Margate Creative Land Trust

Working for Thanet District Council, Augarde & Partners, in partnership with PRD and WorkWild, established a Creative Land Trust in Margate,. This involved working closely with the local creative sector and to co-design the Trust’s governance and operational model and producing an outline business plan to embed a sustainable financial strategy. We identified potential property market interventions, delivered a communications and engagement programme, set up the trust as a legal entity with charitable status, secured political buy-in and investment and supported the recruitment of trustees.

In addition, A+P were invited to continue working with Margate CLT to establish a property strategy and process for assessing viability and suitability to acquire. We developed a property acquisition strategy for the Land Trust in 2023. We conducted detailed site searches for properties in the Margate and surrounding area. We worked with the public sector regeneration and planning teams, local agents, used Land Insight and Co-Star search tools to establish a long-list of possible sites in the designated geography. These included sites in public and private ownership and a variety of typologies (brownfield, retail, garages, former cinemas, office). We created a bespoke assessment tool to review each opportunity to understand the relative merits and deliverability of each site. We created a model to test viability of each site based on providing a mixed model (commercial and affordable rent). We assessed the yields, hurdle rates and set this against the revenue requirements. The outcome was a shortlist of properties that are currently being taken forward by the Land Trust for further investigation.