Tania Charman is the director of the Heart of Hastings Community Land Trust, which has proposed a community of self-build housing and workspaces on the Old Power Station site in the Lower Ore Valley. They want to get local people to people to plan and construct the buildings, plus a section of the greenway route from Ore Station to Broomgrove Road.
The only way things are going to change is through the people’s power.
What’s your name?
My name is Tania Charman and I come from Hastings. I’m originally from London but I’ve living in Hastings for 20 years now.
What do you do?
I run my own business with my husband and I’m also a councillor and county councillor in Hastings for Old Hastings and Tressel Ward. Tressel Ward being the poorest ward and Old Hastings being a gentrified ward. I also like to be involved in voluntary things, I always have done, so I sit on two land trusts.
When did you decide to get involved in community land trusts?
It wasn’t a deliberate thing to get involved. When I became a councillor in Tressel Ward about two years ago there was already an established group that was a non-build community land trust that was saving a woodland called Speckled Wood, so my first experience was by sitting in their meetings and learning about it. Shortly afterwards there was an opportunity to set up a new community land trust, Jess Steele was leading on that, and one of the projects that it was looking at was just over the boundary of my ward. It was a long term derelict power station site, very important to the community.
How do you fit it in?
I’ve sat as a director on the CLT since February and it’s taken me a while to work out how I fit in with the CLT. But now it’s picking up pace. I’ve come up with a project idea to engage the community that will support the CLT. So right now I’m bid writing. But really sometimes it’s a case of finding yourself doing invoices for your business at 11pm.
What’s been your proudest moment so far?
My proudest moment was November last year when I was asked to speak to a group of people about aspirations for the site and potential ideas for the site. You don’t know who your audience is going to be and how they’re going to react. So for me it was going along and seeing their reactions to what I was saying. That’s when you know that you’re delivering something in the right way.
What’s been the hardest?
The hardest thing for me has been the division between being on the council and being part of a CLT. Potentially the council want to work with us, that’s great, but also the council has its own plans to start building housing. So there’s this reticence from the council because they see us as competition. How we can compete with the money that they can borrow and their resources, I don’t know. However, it seems like they feel that way.
What drives you when you hit those moments?
What drives me? The people. It has to be the people. I’m socially regenerated myself, so I lived in social housing for 15, 16 years. I raised my daughter in social housing. So I come from a bottom up, really, that’s what I believe in. I’ve had top down regeneration done to me and the community that I’m in and it’s not a nice process. So I always remember that the fight is from the ground up and that is what inspires me, inspiring other people.
What’s the next step?
The next step for us is that we’ve just secured a licence on the Broomgrove Power Station, that means we can actually start using the site, using it for consultations and events, attracting the community back to what is a long forgotten space. It’s been left, it’s been boarded up, some people have broken in to use it for dog walking. Most people have forgotten that it’s there. So it’s about awakening that again and asking people what they want to happen with it. We don’t want to prescribe too much. We’ve come up with some ideas but they’re not set in stone, because the community might want something different. The other project is in the white rock area. We’re moving forward at buying our first property, to regenerate that to provide homes with capped rents and affordable rents.
How did you vote in the EU referendum and why?
I voted to stay in. It was a difficult decision. I couldn’t really make a decision in a national framework – I found that difficult to do. Though I wanted to stay it, for me it was about Hastings and how it would affect our town. There was an exercise that was done there about how much money we probably contribute, done by the council leader, and how much money we got from the EU. The money we got from the EU was absolutely invaluable. We’ve still got some money in the pipeline and we’re hoping some of that is secure but we may still lose it. That was my fear and that’s why I voted to stay in.
How will the outcome affect you?
We had an urban innovation bid in the for EU. That was in early stages and there were no guarantees anyway. But we got wind that we’d failed in that and that was a £3 million bid with the borough council. But they gave us some helpful pointers. They liked the project and there’s always that hope that they would have pushed it out anyway. But now we’ve come out of EU.
What would you say to someone looking to get involved?
Go for it. I think what’s happened in society today is that people don’t get involved because they think they can’t do anything, it’s too much bureaucracy, there’s too much red tape, how am I going to influence that? And then they go back to being sedentary again. That’s not the way it is. The only way things are going to change is through the people’s power. And the only way that’s going to happen is if people join, understand the concept and want to be involved in owning and managing housing stock.
