What you told us
We would like to thank everyone who took part in the consultation about community use and access at Hornsey Town Hall. Over 300 people shared their views with us, either through the online survey or at one of our workshops, which we, the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust, have analysed and summarised in a report on the consultation.
You can view and download the full report here.
The findings showed very clearly that there is a huge amount of community interest in the future of the Town Hall. People want to see it brought back to life as a vibrant, sustainable place at the heart of Crouch End, bringing social, cultural and economic benefits to the area.
Consultees’ 4 top priorities for the community use aspects of the Town Hall are: Creative arts use, community facility, educational opportunities and business space, within a financially sustainable envelope. Participants also stressed that they want to be able to hold the future operator to account through long term community governance of the Town Hall.
Our report will be going to Cabinet on 16th June, as an appendix to the council’s paper on the Town Hall.
Cabinet paper
The paper being presented to Cabinet on June 16th seeks approval for the council to run a procurement exercise to select a developer (or a consortium of developer/operator) to build housing on the car park to the rear of the site, restore the Town Hall and operate it (or work in partnership with an operator to run it).
The council paper stresses the importance of future community use and access. One of the key objectives of the work is to “facilitate cultural, community and other activities in the Town Hall, provide public access to the building and make a positive contribution to the local economy”. The paper also makes clear the council’s objective to remove its ongoing liability for the building and to create a financially sustainable future, meaning that they anticipate a mix of commercial and community uses in the future.
The full Cabinet paper can be read here. As it is a large document of over 500 pages (the HTH papers run from page 179 to 206), we have created a cut down version relevant to the Town Hall, which can be downloaded here.
Next steps
Our report on community use and access will be used to create the tender brief for developers so that their tender proposal will respond to what you want to see at the Town Hall.
We will be part of the evaluation panel assessing bids from developers, judging their community use and access offer in the context of your feedback. We have already successfully fought to have the ‘community use and access’ criteria to be the highest scoring part of the tender evaluation.
The procurement process is long and the timescale for selecting a preferred bidder is likely to be June 2016. In the meantime, we are urging Haringey Council to ensure that the doors to the Town Hall stay open with creative interim uses as are happening now at the HTH Arts Centre.
We, the Hornsey Town Hall Creative Trust, will continue to champion the maximum community benefit from the ongoing operation of the Town Hall, in accordance to what you told us in the consultation process.