Mentor Spotlight: ARUP and West Marsh Development Trust

Building momentum for community-led housing in Grimsby.

In West Marsh, Grimsby, more than 300 homes sit empty while thousands of people remain on the housing waiting list. Many residents have lived with the consequences of poor-quality housing for years: damp, mould, spiralling energy costs, absentee landlords and homes left to deteriorate. Alan Burley and Neil Barber, local residents from West Marsh Development Trust, decided they didn’t want to simply campaign around the problem anymore. They had a solution, and the drive to bring it to life.

The ambition was bold: to take derelict, empty homes into community ownership (targeting five to start with) and transform them into affordable, safe, quality homes for local families – through an ethical landlord model rooted in community care. 

Image: Alan and Neil at a workshop in September

Location: Grimsby

“We were inspired by our neighbours East Marsh United, as well as the growing movement of community housing around the country. 

Through East Marsh United, people have gone from having 4-5 landlords in a year and noone responding to their broken boiler for months, to multiple families having secure homes, and only one household moving out in four years – and that was to move town!”

– Alan 

At the start of 2025, Alan and Neil joined Footwork’s People and Place programme to help turn that ambition into a practical, deliverable plan. The programme involved mentorship from built environment professionals at Arup: Helene Grosden, Zarina Husain , Catherine Darby-Roberts.

“Having professionals like ARUP in our corner…”

Alan describes the mentorship as one of the biggest catalysts in the project’s progress so far. 

“Without ARUP and Footwork, we wouldn’t be where we are today: strong relationships and trust with the council and local partners and close to the first house purchase. In fact, I’d be retired instead, sitting back and seeing all the untapped potential as the housing crisis gets worse! Having professionals like ARUP in our corner has been a powerful lever.” 

Over the course of the year, the mentorship helped Alan and Neil accelerate key decisions, unlock relationships and partnerships, and build local momentum around a community-led housing vision. What began as a fixed number of days of mentorship (baked into the People and Place programme) turned into a broader pro bono partnership.

Image: Alan, Neil, Catherine and Helene

Location: West Marsh Community Centre

For example, Alan and Neil had initially been exploring raising funds to employ a housing manager. During a mentorship conversation on a Footwork residential in Hastings, Helene Grosden from ARUP floated an alternative idea: what if a local registered housing provider managed the properties initially, until West Marsh Development Trust had grown the scale and capacity to do this themselves?

That lightbulb moment led to a partnership with charity Doorstep (with whom Alan had collaborated in the past) – “a meeting of kindred spirits that moved the project forward more quickly,” says Alan.

With Doorstep set to manage the first homes, West Marsh Development Trust could focus on developing its Community Benefit Society (CBS) structure and longer-term housing plans, instead of expending limited energy and resources on fundraising for a housing manager too early.

A partnership rooted in trust, not hierarchy

At Footwork, we often talk about “professionals on tap, not on top” (coined by Tony Gibson, pioneer in community-led neighbourhood design). It’s the idea that technical experts shouldn’t direct local change, but instead help enable communities to realise their own ambitions. 

“When it comes to community-led housing retrofit, the transformation of multiple homes is greater than the sum of its parts. 

It’s about systems change, it’s about wider outcomes like health, community resilience and equity, and it’s about recognising that people and communities are at the heart of a just transition in the built environment.” – Helene

From the moment Helene first met Alan and Neil at a People and Place gathering in Kilburn, she was struck by their determination and entrepreneurialism.

“Alan and Neil are inspirational and so deeply committed to their community. They’re on a mission: they’ve seen the problem, figured out what resources are needed, and built the local trust required to deliver real outcomes in their community. 

It quickly became very obvious that Alan and Neil knew exactly what it would take to make change happen – in a way outside ‘professionals’ often don’t.”

For Helene and Zarina, this involved a conscious shift away from the instinct that many consultants are trained into; i.e. arriving with fully-fledged solutions and taking the lead.

“Our natural wheelhouse is to enter solution mode… here’s what you should do: A, B, C.”

Instead, this mentorship became about asking a different question:

“Where in this puzzle do I best fit? Alan and Neil knew the solution, and were best placed to deliver it. But there were challenges we could help unblock.”

Over the year, that meant offering strategic advice where useful, opening doors, making connections and facilitating conversations, from council decision-makers to academic experts on flood risk. It meant sharing technical expertise around retrofit standards and housing systems. It also meant helping shape the narrative and a business case that set out the project’s expected impact, including building and retaining local retrofit skills. At times, it simply meant ARUP acted as a sounding board. 

