From spare room office to prominent High Street location — an Isle of Wight Community Council is helping to regenerate Newport.
The former Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop on Newport High Street is now the home of Newport and Carisbrooke Community Council.
With offices for staff on the 1st floor, the ground floor has been divided into flexible exhibition space, a meeting room, working space and shop lets for small independent businesses or charities. At the moment, the shop lets are offering cost-of-living advice and support for those who need it.
It recently hosted the National Gallery’s touring exhibition of John Constable’s The Cornfield, which attracted almost 1,000 visitors.
Councillor Julie Jones-Evans says it shows the Community Council’s commitment to the High Street. She hopes it will be a vibrant place, with small spaces for small businesses, and the Community Council could have gone anywhere but it was important to be seated in the heart of town. Meetings of the Community Council are now also being held there.
Cllr Jones-Evans said there are good projects happening in Newport now, highlighting the NHS hub and Wadhams project with Platform One, and in 6 months the town would be a lot different.
The project has cost around £706,000 to buy the building and refurbish it with funding from a loan from the Public Works Loan Board, the parish precept and grant funding. Through loan repayments, the Council and Newport residents will pay roughly £52,000 a year, for the next ten years.
Cllr Geoff Brodie, Newport and Carisbrooke Community Council’s finance lead, said he has always been cautious with how taxpayers’ money is spent but the shop will become an asset beneficial to residents.
The feedback from residents, council clerk Josh Tombleson said, is that the project has gone down well and they have been impressed with the investment in the building.
He said the High Street presence has allowed the Council to speak to residents which helps shape the authority’s activities. The shop has also enabled the Council to become a custodian of the Newport Carisbrooke Heritage Society with the hopes to present its archive at a later date.
Asset? Yeah right. We lost a decent shop so a bunch of numpties can sit on their thrones
Better than an empty shop, and the sooner people realise that High Street shops needs to be supported , then the loss of our shops will halt and hopefully reverse.
Our tax laws need updating to make sure the big online retailers ( Uk or International ) pay a fair share of taxes proportional to their sales volume, currently bricks and mortar shops are propping them up , even though they are their unfairly privileged competitors.
Action is needed before the town centres decay beyond salvation, and become ghettos.
Why should shops that have a sound business plan and sell what the public requires pay more than hobby shop owners who come and go like the wind without paying their debts, the high street as a concept is dead, and has been dead for years, even King Canute had to accept defeat in the end.
Councillor Julie Jones-Evans says it shows the Community Council’s commitment to the High Street. £706,0000 that has to be paid back by us .. who may never step foot in there, how many more of these pop up IWC open an office, but not support local businesses are we going to pay for .. scrutiny .. not a word that’s used at the IWC .. wake up IWC !!
Newport is dead.
Its been ruined.
Nobody looks around Newport anymore.
turn it into flats and houses.
Newport is a waste land. Not one person went to Newport today because of the lack of free parking! The council needs to wake up a subsidise more parking to save our towns!
Plenty of free parking. 1 hour in council car park, 2 hours in Morrisons, hour and a half in Sainsburys, another hour in M&S.
Only the truly stupid pay to park in Newport.