THE GREAT BIG EMPTY SHOP EXPERIMENT: Cardiff City Centre, 11-22 July

What’s it all about?
If you take a walk around Cardiff city centre and stray beyond the immediate environs of the impressive new St. David’s shopping precinct with its wealth of well-known retail brands (most of them headquartered outside Cardiff), two things become apparent. First, there’s an increasing number of empty shops around the city; and second, there are signs of a healthy independent retail (and other small enterprise) sector, based particularly in the city’s beautiful Victorian arcades.

The Great Big Empty Shop Experiment is an attempt by the Centre for Policy & Enterprise in Creative Industries (PECi), based at the Atrium in Cardiff, to find out what needs to be done to transform more of Cardiff’s empty shops into homes for start-up creative enterprises. (We’re defining ‘creativity’ quite widely to include activities like crafts, gardening, cooking and play, as well as the disciplines taught at the Atrium.)

So what’s occurring?
For the month of July, PECi has been granted temporary rent-free occupancy of a shop in the Capitol Centre by a charity called 3-Space, which exists to match empty properties with not-for-profits that can make ‘meanwhile’ use of the premises. During the middle two weeks of July (11th to 22nd), to coincide with the Cardiff Festival, we’ll be using the space to display lots of our students’ work – in fashion, photography, set design and design communication – and to hold creative workshops with visitors to the shop. There will also be creative exchanges – of books, materials and skills – throughout the fortnight. We’ll be conducting research throughout the experiment and sharing some of our interim findings with an expert panel of politicians, planners and creative workers at a brainstorming event – called Talking Shop, of course – on the evening of Wednesday 20 July (more details to follow).

What’s inspired us?

The pop-up movement. PECi’s Sophie Paterson posted this great piece earlier this year on the Creatrium blog. Close to home, we’ve been particularly impressed by the work of thinkARK in Cardiff in animating the city’s arcades – and, most recently, by Platffôrm, the high street pop-up hosted by the Atrium’s Fashion division.

La Cantine, Paris. We were introduced to this European ‘silicon allee’ co-working space – set in an old arcade in the midst of Paris’s grands magasins – by our partners in an EU-funded Interreg project on Economic Clusters of Cultural Enterprises (ECCE). As well as bringing freelance creative workers together, it also helps to establish and support start-up enterprises.

Talk about Local (TAL). The Atrium hosted the #TAL11 unconference in Cardiff earlier this year, and it made us think that there must be room for some social-media-enabled hyperlocal newsrooms in some of the city’s empty spaces, especially since the much-lamented departure of the Guardian’s Cardiff beat blogger.

Co-exist. This initiative is based in a Hamilton House, a re-purposed office block at Stokes Croft, Bristol. We like the mix of skills and activities that this space enables because it reminds us that creativity is an essential part of wellbeing.

What next?
We’ve already got plenty of exhibitions and events lined up, but we’re looking for more people to exhibit, perform, blog, lead workshops, give us stuff to swap and generally help out in the surprisingly capacious space within our shop. If you’d like to get involved (or just find out more), please contact the project administrator, Sophie Paterson (spatters@glam.ac.uk). We’ll be blogging regularly about the project over the next month or so, but the best way to keep in touch is to follow our Twitter feed, @CreAtrium. 

Dr. Gill Allard
27 June 2011