Two Up Two Down
Note: This organisation was formerly known as Homebaked Community Land Trust. It changed its name to Two Up Two Down in 2025. Naomi’s interview, recorded in May 2026, refers to Homebaked CLT - this is the same organisation.
In 2002, the Housing Market Renewal Initiative designated the area around Anfield and Everton a market failure. 1,800 residential and commercial properties were demolished. 1,300 new homes were planned to replace them. The scheme was deeply unpopular - compensation for homeowners was rarely enough to buy one of the new properties, and a community that had survived on proximity and density was being systematically dismantled. When the coalition government pulled the funding in 2010, the streets were left abandoned.
What does it mean to live well?
That year, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk was commissioned by Liverpool Biennial. Her conviction was that art can create fields of interaction: relationships, debates, the conditions for people to shape their own surroundings. The initiating question was simple: what does it mean to live well?
Over the following years, her project invited the community to take matters into their own hands, with a people-centred, intimate approach to re-imagining the area. A group of more than 20 local people worked with architects and other design specialists to re-use a block of empty property comprising a former bakery building and adjoining terraced houses. Taking the community as their client, they designed an affordable housing scheme and shop, as well as meeting and project spaces. The buildings remained earmarked for demolition.
Naomi Cull, Communications and Engagement Lead at Two Up Two Down CLT
Brick by Brick We Build Ourselves
In April 2012, the community formed Homebaked Community Land Trust (now known as Two Up Two Down) to take on the development of the buildings and future community assets, with a focus on affordable housing. The following June, Homebaked Co-operative Bakery was incorporated, becoming the CLT’s first tenant.
Despite demolition orders still being in place, the CLT persisted. An internationally backed campaign saved the bakery building from demolition and facilitated the first phase of renovations. In April 2016, Liverpool City Council purchased the bakery freehold and granted the CLT a lease, with an agreement to transfer the asset for £1 on completion of first-floor refurbishment. The CLT refurbished the ground floor bakery and the flat above - creating an affordable home for a new business and four local people.
But the vision was always more than one building. In parallel with the development of the bakery building and flat above, Two Up Two Down entered negotiations with Liverpool City Council to lift the demolition order and create plans for the adjoining terrace of nine homes and the former recreation ground behind it. Working with URBED architects and LEDA, a participatory process of community design workshops invited local residents to learn together, develop new skills, and contribute ideas. The resulting scheme included a mixture of different sized homes, community and business spaces.
The scheme was scheduled to be delivered in 2020, in partnership with Liverpool City Council and Your Housing Group. But setbacks came: the pandemic first, then significant issues within Liverpool City Council delayed proceedings for years. The community kept pursuing it. In 2025, Liverpool City Council decided instead to sell the properties to a traditional developer on the open market.
The house recently sold by the council to a private developer
Two Up Two Down is now pursuing multiple other sites across the neighbourhood, carrying the skills and experience from this process forward. The vision has not changed: a neighbourhood where all can live well, now and in the future.
The Model
The CLT is co-owned by people who live and work in the area. The founding belief is simple: we all deserve to live well. For Two Up Two Down, that means homes and spaces that are high quality and kept affordable - not just now, but for future generations. It also means that how they work together is as important as what gets made. Local expertise is central to planning, design and development. Other expertise - architecture, finance, environmental sustainability - is invited to the table with no hierarchy between them.
What It Shows
Two Up Two Down is proof of something. That demolition is not the only answer to decline. That the community are here to stay. And that art, when it’s serious, can be the first step toward something structural. That when communities are given the space and tools to design their own futures, what they build is more careful, more rooted, and more likely to last than what gets imposed from above.
The council sold the site to a developer in 2025. That is the condition Two Up Two Down works in - not against a static enemy but against a system that keeps moving the goalposts. What stays constant is the neighbourhood. What stays constant is the CLT.