Bournemouth Council will decide tomorrow whether to provide £207,000 funding to kick-start a new European project in Boscombe to help creative industries and enterprise in the area.
Bournemouth Council already achieved £208.000 for a European ‘Recreate’ partnership project and Cabinet Members will consider and decide if Council will assign further £207,000 funding making a total of £415,000, to enable work to start this month and run until June 2015.
Councillor Jane Kelly, Cabinet Member for Partnerships and Regenerations, said: “This funding will be not just money, but it will come in terms of properties or services and we’re going to use it for our creative industry hub in the Boscombe Centre of Communty Arts.”
She added: “This project will provide new spaces for new creative industries and exibitions, and will help especially the graduates from arts school to start their own business in Bournemouth providing them a cheap space. It will run until 2015 because at that point, we hope and believe that it will be able to stand on its own feet. ”
Recreate” is a European Union INTERREG cross-border partnership project – an initiative that aims to stimulate cooperation between regions in the European Union and financed under the European Regional Development Fund– which involves 16 partner towns and cities from across the south and east coasts of England and northen France, and aims to boost the creative industries sector and promote social regeneration in declining city and urban centres.
Ria Wiocox, Boscombe local resident, says: ” I think it may be a good idea. Boscombe is not the way it use to be so anything extra that may attract people to come to Boscombe again woud be definitely good”.
Ali Ahmed, who lives in Christchurch road, says: “I thing that if enough people want to use old buildings for something productive instead of closing them down that would be very positive and any encouragement to young people to open their own business in their own area is welcomed.”
Here is what Boscombe’s residents think about Recreate project:
Ms. Kelly said that a definitive plan is still to be outlined and that if the allocation of funding is approved, consultation with local residents will follow, who so far seem curious and overall supportive of a new initiative that may help Boscombe regeneration and enable people to start their own business.
“If we can encourage creative small kind of business to come to Boscombe they will help to create a large footfall because people will come here to see them since they will be nowhere else, they will be unique.”
Main Image: Cristina Odero
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