About Us

Redruth Revival is a CIC – A Community Interest Company which is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses will be reinvested for the benefit of the business and the community.

Redruth Revival CIC is a Community Interest Company with no shareholders, the members and directors volunteer their time for no financial reward.  The aim of the Company is to use business solutions to achieve its aim, namely to support the regeneration of Redruth Town Centre with a 21st Century outlook. Redruth Revival CIC has a distinct and valuable role to play in helping create a strong, sustainable and socially inclusive economy in Redruth by using business solutions.

Redruth Revival Community interest Company has a board of six unpaid directors:

Judy Davidson MBE A former town Councillor and Mayor of Redruth. Judy is a former business owner who also has extensive experience in employment through many years work in the local Jobcentre

Ross Williams grew up in Redruth where his family have a long-established building business.  He retired at the end of 2020 after 30 years as chief executive of Creative Kernow and Krowji, the large creative hub on the edge of Redruth, but retains links with a large network of creative sector organisations across Cornwall.

Jan Driver was the founder and owner of Windmill Nursery and Windmill Minors Playclub in Redruth until she retired in 2017; she also worked, for many years, as a Senior Locality Special Needs Coordinator with Cornwall Council.

 

Tamsin Spargo is a Redruth-born writer and cultural historian, returned home after an academic career in the UK and overseas, including a decade as a Director of Media, Critical and Creative Arts.  

Paul Harris Founder of Harris Paul and Co Ltd, a Redruth-based accountancy firm with over 35 years of experience in financial matters.

 

Aaron Pascoe has a lifetime of experience in the hospitality industry as a Director of Penventon Hotel in Redruth and he also has business interests in The Alverton and The Greenbank Hotels.

How it all began

In the spring of 2014, Judy Davidson, Former Town Council Mayor, gathered together a group of committed and successful local business people, to consider forming a CIC and develop a plan to further shape the town centre of Redruth with a 21st century feel.  Judy’s mission statement to the other members was clear:

The purpose of the CIC is to work in tandem with the developments at the old brewery site and ‘breathe new life into the heart of Redruth’.

The newly formed interest group viewed the Old Brewery project as the catalyst needed to bring new footfall into Redruth, and to encourage further investment into the town.  In other words, the time was right.

Supported by Charlotte Caldwell, Cornwall Council’s Community Network Manager for Camborne, Pool, Illogan and Redruth, the group met, enthusiastically, to explore options.  It was clear to all that major retail is no longer the function of the town centres.  The out of town shopping sites are here to stay and all readily acknowledged that no town centre can compete with the space, parking and co-locational opportunities that these offer the public.  The CIC interest group felt that Redruth needs a unique in-town commercial centre, characterful, vibrant, elegant and exciting.  A place where successful upwardly mobile people want to be.

Serendipity intervened. The ‘now official’ Redruth Revival CIC, received a helping hand when the Mining Exchange and Buttermarket site became available for purchase at exactly the right time.

The ancient Buttermarket site fulfilled all the criteria that the Redruth Revival C.I.C. was formed to address. It is architecturally exciting, large, has a wide range of small and large sized meeting spaces and a magnificent central courtyard with its jettied upper storey resting on ancient granite pillars which offers incredible flexibility for all manner of activities from outdoor relaxation space to the hosting of travelling theatre companies.

The main entrance to the site reflects Redruth’s mining heritage; with its fine dressed granite this is a fine example of high Victorian architecture.

The Buttermarket ‘ticks all the boxes’.  It will become a focus for community use and will include an innovation business centre to offer vibrant communal office space to new and existing businesses, with a particular eye on young entrepreneurs leaving College or University.  Here they can rent affordable space to grow their businesses. The Buttermarket will undoubtedly become a showcase for some of the vibrant artistic community based at Krowji –on the western edge of the town, and who need a shop window in the centre of town; we visualise a small element of retail, particularly specialist shops.  These emerging entrepreneurs will need somewhere to buy specialist deli foods, gifts, cards, all the ‘dash out and grab at lunchtime’ items, and, it is likely that stationery, office supplies and IT could follow. This unique site, and it is truly unique, is the last major site available for a project like this. It is located 10 metres from a sizable and affordable public car park, 2 minutes walk from the railway station and even less from the town’s primary bus stop.  We have the enthusiasm and the vision, we have the premises, and with Cornwall Council’s support of our funding bid, we can make that vision a reality.