace Oxford, including Transition by Design Cooperative, Aspire Oxford, Broken Spoke Bike Coop and Community action Groups - Oxfordshire, picked up the keys to Aristotle House, a 600 sq m two-storey 1960s office building in North Oxford.
The building belongs to Wadham College and had previously been used by Oxford University Press and Oxford Illustrators.
Until 2018 it had been unused for a number of years.
READ AGAIN: Vacant shops in Oxford on the rise - what should happenMakespace Oxford secured £80,000 in funding, from Oxfordshire Community Foundation, The Old Bakehouse Trust and Sankalpa Trust to cover the cost of fitting out of the building, recruitment of tenants and a part-time coordinator role.
Overwhelmed with applications, businesses began to move in as early as April and the building’s studios were fully occupied by July the same year.
Tenants pay a sliding scale of rent depending on the size and make up of their organisation, their turnover and the work they do.
Residents include East Oxford Fabricators, New Ground Coffee, start-up coffee roasters working with people leaving prison, Sabali Pots, a community pottery studio and the Young Women’s Music Project, a recording space and HQ for the much loved Oxford-based music and education project for young women.
The base is also home to the Tandem Festival, a community-run festival focussing on the arts as a channel to collectively explore climate change and our environmental impacts.
And you can visit to share the Oxford Library of Things, a library of useful items for anyone to borrow.
Other businesses include Lisa Made it, a local designer, illustrator and clothing maker, Inner Peace Records, a charitable recording studio, and designers, filmmakers, strategists, consultants, developers and change makers.
Makespace has become a thriving community space with frequent events attracting over 2,000 people through our doors.
Ms Warin added: "Based on the success of 1 Aristotle Lane, we were approached by Oxford University Estates Department in regards to an empty shop front on Little Clarendon Street.
"In November, Makespace and Transition by Design transformed the shop into Open House, a public talking shop on housing and homelessness.
"Our tenancy agreement with Wadham for the building at 1 Aristotle Lane comes to an end in February 2020 and we are already in talks with landlords across the city about how we can bring more empty, underused or unloved spaces back into community use for the good of the whole city."
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