Homebaked Community Land Trust

The Beginning: Housing Market Renewal & Loss

Homebaked CLT began in 2010 as a response to crisis. In 2002, the neighbourhood around Anfield and Everton was identified as a ‘market-failure’ under the Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI). This government-backed programme saw 1,800 residential and commercial properties demolished with 1,300 new homes intended to be built. However, the scheme was deeply unpopular with residents who felt it was undermining a once-thriving community. For home-owners, compensation was often insufficient to buy one of the new houses. The scheme was pulled in 2010, leaving the area effectively abandoned.

At the heart of this story was Mitchell’s Bakery – known locally as ‘The Pie Shop’ – serving pies to locals and football fans on match-days since 1903. By January 2011, stripped of its customer base as streets were emptied around it, the bakery closed. The building, like much of the local area, had been designated for demolition.

The Arts Project & Community Action

What started as an arts initiative called ‘2up2down’, supported by the Liverpool Biennial and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, asked how the local community could take matters into their own hands. Core to van Heeswijk’s philosophy is that art can create ‘fields of interaction’ that build relationships and trigger debates that can assist people to shape their surroundings. In June 2012, the community formed Homebaked Bakery Co-operative to re-open the space as a community-led business. In 2013, the Community Land Trust was formally established to take on responsibility for the bakery building and future community assets.

The Bakery Reopens

In October 2013, Homebaked Bakery opened as a social enterprise dedicated to feed, employ and train the local community. Its strapline became ‘more than a pie’. The bakery now employs 16 people, turns over £500,000 annually, and runs training courses. It uses the space as a community hub. Pre-COVID, 90% of the business’s income came directly through trading. During the pandemic, the bakery provided freshly baked loaves and rolls to local foodbanks and organised delivery of free school meals.

The Regeneration Strategy: ‘Brick by Brick and Loaf by Loaf’

Through long negotiations with Liverpool City Council, the CLT secured removal of the bakery from the demolition plans. In April 2016, the council purchased the freehold and granted the CLT a lease with agreement to transfer the asset for one pound on completion of first-floor refurbishment. The CLT refurbished the ground floor bakery and the flat above.

Parallel to this, Homebaked has concentrated on the potential of the site adjacent to the bakery and the former recreation ground at its rear, developing plans to refurbish the terrace of houses next to the bakery as part of longer-term aims to regenerate the local high street. Working with URBED architects and LEDA, a participatory process has been underway since 2018 – a series of five community design workshops invited local residents to contribute ideas. The Core Design Group developed plans for 26 affordable flats on the land next to the bakery. Residents helped choose windows, render colours, kitchen and bathroom fittings – creating a sense of ownership.

Community Ownership Model & Partnership

The CLT is co-owned by people who live and work in the area. Their strategy is rooted in a simple belief: we all deserve to live well. For Homebaked, that means making sure homes and spaces created together are high quality and kept affordable – not just now, but for future generations. The ‘how we work together’ becomes just as important as what is actually made. The work is based on acknowledging local expertise as key to planning, design and development – and inviting other expertise to the table (architecture, finance, environmental sustainability) with no hierarchy of expertise.

Homebaked has partnered with Your Housing for the actual build and will buy it back on completion; at that moment, the freehold of the land will be passed into community ownership for the CLT to hold and protect for future generations.

Why This Matters

Homebaked demonstrates regeneration led not by developers or top-down council planning, but by residents who understand their own neighbourhood – its history, its gaps, its potential. It uses cultural practice (art, food, community gathering) as the entry point to economic and social transformation. It shows that a building – a bakery – can become the anchor for an entire area’s reimagining. Most crucially, it proves that when communities are given the space and tools to design their own futures, they produce something more careful, more rooted, and more likely to last than schemes imposed from above.