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Annual General Meeting
The Annual General Meeting of the Ilfracombe Community Land Trust was held on Tuesday, 19 May.
The current Board were reelected en bloc.
The Chairman, Mark Read, gave the following report:
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Setting Foundations - impressions from the first site visit with Poltair
With construction work finally beginning on the Bicclescombe Nursery site, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on the journey that the Ilfracombe Community Land Trust has undergone since its inception. The hope is that we can learn from our experience, share with others, and hopefully find more land to begin another project providing affordable social housing for our community.
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Building Relationships - members of the ICLT meet with representatives of the project teams.
On Monday, 2nd March, members of the ICLT board met with representatives from Poltair Construction, Gates Consultancy – a firm managing the project, and Aster Housing Group, who will manage the development upon its completion in early summer 2027.
A great benefit of Poltair being a local firm is that they are already very familiar with the site itself, aware of the challenges it poses, and aware of the rewards it will offer tenants when they arrive. They are well-acquainted with the practicalities they must navigate to complete the build, and, being a local firm, they are well connected to the supply chain of materials and tradespeople they will need.
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Not such a grey day!
On a grey February Saturday afternoon, upon our Treasurer’s dining table sat some 112 pages of a freshly couriered contract for our signature. Which felt a bit inauspicious considering the years of conversations and project meetings and site visits and negotiations and planning applications as well as bat mitigations between ourselves, North Devon Council, Aster Housing Group, with help from consultants at Middlemarch, Gates and many other agencies – just a couple of squiggles with a black biro and back in the envelope for delivery to our lawyers. Despite the pragmatic austerity of the event, it marks a significant milestone in the journey from overgrown, brambled dereliction to thriving and beautiful community life.
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Representatives from four of the North Devon CLTs meeting to discuss and share information on their projects.
We’re always keen to learn from and share with other local Community Land Trusts. Recently, we were pleased to welcome colleagues from Braunton, Lynton & Lynmouth, and Mortehoe & Woolacombe, along with Alison Ward from Middlemarch, to Ilfracombe.
We heard of the challenges facing local CLTs - long struggles to get planning permission, to find suitable and affordable land, and indeed to find anywhere flat enough to build on that hasn’t already been snapped up for other uses. Conversely, while many areas have large empty buildings, converting them to modern accommodation is beyond the reach of most CLT budgets.
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Allotment Collective Project Leader Sophie Read is recovering bricks from the Bicclescombe site.
There’s an old adage of “one man’s trash is another’s treasure”. In the past couple of weeks, the main buildings at the Bicclescombe Nursery site have been demolished, as part of North Devon Council’s enabling works in preparation for the Ilfracombe Community Land Trust’s project to build 16 new units of much-needed social housing. The demolished buildings were derelict and increasingly hazardous, but they were constructed from beautiful red bricks.
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ICLT Chair, Mark Read, speaking at a meeting of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
On June 27, our Chair, Mark Read, was invited to present our work as a Community Land Trust at an event for the Royal Town Planning Institute. The event was exploring Ilfracombe and how planning could be used as a tool for regenerating deprived coastal communities. Within his daily work leading the North Devon Salvation Army, Mark is well acquainted with the deprivation and challenges faced by communities in the area, and so was able to offer some insights and description before presenting our Bicclescombe Nursery project as a good example of regeneration.