About us
Creative Land Trust is a charity established in 2019 to address one of the most pressing structural challenges facing London’s cultural life: the rapid and permanent loss of affordable workspace for artists and makers.
We act as a long-term steward, securing buildings for creative use, permanently protecting the conditions that allow artists to work and create in the capital, forming an essential part of its creative, urban infrastructure.
Our Vision
We believe in a London where artists and creative communities are recognised as essential infrastructure for urban life – as vital as transport and energy – embedded in neighbourhoods across the city with permanent space to develop their work, driving cultural and economic vitality and ensuring London remains distinctive, inclusive and culturally alive: the greatest and most creative city in the world.
We understand the intrinsic value of art and artists. Artists need dedicated, permanent space where they can develop their craft and artistic vision with the stability required to sustain creative practice over time. Making art – as a career or as an enriching and important passion – should be open to anyone with the talent and desire, regardless of background or financial circumstance. When artists are able to live and work in neighbourhoods across the city, children and young people can see creative lives and careers as possible for them.
Our Values
Reliable
We’ll be stable and steadfast, the anchors on whom people can rely in the long term and the bridge between communities and sectors.
Supportive
We’ll look for ways to help.
Expert
We’ll always be respectful, and always learning, but we’ll really know our stuff.
Pragmatic
We’ll find real world solutions, focusing on delivery and innovating where we need to.
Invested
We care deeply about London, the arts, each other, and getting stuff done.
Our Mission
Creative Land Trust protects the future of art in London by securing buildings for the long term – including at-risk buildings of historic value – as permanent, affordable workspace for artists in communities across the city. In doing so we act as creative placekeepers, embedding artists within neighbourhoods and shaping the creative infrastructure that allows London’s cultural life to thrive, while building a long-term model that can ultimately sustain itself without ongoing public investment.
Meet the Team
Creative Land Trust was founded by the Mayor of London, Arts Council England, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
The Charity has been developed with public and private sector partners and stakeholders, including developers, local authorities, artists and affordable workspace providers, in response to the significant pressures creative practitioners face.
The Trust is operated by an executive team committed to providing lasting solutions to London’s studio crisis and supporting the creative economy, governed by a Board of Trustees comprising experts in arts, studio provision, property and finance.
Annie Clements
Chief Executive Officer
Annie Clements joined the Creative Land Trust in May 2023 as a consultant to support the team with acquisitions and fundraising, and is now our CEO. She has nearly 40 years’ experience in the property industry, including development and debt finance, and more recently, major mixed-use regeneration. Annie’s expertise in planning considerations combined with her finance and development knowledge greatly supports our decision-making on pipeline transactions and property finance.
Gemma Dean
Head of Development
Gemma Dean is Head of Development at Creative Land Trust, where she focuses on developing the property pipeline and supporting growth through impact investment strategies. Her career spans the real estate finance industry having previously worked on European commercial transactions in banking, restructuring and advisory roles at international firms based in London. Throughout her career, she has championed sustainability strategies and provided business and development advice to arts organisations in London.
Yves Blais
Director of External Relations and Fundraising
Yves Blais is Director of External Relations and Fundraising at Creative Land Trust and has worked on the project since its inception. As part of the start-up team, he delivered the initial multi-million-pound funding from the three founding funders that helped establish the organisation. He also has experience in writing successful bids to trusts and foundations and public institutions in arts, culture and heritage, specifically focused on property, placemaking, and culture. This includes the acquisition of artworks into national museum collections around the UK. He has managed grant reporting across different projects in both arts and property.
Yves has experience advising and brokering opportunities in property for affordable workspace provision through his work at Outset Contemporary Art Fund and WorkWild. He is also a producer and curator having worked on public programmes across the UK, and is a Trustee at art commissioning and production charity Forma, and is Chair for the Board of postgraduate art education programme TOMA.
Paula Hillman
Finance Director
Paula Hillman is our Finance Director responsible for the Charity's finance and governance activities. For more than 30 years, she has been dedicated to helping charities, non-profits, and social impact organisations maximise their long-term value. Currently helping to drive financial strategy at the Creative Land Trust by partnering with the CEO and Board.
Paula is deeply passionate about philanthropy and loves using her financial background to champion creative spaces and empower communities to thrive.
Piarvé Wetshi
Marketing and Comms
Piarvé Wetshi is a Marketing and Communications Executive at the Creative Land Trust, managing all stages of branding relating to our business, activation of space and portfolio. Prior to this, Piarvé has specialised in digital marketing within the events, interior design and charity sector with a focus on campaign management, consumer behaviour, lead generation and digital platforms. Passionate about sustainability in the clothing industry, Piarvé is also a dedicated advocate, leading award-winning programs in this field.
