A potential £500,000 investment has been earmarked to support the creative and digital industries and provide a central hub where local professionals can work alongside each other to create and grow small creative and technology businesses, exchange ideas and collaborate.
The new hub will be based at the Guildhall, Bath, following the relocation of the existing Council Connect Office to new facilities in Manvers Street. Over 3,500 square feet on the ground floor will be turned into a high-tech collaborative space for Bath and North East Somerset’s growing community of app designers, coders, copywriters and web developers. The space will include co-working areas, meeting rooms, training facilities and event space, with a range of memberships available to suit small and growing businesses.
The announcement follows the highly successful X Media Lab conference held in Bath last month. Hundreds of digital entertainment experts, including some who have worked on films including Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Inception, gave their support and advice to aspiring local creative businesses.
Councillor Cherry Beath (Lib-Dem, Combe Down), Cabinet Member for Sustainable Development, said: “The number of creative and digital enterprises in our area is truly remarkable and these are businesses that Bath & North East Somerset Council is proactively supporting.
“By bringing internationally renowned digital events to Bath and investing in The Guild Co-Working Hub the Council is playing our part in developing the city as a place of innovation and entrepreneurship, and furthering opportunities for local people to find employment.
“We want to create 9,300 jobs for local people over the coming years with a focus on the Bath City of Ideas Enterprise Area as a location for many of these. Given the strong track record of the high value, higher wage digital and creative industries in our area, we anticipate many of these new jobs will be in these fields. This is why the Council is determined to support existing and future businesses in these sectors to thrive and grow.”
With 3,200 businesses, the area has more creative enterprises per capita than any other area in the West of England and Bath & North East Somerset Council is looking to increase this by 20% in the next 20 years.
Tom Lewis, co-founder of tech start-up networking group BathSPARK, said, “We are excited to support this initiative, which will help to create a world-class co-working facility to assist new and growing tech and creative businesses in Bath. This investment sends a clear signal that the council recognises the importance of these sectors to the local economy, and a co-working hub at the Guildhall will be a vibrant demonstration of that investment.”
For more information and register your interest in the Guildhall Co-working Hub log onto http://www.coworkingbath.co.uk.
