The Creative Quarter Company – Vision and Objectives

We are an economic development agency

The Creative Quarter Company, owned jointly by Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham City Council, is a catalyst and an enabler of Nottingham’s future success.

Our principal purpose is the creation, protection, and attraction to Nottingham, of jobs and an increase in productivity and GVA in the creative and digital industries.

We encourage the growth of Nottingham’s creative economy and support Nottingham’s creative businesses wherever they are based.

In the specific geography of the Creative Quarter (roughly described as Hockley, the Lace Market, Sneinton Market and BioCity) we support businesses in all sectors, particularly helping creative and digital businesses to start-up, to spin-out, to grow and to thrive.

The Creative Quarter Company has succeeded in engaging well with start-ups and some CDI sectors, particularly crafters, makers, freelancers, artists and performers. We now seek to connect better, and to better effect, with more established SMEs and more digital and technology based businesses.

We want to be of much greater economic benefit to Nottingham. We aim to help 500 or more people to make a living from their craft, practice or creative skill or activity. We also want to find and help 5 or more businesses to grow to employ 100 or more people. And we hope that one day one of them might employ 5000 people.

We work in support of the delivery of Nottingham Trent University’s employability and enterprise agendas facilitating opportunities for students and graduates to gain valuable work experience and start attractive and rewarding careers in creative and digital businesses across Nottingham.

Through The Big House project (ERDF match-funded to September 2022), in a significant partnership that we lead, we deliver business support services to creative and digital entrepreneurs and SMEs from across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

We work with partners including Marketing NG to attract businesses and jobs to the Creative Quarter; particularly creative and digital businesses, and especially given the current property offer, start-up and early growth businesses.

With Nottingham City Council, Nottingham Trent University and other key actors, we seek to protect and enhance the property offer to creative and digital businesses in the Creative Quarter, most especially an adequate and attractive supply of easy access, co-working and incubator space and aspire to see developed higher-grade accommodation that will keep Creative Quarter businesses here as they grow, and attract businesses from elsewhere to join them.

At Sneinton Market we help manage and operate a managed mixed-use creative and digital industries start-up and early growth business incubator where a broad cross-section and healthy, managed mix of craft, creative, cultural and digital businesses, and some food and retail business, can start-up and grow, create jobs and generate footfall and a sense of place arising from being an active place of work and a great place to meet, and from having a lively events program, becoming Nottingham’s new place to be.

The Creative Quarter Company is also a place-making organisation

We seek to make the Creative Quarter not just a first-choice location for creative and digital businesses but also a great place to learn, work and live.

We work with NTU to deliver and grow its Creative Quarter campus, most emphatically enhanced by recent opening of Metronome, and support Nottingham College developing its Skills Hub.

We recognise the importance of the overlap between Nottingham’s creative and digital industries and its cultural economy and play our part via our own events and cultural activities program, supporting third parties to deliver festivals, events and cultural activities and to make a success of cultural venues, and via our membership of the Strategic Cultural Partnership.

We engage proactively with Nottingham City Council and others because we have increasing agency and seek increasing influence over the quality and maintenance of the public realm and environment, and the management of the highway and public spaces, in and around the Creative Quarter and most vitally at Sneinton Market, in Sneinton Market Square, and in Victoria Park.

We want the positive economic and social impact of our work to be felt beyond the Creative Quarter, especially in the communities of Sneinton and St Ann’s.

We believe that as we and our partners - the businesses we support and encourage - are successful, we will create a place that is increasingly attractive to creative and digital business owners, to the people who want to work for them, the businesses that support and thrive in their company, to city-livers and city-lovers, to UK and international students (and their parents) and to potential investors, including government, its agencies and major international businesses.