Insights from the PBII Network Meeting in Bradford

For our most recent Place-Based Impact Investing (PBII) Network meeting, we convened in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The visit began with a tour of the Bradford City Village, led by Jamie Saunders, Service Lead at Bradford City Council. He outlined the ambitious proposal to deliver 1,000 new homes within the urban core through a partnership between the Council, ECF (English Cities Fund) and Muse, demonstrating a significant commitment to regenerating the former retail heart of the city.

This regeneration is not happening in a vacuum. It is deeply intertwined with Bradford’s designation as the UK City of Culture 2025, which has already proven to be a powerful catalyst for new investment, confidence, and community pride. While the official status lasts for one year, Bradford has developed a ten-year cultural strategy to ensure a sustainable legacy. This long-term vision illustrates how culture can be the essential binding agent for physical and economic regeneration, from public realm enhancements like the City Park to the vital cultural spaces emerging across the city.

Embedding Culture at the Heart of Regeneration

As Erica Ruston MBE, co-founder of the Kindred model, reminded us, culture is not a mere add-on but a fundamental catalyst for economic and social shifts. By stimulating pride, participation, and creativity, cultural activity builds the foundation for community growth and cohesion. Top-down investment in the built environment can only achieve so much. It must be complemented by grassroots investment in place-based creative entrepreneurs to foster a living, breathing culture that defines a place’s identity.

This perspective was reinforced by Carolyn Abel, Director of Culture and Tourism at Southampton City Council. She reiterated the importance of embedding grassroots creativity into broader regeneration efforts, for example by integrating cultural and creative strategies into local development plans. This highlights how small-scale but well-targeted social investment can play a vital role in stimulating activity beyond the city centre, particularly where traditional viability metrics make large-scale capital investment challenging.

The City of Culture programme has created opportunities across Bradford, strengthening community ties and reshaping the city’s narrative. For a place that has faced historic social tensions, this focus on belonging and cohesion is particularly significant.

Bridging the Gap Between Culture and Capital

Despite its evident impact, culture’s role in economic growth is often undervalued in conventional funding decisions. Amy Tarr, Associate Director for Policy and Research at Creative UK, noted that despite strong evidence of cultural impact, and the recognition of the creative sector in the Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy, the lack of a recognised cultural evaluation framework makes it harder for cultural organisations to access long-term investment. This gap between place shaping (plans and visions) and place making (bringing places to life) remains a critical challenge which Creative UK is actively seeking to address.

In today’s fiscally constrained environment, culture must compete with other priorities for funding. The indices we use to measure the success of places often have a culture-shaped hole. Greater creativity is needed in how we measure and prioritise outcomes, placing more weight on culture as a key objective of inclusive growth. It was also noted that popular cultural offerings are often positioned as temporary or ‘meanwhile’ uses; these should be recognised as ‘worthwhile’ in their own right and integrated into long-term strategic development plans.

Impact-Adjusted Capital

Our discussions concluded with a shared recognition: to unlock the full potential of regeneration, we need impact-adjusted capital. This means investment that supports not only the bricks-and-mortar of development but also the cultural and social fabric that brings places to life. The challenge is to deploy new financial tools and models that prevent regeneration from inadvertently driving up poverty, ensuring that growth is genuinely inclusive and allows the latent creativity of communities to flourish.

Looking Ahead: Lessons from Bradford

Bradford’s journey offers a powerful lesson: successful regeneration is about more than new homes and infrastructure. It is about weaving culture, creativity, and community into the fabric of a place to create growth that is inclusive, resilient, and rooted in local identity.

The Bradford tour highlights key recommendations from our recent White Paper, Scaling-Up Local Investing for Place-Based Impact. It underscores the necessity of understanding the local context to inform investment decisions. Adopting a risk–return–impact lens is essential for aligning capital with broader social outcomes. Finally, effective delivery depends on strong strategic alignment with strategic authorities, backed by robust political leadership, to enable investment at scale.