Ciara Scallon
Development Executive
Ciara Scallon is a Development Executive at Creative Land Trust. Within the executive team, she is responsible for further developing the fundraising plan and relationships required for the charity to deliver on the social value and community wealth objectives of its mission at its studio properties. As an independent consultant, or in-house, she has worked extensively with the CEO and senior management teams of arts and health charities over the last twelve years, securing essential funding from trusts and foundations, statutory bodies and businesses. She is passionate about the essential value of the arts to a thriving society for everyone, everywhere but particularly where need is greatest.
Ciara is a member of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising (MCIOF) and a Fellow of the RSA, the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce.
Rebecca Sainsot-Reynolds
Project Assistant
Rebecca Sainsot-Reynolds is Project Assistant at the Creative Land Trust. Liaising with all of our studio providers and supporting the set-up of new affordable studio spaces. Based in South London, Rebecca comes from a background of managing studio facilities for grassroots studio providers, community engagement in the Community Land Trust housing sector and is also an artist and educator specialising in site-specific research, youth programmes, play-work and community engagement. She is dedicated to making London more sustainable, accessible and affordable through new models for creative workspace, community ownership and housing.
Andy Martin
Chair of Board
Throughout his business career, Andy has been lucky to work with teams of people driven by common purpose. Mostly this has been about creating and implementing long-term strategies and advising on all aspects of the creation, implementation and delivery process. This has led me to understand placemaking as an important driver for long-term economic and social success.
In a new phase of his professional life, Andy has spent more time researching ecosystems and the impact they have on creating long-term sustainable places. He has focused on sciences with a particular emphasis on life science and made several presentations in both the USA and the UK. As a result, Andy has been building up new opportunities working with universities, incubator specialists, public authorities, designers, and major investors. He has extended this research to cultural ecosystems as a means to assist in rebuilding communities in lesser-performing local economies and presented this in Dallas and now in the UK.
Malene Oddershede Bach
MOB Creative, Creative Director
Malene started out her career in high-end fashion, showing her womenswear collections during London Fashion Week and selling her eponymous label worldwide, while also dressing a long list of celebrities.
Alongside her creative business, Malene has since 2014 grown a large creative workspace portfolio that today provides more than 200 creative workspaces across several sites in North London.
She project manages commercial projects in construction and has worked across retail stores for Paris Saint Germain, Lululemon, Alo Yoga, Costco, and many more. She has her own team of construction workers, runs a photographic studio, and in 2022 launched a local community festival in Tottenham – Markfield Road Festival – celebrating creatives through art, music, and discussion.
Malene consults on creative workspace and also acts as a planning consultant, having recently had a major development approved, delivering 35,000 sq ft of creative workspace.
Back in 2017, she sat in round table discussions with Haringey and Regeneris to consult on what eventually led to Haringey Council becoming one of the Creative Enterprise Zones. She works extensively on ensuring that affordable creative workspace will not be lost during regeneration of local areas, so her work with the CLT is a natural progression of this.
Natalie A. Carter
Senior Legal Counsel, Apache Capital Partners, Legal
Natalie is currently Senior Legal Counsel at Apache Capital Partners. Before working at Apache Capital Partners, Natalie worked as a real estate lawyer in the City for over 12 years.
Natalie has a broad range of experience in acquisitions, financing (raising both acquisition and development finance), property management, development agreements and disposals. Natalie also acts for lenders providing both senior and mezzanine financing for mixed-use assets. Natalie was noted as a Professional Services Rising Star at the 2020 Black British Business Awards and is the co-founder of Black Girls Book Club, creating a safe space for black women who love literature. Natalie is also heavily involved with various charities and organisations that aim to improve diversity in the legal industry and the real estate industry and is passionate about supporting the growth of social value in real estate development.
James Cooksey
Old Park Lane Management Ltd, CEO
James joined Old Park Lane Management in August 2021 as their new Chief Executive. Prior to this, James spent 12 years at The Crown Estate, latterly in the role of Managing Director of London, responsible for The Crown Estate's holdings in the Central London portfolio valued at around £8bn. With over 25 years' experience in real estate and fund management, James is a qualified Chartered Surveyor as well as having passed the full IMC. James is a Board member of both the Westminster Property Association and HOLBA as well as a Trustee for the Creative Land Trust.
Misa von Tunzelman
Executive Director, Corporate Affairs & Marketing for Development in the UK and Italy at Lendlease
Misa von Tunzelman is Executive Director, Corporate Affairs & Marketing for Development in the UK and Italy at Lendlease in this role she leads on communications, marketing and stakeholder engagement across Lendlease’s European markets. With 30 years’ experience across the built environment, professional services and cultural sectors, Misa has held marketing and communications roles at BNP Paribas Real Estate, JLL, EY and the Imperial War Museum. She has a degree in Sociology and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors.
Alongside her executive career, Misa is an active supporter of charitable, educational and industry organisations, having served on the Boards of Eastside Young Leaders Academy, Bird Conservatoire, Freehold LGBT CIC, The University of the Built Environment and Home Live Art. She is passionate about the role that arts and culture play in creating vibrant, inclusive places and thriving communities. As a Trustee of Creative Land Trust, she brings extensive experience in charity governance, strategic marketing communications, partnership building and stakeholder engagement, alongside a deep understanding of how long-term stewardship and investment can support creative communities to flourish.
