PLACE

Our surroundings are not just backdrops.
They are kin.

Streets, buildings, parks, and commons carry memory. They hold us in daily life, shape our rhythms, and quietly teach us how to belong. When places are neglected, extracted, or sold off, it is not just bricks and mortar that are lost it is part of our shared body, our collective home.

We begin from a simple orientation: place is relational.
If we treat places as disposable, life becomes disposable too.
If we treat places as kin, different futures become possible.

Through Common Ground, we work to protect and regenerate spaces under threat pubs, halls, workshops, high-street units, and community buildings that once held shared life and could do so again. We refuse the idea that these places exist only to generate short-term returns. Instead, we steward them as long-term hearths: spaces of work, care, culture, and connection that endure across generations.

Our approach goes beyond preservation.
We pair the revival of place with new ways of inhabiting it.

Using an equity credit model, we enable people who are locked out of property ownership and secure commercial space to build collective, long-term stakes through participation rather than upfront wealth. Rent is transformed from a dead cost into shared ownership. Buildings become shared infrastructure for meaningful work, not assets to be extracted and discarded.

When we act as though places are our relations, restoration becomes an act of care rather than control. Spaces are renewed not just for use, but for belonging. Together, we can reclaim threatened places as anchors of solidarity, creativity, and resilience — where people and place grow strong together again.