Role of the Tower Hamlets local authority

Tom Fleming

The Tower Hamlets municipality has been playing quite an important role over the last 10 – 15 years in terms of supporting the development of the creative industries. They have played this role in two ways. One, they developed interesting policy around the sector (i.e. interesting ways of supporting the development of the sector), which after financial services is seen as the most important sector in this part of London. One example concerns property, as this is an increasingly expensive part of London. They have been developing relationships with private landlords, with the private sector and developers, who are coming to this part of London. They have negotiated that for every new block of flats and for every new office building, the developer has to provide money for investment into the development of creative industries or they have to provide affordable studio places to be used by creative industry businesses. This way they have supported the development of a practical relationship between creative industries and private sector investors and developers. They also continue to fund specialist business support for the creative industries. They are thus making a statement that the sector is important, that it needs to be nurtured and that it shouldn’t be attracted to go somewhere else. They provide a lot of networking, showcasing and things like that. They recognise that the city authorities can often be inflexible and can be quite bureaucratic so the financial help to the creative industry sector is administered by organisations that are much closer to the creative industries sector. 

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Tom Fleming

Tom Fleming

Director of Tom Fleming Creative Consultancy in East London, United Kingdom

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