Alexandra Notay
Radix Big Tent Housing Commission, Chair
Alexandra Notay is an internationally recognised expert on housing, placemaking and ESG. She has 20 years' strategic advisory and investment experience, having worked extensively across four continents. In August 2024, Alex took over the chair of the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission from Dame Kate Barker.
Until July 2024 she was Placemaking and Investment Director at Thriving Investments (formerly PfP Capital), the fund and asset management arm of Places for People Group, overseeing a UK-wide residential strategy. Achievements include a £390mn JV with Housing Growth Partnership and the successful acquisition of award-winning sustainable developer igloo Regeneration, on whose Board she served.
In October 2023 Alex won Residential Leader of the Year at the inaugural Property Week awards for Inspiring Women in Property. In January 2019 she was selected by BISNOW as one of 48 women shaping the future of UK real estate.
Alex is a published author and editor of over 30 books and reports on real estate, including the renowned ULI UK Best Practice Guide on Build to Rent (2014, 2016). Alex is Chair of the British Property Federation (BPF) working group on residential ESG, former Vice-Chair of the ULI UK Residential Council and currently serves on BPF's Build to Rent and Sustainability Committees and AREF's ESG / Impact Investing Committee.
She is also an experienced government advisor, serving on two Ministerial Steering Boards at MHCLG for Digital Planning and PropTech and at DSIT as an Independent Commissioner on the UK government's Geospatial Commission, where she chairs the Property workstream and the National Land Use Data Programme. She has also served five years as Co-Chair of the Creative Land Trust and is a Trustee of St Mary Redcliffe.
With a reputation for being 'abnormally energetic', Alex is passionate about enabling tangible social impact through innovation and collaboration as well as mentoring the next generation of diverse talent. Alex holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Sussex and a Master's Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from the University of Oxford Saïd Business School.
Daniel Silver
Sculptor
Daniel Silver is a London-based artist best known for his figurative sculptures. His practice is deeply influenced by the art of ancient Greece, Modernist sculpture, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Silver's works use concrete, bronze, marble, stone, wood and clay, and often appear as monuments or totems, as if belonging to an archaeological excavation. Like a contemporary Pygmalion, his figures seem to speak of the intimacy of touch and the memories inherited through material. Silver's sculptures explore and manipulate the human figure, sometimes with brutality, at other times with the utmost sensitivity. An analyst, an archaeologist and an artist, he moves constantly between styles, examining the physical and emotional impact of the body and its representation.
Photo credit: Benjamin Westoby
Catherine Webster
Thriving Investments, CEO
Cath started at Thriving Investments in January 2023 to focus on increasing funds under management alongside the delivery of social value, augmenting the existing fund management platform across high-quality affordable housing, private-rented residential and urban regeneration strategies. She joined from Quintain, where she was Executive Director for Strategy and Investment and chair of the Sustainability Steering Group.
Cath has over 30 years of real estate experience and has held several leadership roles as an investor or a lender in a wide array of companies including private equity, fund management and investment banking at Hudson Advisors (Lone Star Funds), TIAA & Lehman Brothers Global Real Estate.
She holds a BSc in Land Management from Reading University, an MBA from INSEAD and is a Member of the BPF's Affordable Housing Committee and a Member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Florence Peake
Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995.
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate.
Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body's physicality, text, film, and drawings that respond to and intercept each other to articulate, extend, and push ideas. Peake's work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world.
Her work has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes.
Emmanuel Unaji
Emmanuel is a multimedia fine artist based in London. Combining painting, drawing, collage and fashion design, his work is an exploration of what lies beneath the surface of human existence. He critically examines our tendency to form opinions on the basis of media headlines and photographs, critiquing the digital era we live in.
Emmanuel also co-owns Unaji&Co, an art and design company. As an entrepreneur and business owner, he understands the critical role that financial stability and long-term planning play in sustaining a studio practice.
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962) in London, UK, studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1989) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1991).
His interdisciplinary practice uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.
In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2008, his mid-career survey began at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, travelling in 2009 to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. In 2010, his first public art commission 'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and is in the permanent collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
In 2013, he was elected a Royal Academician and was awarded the honour of 'Commander of the Order of the British Empire' in 2019. His installation 'The British Library' was acquired by Tate in 2019 and is currently on display at Tate Modern, London.
This year, Shonibare was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award. A major retrospective of his work opened at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria, in May. He is co-ordinating the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, which will open in September.
Shonibare's works are in notable museum collections internationally, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and VandenBroek Foundation, The Netherlands.
Haroon Mirza
Haroon Mirza's disciplinary practice tests the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He devises sculptures, performances and immersive installations that pry on one's awareness of their own experience. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating his primary medium, electricity, a live, invisible and volatile natural phenomenon. Adopting a myriad of materials and technologies, Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music, and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms.
