A sustainable future for our railway heritage – and an AGM!

Monday 4th December saw an evening which combined a fascinating exploration of railway heritage brought back to life with YoCo’s 2024 AGM – one of those facts of life of being a constituted body, in YoCo’s case a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG). AGMs rarely get the pulse racing, but we made ours a celebration of a fascinating year and paired it with an illustrated talk by Tim Hedley-Jones, Director of the Railway Heritage Trust (and a York resident). The Trust has almost forty years’ experience of supporting organisations to restore and re-use our railway heritage from waiting rooms to water towers. In his talk, Tim began with the demolition of Derby Midland station in 1985 (which prompted the formation of the Railway Heritage Trust) and how since then the Trust has supported more than 2000 projects with around £62m of grant funding. These have varied in scale from Sheffield station’s public hall, through to signal boxes and from the clearly picturesque to some really challenging infrastructure.

Tim very kindly allowed us to host his presentation slides which can be browsed here .

We then – via CAKE, naturally – moved on to YoCo’s AGM with a swift romp through the year’s highlights. We continued to run monthly Open Meetings, this year themed around Warm Homes, Co-Housing and Community-Led development, York Open Studios, the ownership of public space and food networks and plant exchange, and a walk through Wild Streets. Along the way we launched the York Central Heritage Forum at an event with the Civic Trust’s Andrew Morrison exploring the area’s pre-railway history, and subsequent events explored Holgate Windmill, the City Archives, and the NRM’s plans for its buildings and spaces.

We hosted a design project for York St.John Interior Design students, looking at future uses for the Foundry buildings, and in a different perspective on the same buildings we presented proposals to York Central Partnership Strategy Board to create a business incubator and community makerspace there, along with development of forever-affordable homes and a centre for learning and culture.

We organised an online event exploring how to co-own your local economy – speakers at Don’t Extract – redistribute! included Coin Street Co-operative from London’s south bank, the pioneering Mayday Saxonvale community project from Frome and key people from Homes England, Friends Provident Foundation and Centre for Local Economic Strategies. Hot on the heels of that we took part in the Radix Big Tent Ideas Festival, hosted in York’s Deanery Gardens. We had a gazebo in their Community Fayre, Helen was a speaker at the Leaders’ Summit and Phil chaired a discussion panel during the following day’s public events. You can read more about all of the above events on our Blog page.

Since then, like many with an interest in York Central, we have been awaiting the appointment of the master developer by Homes England. Earlier in the year we had many meetings with both of the final shortlisters, and encouraged by these we have spent the autumn and winter months developing initial strands of work which we hope will lead into collaborative projects. We have been discussing local economy and economic modelling – with Friends Provident Foundation, Mutual Credit Services and with Homes England and regional community housing hubs. (To see how important economic models are for local development, take a look at Mayday Saxonvale’s Economic Manifesto). We’ve also started a collaborative investigation with artists from York Open Studios, asking how space and facilities for collaboration could allow greater creative work within the city.

But all of this needs to sit on a stable base:- YoCo is a membership organisation, currently with more than seventy members, and it is legally constituted as a CLG which requires a small team of directors to keep it functioning (raising money, and paying bills). As a “micro-entity” with no liabilities we don’t require formal audit, but submit simplified accounts to Companies House. Prior to our most recent financial year to 31st March 2023 we had received grant funding from Growing Green Spaces, and during the year income for a specific event in the summer of 2022 from UoY, along with small sums for leading events and walks from UoY, UYSJ and the Forward Institute. Our outgoings have been venue hire, Corporation Tax and Public Liability Insurance. A financial statement setting this out was approved by members by a show of hands.

We finished with more cake, and looked forward to an interesting year ahead.