How Can Major Employers Become Engines Of Fairness And Belonging In The Places They Call Home?
This month’s Grow Places Insights is rooted in a vital collaboration with Volterra Partners, centred on one of East London’s most characterful and culturally significant estates: the Truman Brewery. Together, we have explored how large employers and landowners can become active stewards of local opportunity—not only for those already within their networks, but for those traditionally excluded.
The Truman Brewery is no ordinary site. It is home to more than 200 creative and tech-led businesses, employing over 1,600 people and shaping the economic and cultural identity of the area. Now, with a considered mixed-use redevelopment in motion—led by Grow Places—there is the potential to double employment numbers and extend its economic impact even further.
Our shared question throughout this process has been: how do we ensure that growth at Truman Brewery translates into opportunity for everyone—not simply a privileged few?
A Test Case for Inclusive Local Growth
Rather than rely solely on traditional economic measures, we set out with Volterra to understand how growth could be deepened, diversified, and embedded. The result is a framework that not only quantifies economic uplift, but also explores how it can be retained and shared locally.
The redevelopment is forecast to deliver:
Over 2,000 new jobs
An additional £18 million in local annual spend
An increase of 37,000 weekly visitors
These are significant numbers. Even so, economic expansion alone does not guarantee fairness or inclusion. The real challenge lies in creating mechanisms that allow this value to remain within the community, recirculating to benefit those most in need of support, employment, and belonging.
What Is Community Wealth Building—and Why Does It Matter?
We grounded the study in the lens of Community Wealth Building (CWB)—a practical economic model gaining traction across the UK. Rather than treating growth as something to be extracted, this model focuses on building resilience by:
Retaining wealth within local communities
Supporting small and diverse enterprises
Aligning institutional procurement, recruitment and leasing with social value goals
This thinking helped us identify four areas where anchor institutions like Truman Brewery can make a lasting difference:
Local recruitment: proactive outreach to underrepresented talent
Local procurement: ensuring contracts are accessible to community-based businesses
Strategic partnerships: working with mission-led organisations to target inequalities
Reinvestment in place: ensuring returns support community priorities, not only private interests
From Ambition to Implementation
This is not simply a conceptual exercise. The report includes practical tools that landowners, employers and institutions can adopt immediately—from job brokerage models and inclusive lease structures, to apprenticeships and social value clauses embedded in contracts.
The Truman Brewery is now actively exploring how these principles can be integrated into the next phase of its evolution.
What Next?
As the planning process unfolds, the Truman Brewery offers a powerful live example of what it means to design development with social purpose. It is a site with deep roots and powerful potential—a microcosm of the wider question facing cities across the UK: how can we grow in ways that truly include?
This work is intended as an open invitation to other major employers, local authorities, funders and anchor institutions. If you are serious about regeneration that delivers more than economic metrics—this is your call to action.
Because the places we shape today determine the futures we make possible. When we build with intention and inclusivity, we create not only employment but pride, purpose and prosperity that lasts.
Read the Full Report
To request the full Grow Places x Volterra report, which includes modelling, policy recommendations and actionable strategies, please get in touch. We would be delighted to share our findings and help explore how these principles can be applied in your own context.