Strange Field: Our Thinking
Why we do it this way
Public things give democracy a world to be in common. A world we can share and argue about. When those things disappear, something more than a building is lost. A community loses a place it was attached to.
The political philosopher Bonnie Honig made this argument writing about swimming pools and libraries. She could have been writing about artist studios, community venues, rehearsal spaces. The same logic applies. These are not amenities. They are the material of democratic life.
The art world is structurally broken. That is not a controversial thing to say anymore. Aindrea Eze said it. The White Pube said it. Most people working in it know it. The arguments about who gets represented, who gets paid, who gets to decide, those arguments are right and they matter.
Strange Field agrees with all of it. We have just taken the argument one step further. To the land underneath.
Because here is what keeps happening. A space opens. Artists move in. Something real gets built, community, practice, trust. Then the lease ends, or the landlord sells, or the council budget changes, or the funding dries up. And it is gone. And everyone is shocked. And then it happens again somewhere else.
This is not bad luck. It is the logical outcome of a system where artists occupy space but rarely own it.
This pattern is not new. In Glasgow it has been documented for decades. The writer and researcher Neil Gray has shown how artists have been used as instruments of property strategy in the city since the 1980s. Their presence in neglected buildings raises land values and cultural credibility. Displacement follows. The cycle repeats. The analysis exists. The conditions persist.
There is a particular version of this that needs naming. Temporary occupation of empty commercial buildings, offered free to artists, framed as opportunity, has become a standard response to the shortage of affordable space. It looks like provision. It feels like something. For individual artists it can be genuinely useful in the short term.
But structurally, it does something damaging. It fills the gap just enough that the harder question never gets asked. A building that looks occupied does not create the political pressure that might otherwise force a sale, a transfer, or a proper long-term solution. The landlord avoids empty rates. The council points to creative activity in the area. The ownership question disappears.
And then the termination notice comes. And everyone is shocked again.
"A building that looks occupied does not create the pressure that might force a real solution."
Local authorities are not the villain here either. Glasgow City Council operates Tramway, Platform, and the Gallery of Modern Art through Glasgow Life, and their existence matters. Libraries, schools, swimming pools: governments should fund and protect these things. The case for cultural centres being on that list is real.
But public provision and genuine security are not the same thing. Across Britain, local authority arts funding has fallen 55% in real terms since 2010. Scottish councils have cut per capita arts spending by 22% over the same period. What one administration protects, another cannot always afford. The security artists believe they have in a council lease is not the security that actually exists. The pattern keeps proving this. And yet the belief persists.
Partly because the alternative requires a harder ask. Partly because precarity dressed as provision is easier to accept than nothing.
There is something else worth saying. When a drug does not work, it gets withdrawn. The failure is documented. It informs what comes next. Social policy does not work like this. A programme runs, funding ends, something similar starts somewhere else. Nobody asks whether the net effect was good.
Meanwhile space produces visible results fast. Artists in buildings. Events. Photographs. It is legible to funders within a grant cycle. Community ownership takes years of unglamorous legal and financial work before anything is photographable. The system rewards the former and makes the latter nearly impossible to fund.
The people running these programmes are not wrong that they are doing good. They may be entirely untested on whether the systemic effect is good. Thatcher’s Right to Buy is the most publicised version of this failure: visible immediate impact, popular at the time, and structural consequences that took thirty years to fully materialise. By then accountability had dissolved and the assets were gone.
Strange Field led the campaign for The Pipe Factory’s ownership. We persuaded the owners to sell it into community hands. It took years. It required a legal structure, the right moment, and a very particular combination of relationships and persistence. We are now a member of Friends of the Pipe Factory, who own the building. It is not easily replicable. But it is possible.
Ownership is only half of it. Most ways of taking part in civic and cultural life are built around speaking. Meetings, consultations, panels, applications. Being fluent, quick and confident with words is treated as a sign of being right, or of belonging. That shuts out a lot of people. People who think through making, through space, through doing. People whose minds work in different ways. People who have never been given the room to speak. So we are trying an alternative. We use sociocracy, where decisions are made by consent in small circles with structured rounds, so everyone is heard without having to out-talk anyone. And we treat making, building and looking after a space as a real way of knowing, not an optional extra. The person who understands a building through their hands knows something a planning report cannot.
At Barrowfield Weaving Factory on French Street, Dalmarnock, we are still trying. We have a ten-year lease on a working-class industrial building. We were told, at one point, that it could be purchased. That offer was never put in writing. Without it in writing it was worthless as leverage for funding. Funding bodies would support repair once ownership was secured, but not the purchase itself. Every mechanism required a prior condition the others were supposed to provide. None of them closed.
We are now exploring philanthropy. Not because philanthropy is the right structural answer. But because the building is worth protecting and someone has to hold a steel stomach while the system works out what it actually believes.
Strange Field will keep researching and exploring alternative models of ownership. That work has started a journey that will take us from Land’s End to Lerwick in 2026/27. We want to understand what each model requires, and whether any of them can be reproduced elsewhere. You can find out more on our website under Slow Routes to Resilience.
Community ownership is not a panacea, but the risks of owning have solutions. Policy matters, and it needs to make ownership achievable at scale. But the reversal of the pattern, the attachment without security, happens when communities hold buildings. Everything else is contingent.
Honig, B. (2017). Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Fordham University Press.
Gray, N. (2009). Glasgow’s Merchant City: An Artist Led Property Strategy. Variant, 34.
The White Pube (2021). Ideas for a New Art World. Rough Trade Books.
Eze, A. (2023). Structurally F**ked. Rough Trade Books.
Campaign for the Arts (2024). Local government culture spending per person in England cut by more than 50% since 2009-10.
Autonomy Institute / Equity (2025). Local Government Arts Funding Tracker.
Strange Field is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). We operate The Pipe Factory and Barrowfield Weaving Factory, French Street, Dalmarnock, Glasgow.