“Having such quality of support and advice gave Neil and myself the belief that owning houses as an ethical landlord wasn’t just a dream and was clearly achievable.” – Alan

Building cross-stakeholder momentum in North East Lincolnshire

At one stage, Alan and Neil had struggled for months to gain traction with local authority stakeholders. So, together with ARUP (particularly drawing on Catherine’s connections) and local partners, they convened the first ever Community-Led Housing Conference in North East Lincolnshire. 

Image: Community led housing event

Location: Grimsby

The event brought together, for the first time, North East Lincolnshire council officers, housing organisations, charities, funders, businesses, built environment professionals and community groups around a shared conversation about empty homes, retrofit and community ownership. 

For Alan, it marked a significant shift:

“People we’d been trying to talk to for three months suddenly turned up. And followed up with us afterwards on a variety of ideas and opportunities”

The conference helped generate new conversations around:

• Compulsory purchase powers for long-vacant properties;

• Section 106 funding to support community use or acquisition of space;

• Retrofit approaches;

• Cross-sector partnerships, including with the current owners of vacant properties;

• and the future of community-led housing in the area. 

“In my opinion, the event helped lead to a sea change in the agenda within North East Lincolnshire” – Alan. 

The ARUP mentors supported in facilitating the conference and later in producing a report capturing the ideas, priorities and opportunities that emerged, which will be used to help reach local and national supporters and funders for West Marsh Development Trust’s ethical landlord ambitions. 

Since then, momentum has continued to build, and an opportunity to purchase the first empty home has emerged out of West Marsh Development Trust’s deepening relationship and trust with the local authority. 

‘Pride in Place’ breakthrough and peer collaboration

Following the announcement of £20M Pride in Place funding for North East Lincolnshire, Alan joined the Council-convened working group helping shape plans for empty homes and neighbourhood renewal, which drew on the Community-Led Housing Conference’s conclusions and put forward a recommendation for the use of a segment of those funds.

One of the first proposed projects is the purchase and retrofit of an empty home in West Marsh. This is set to be a “beacon” project – a model of what community-led housing could look like locally and catalyse further acquisitions. West Marsh Development Trust, through its new Community Benefit Society, will work with the council to identify a family to move in. 

“Being an ethical landlord is not just about getting a tenant in on affordable rent and saying ‘Off you go!’ 

It’s also about an ecosystem of support and advice, a centre they can come and speak to someone at, and avoiding situations where anyone’s problems mount up to the point they risk losing their house.” – Alan

With Doorstep, Alan and Neil are also developing plans to support wider neighbourhood transformation efforts across Grimsby, with a staffed Community-Led Housing Hub and visits to different neighbourhoods.

“We just want everyone in the region who works on this to support each other – we’re not here to build our own empires. 

It’s so important to us that people aren’t reinventing the wheel to achieve community-led housing. 

We’ve benefitted so much from peer-knowledge sharing and resources, from as close as our East Marsh neighbours, to Tom Murphy from Homebaked Community Land Trust in Liverpool who we met on a People and Place trip, as well as our programme peers working on a range of other community-led projects, from laundrettes to community centres, not just housing.” – Alan

“Residents know better than anyone…”

For the ARUP team, it was striking to see what local residents could achieve when given the right support and connections. Zarina reflected:

“When communities want to work with local authorities and housing, it can seem so complex and technical that it feels like only a trained ‘expert’ could possibly navigate the process. But actually, residents know better than anyone what needs doing. 

Alan and Neil have made me really optimistic about the future of community-led regeneration.”

Acknowledging that not every built environment professional has capacity to support community innovation in the way ARUP has done, Helene believes there are many ways people can contribute:

“Your personal skills can hugely support grassroots change. It doesn’t always need to mean huge amounts of pro bono time or major technical interventions. Sometimes it’s forming a relationship that builds their confidence, or using your convening power and connecting the dots. The power of your network is not to be underestimated.

I’m looking forward to mentoring another community innovator, Ben, in the 2026 People and Place: Camden programme.”

Zarina added, “Even turning up to an event, sharing insights in a single conversation, can help unblock the process for someone so they can keep steering their project in the right direction.”

There are so many community groups wanting to lead this kind of change in their neighbourhoods. Working with Alan and Neil has also prompted Helene and colleagues to reflect more widely on how the financial resource required for community-led housing groups is relatively small, if the will, ideas and energy is there:

“So we’re asking: how can funding be better connected with these locally-led groups? How can council-managed funds like the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) be more easily accessed? I want to explore how we can contribute to the broader systems change needed as well as working on-the-ground with specific local initiatives.”

Get involved as a supporter or mentor

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