Rohan Silva: The new creatives are transforming London’s derelict buildings

If you were passing through east London on a freezing February afternoon five years ago, you might just have spotted two shadowy figures scrambling over the icy roofs of the derelict St Clement’s Hospital in Mile End. The six-acre site, once a Victorian workhouse, had been closed to the public for more than 150 years. Unless you were an inmate or worked there, you could only imagine what lay behind the imposing gates.

The two people adventurously clambering over the roofs were Dave Smith from the campaigning group London Citizens and an architecture student named Kate MacTiernan. They were exploring the empty buildings to see whether they might be suitable for a Community Land Trust, a radical new form of affordable housing that I wrote about last week.

But Kate didn’t only see the potential for housing in the spooky abandoned asylum, she also thought this public land should be opened up to the community. So with many helping hands from the local area, including the Oscar-winning film director Danny Boyle, as well as Lizzy Daish, Jess Sutton and Grace Boyle, they started the popular Shuffle arts festival in the uninhabited hospital. The festival continues to bring the Mile End community together every year and has since helped bring other places in the area to life as cultural venues and performance spaces.

I know about this story because I later married Kate — but she and the Shuffle team are just one group of a new generation of cultural entrepreneurs in London who are using the arts to breathe energy into neglected places.

Take Hannah Barry, for example, who walked into an empty multi-storey car park in Peckham 10 years ago and started an arts project called Bold Tendencies that has since attracted almost a million visitors. Her project has also sparked new investment and job creation in the area, helping to change things for the better in one of the poorest parts of the capital.

Or look at Fabien Riggall, the talented founder of Secret Cinema, which takes over empty spaces in London and transforms them into epic immersive experiences that draw huge audiences from all over the world.

There are so many more great examples, including Tom Foxcroft, who created an amazing creative venue called Village Underground in Shoreditch using decommissioned Tube carriages, and Unlimited Productions, which organises arts installations in the most unexpected places, such as London’s only lighthouse.

London leads the world when it comes to this type of dynamic cultural entrepreneurship, and it’s something we should be proud of.

This movement has arisen partly because the new generation of creatives can’t rely on state grants, so they have to innovate to attract audiences and new forms of revenue. The eye-watering cost of renting buildings in our city also plays a part too, meaning that young people are forced to take chances on places that no one else will touch. Whatever the reason, it’s now firmly part of the cultural life of the capital.

So next time you walk past an empty car park, closed pub or derelict building, say to yourself: what could it be transformed into? Cultural entrepreneurs are asking precisely that question, and London is a more vibrant and exciting place as a result.