hello-kate

Something that has been keeping me busy in 2025 is an emerging audacious plan to buy a community building for our neighbourhood.

I live on the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham, north London – in the heart of one of the most deprived wards in one of the most deprived local authority areas in England. There is no easily accessible community space on our (large!) estate – and the one potential building – the old estate office, which was a Sure Start centre for a while – is now on Haringey’s disposals list.

A few of us have been working to cook up a plan to get this building and turn it into a community asset. The council are supportive of our plan but need us to raise the money to buy it from them. We think there’s huge potential, but we’re in the classic bind at the start of a project like this – we need money for commissioning our own valuation and condition surveys, and while we’ve done some super fun events (see pics!) to get ideas and opinions, there’s loads more co-design and broadening of our thinking we need to do.

We have such dreams for the building – a community garden, a library of things, a public living room, hireable community space, a music practice room, a community-led retrofit centre for the estate – but if we can’t raise money quickly (the end of the financial year?!) it will be put on the market and then who knows what will happen. Our current thinking is set out here.

We’ve launched a fundraiser to help cover initial costs – here – and we’re applying for as many pots of feasibility funding as we can. We’ve been knocked back from the AHF feasibility pot as the building isn’t listed (although it is an important building in an important conservation area!). I know this is a tight time of year and there are zillions of important places to put money. But I would love advice from the wise folk in my network about how we might get over this initial project start up funding hump.

We’ve got a great group and a decent plan, and I know that we can make something real happen here next year. Really happy to chat to anyone who might have leads on useful Haringey-based funding pots!!