Being a successful entrepreneur is not always about being in the right place at the right time.
Peter Darrant-Parkes opened Britain’s first dedicated LGBTQ+ business hub, the Pride Media Centre, in 2019 – months before COVID-19 brought the country and its economy to a virtual standstill.
But while the pandemic could not have been foreseen, the centre’s unlikely location – in an old warehouse complex in a deprived area of the northeastern city of Gateshead – was carefully considered.
“We could have had a shiny office in Manchester or Birmingham within the gay scene … but actually, we found an old building, we did it up and we flew the (LGBTQ+) progressive flag and that’s made an incredible impact,” Darrant-Parkes said.
With the British government focused on tackling regional inequality as the economy rebounds from last year’s deep recession, officials said the Pride Media Centre could provide a model for initiatives elsewhere in the country.
“We’re in, by acknowledgment of the management team here, a very deprived area of the northeast, but I get the sense they’ve sprayed some magic in this part of the world,” said Britain’s first LGBTQ Business Champion, Iain Anderson.
“If this model could be replicated across the country, that really would be quite fantastic,” Anderson, who co-founded the communications agency Cicero in 2001, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation during a recent visit to the business centre.
With a focus on the media industry, the centre comprises studios for radio and television, but also houses PR firms and marketing companies alongside charities and the owners of the local pub. It is now home to a total of 32 businesses.
Smaller companies can be a motor for growth, particularly in regions such as the northeast that previously relied on fast-disappearing manufacturing jobs, said John Adams, a councillor in Gateshead.
“(It’s about) small businesses coming together, providing a sort of knowledge-rich, innovation-type location for people to work together, learn from each other and make sure that they’re all getting commercial advantage from it all,” Adams said.
PINK POUND
Until recently, LGBTQ+ centres were community-led, focusing on helplines and offering support and security to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
But from Gateshead to Australia, there has been a shift towards supporting LGBTQ+ businesses and entrepreneurs.
In July, the Victorian Pride Centre opened in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, as “a hub for LGBTIQ+ groups and organisations to share ideas and resources”, its website says.
Darrant-Parkes said research his team conducted in 2018 suggested there were only four centres in the world that specifically focused on LGBTQ+ business and media.
Now, however, at least two more are planned to open in Britain over the next year in Kirkcaldy and Perth, both in Scotland.
“Instead of launching a new product or their own business from their spare bedroom, we want to give them a really focused business space,” said Stuart Duffy, founder of LGBTQ+ community organisation Pink Saltire, which is backing both ventures.
“So as well as having coffee and meeting rooms and facilities for the community, we’re also going to have an enterprise space to help foster people into work or to start thinking about their own enterprise,” Duffy added.
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