The Atrium,
Queen’s Market Morecambe
Every bit helps so if you’d like to support us (however small) then please click the button below to donate.
Rest assured that every donation goes directly toward the restoration project.
To reach out about getting involved, putting on events or just to say hello, please fill out our contact form below.
We’re right in the heart of Morecambe, just a short walk from the promenade and town centre. Queen’s Market is easy to reach by foot, bike, bus, or car, with nearby parking and public transport links. Pop in, explore the space, and see how this historic building is being transformed into a vibrant hub for community, creativity, and culture.
Queen’s Market will become a family friendly food, drink and entertainment complex in the heart of Morecambe town centre, serving local products made with local produce, accompanied by local arts, entertainment and education activities, all generated through the talent, creativity and hard-work of local people. Did we mention that keeping things local is important to us?
The complex covers approximately 2200m2 over three floors, and will contain an expansive food court and bar, a 300-person capacity live performance hall, a range of shops and exhibition spaces, a creative studio, and co-working and office spaces.
We want people to come to Queen’s Market and simply enjoy themselves, to feel good knowing that they are supporting local initiatives and contributing to the local economy through everything they spend their time and money on while they are there. This is a place where visitors from around the world and people from Morecambe and the surrounding area can come together and enjoy what’s on offer, to contribute to the rich cultural history, present and future of the town, and to leave feeling enlighted and inspired, feeling like they all belong here.
Queen’s Market Morecambe CIC (QMM CIC for short) is a social enterprise based in Queen’s Market that is responsible for ensuring the building delivers its social mission by reinvesting the profits generated through all of the activity described above into socially-oriented activities, events and projects for the benefit of the local population. And if that wasn’t challenging enough, we are attempting to realise all of this in a way that supports the transition to Net Zero.
A Social Enterprise – sometimes called a Profit for Purpose – is a kind of company that has a viable commercial business model just like any other business, but that seeks to reinvest any profits into creating social value, rather than simply for the financial benefit of the owners or shareholders.
CIC stands for Community Interest Company, which is used to denote a Social Enterprise rather than Ltd which is used to denote a traditional company. This doesn’t mean only CICs can deliver social good, but it does demonstrate our formal commitment to doing this.
It’s worth also mentioning that it’s not like a charity that depends entirely on financial donations and grants; however, these are also ways in which a social enterprise can resource its social mission.
Our social mission links us to our place and the people we share it with. Right now, Morecambe is an incredibly exciting place to be, not least because we are entirely confident that Eden Project Morecambe is going to happen. It’s not the only initiative driving local change, but it’s probably the most significant right now.
In any case, this context informs our mission, and we while we are still tweaking the precise wording, it’s going to be something along these lines…
To enable the people of Morecambe to contribute positively to the sustainable development of their town’s growing visitor economy and to benefit directly from the leisure and employment opportunities this will bring.
Read more about our vision here.
The main driving force is local social entrepreneur Nick Smith, who acquired the building in 2018, driven by a desire to ensure such a significant local asset was preserved for local benefit and not simply to enable external developers to turn it into something that wouldn’t deliver this. As an experienced property developer, and thanks to an extremely supportive family, he’s been refurbishing the building in his own time at his own cost since then, wherever possible repurposing existing materials, many of which have been salvaged from other Morecambe landmarks.
Recognising that he couldn’t do everything all on his own, he formed the CIC in 2021, and has now appointed a new board of directors to enable the formal realisation of the mission.
Simon Harrison and Nicci Dickins joined in August 2023 bringing their own capabilities and experience to the project. Simon is also from Morecambe and brings significant experience of supporting start-up entrepreneurship and sustainable business model development from his role as head of start-up support services at Lancaster University. Nicci is from Manchester and brings significant experience as a social enterprise funding consultant from her role as a Social Value Accountant with a long track record of supporting successful social enterprise developments.
If Nick was looking to exploit Queen’s Market for personal gain, he would have already sold it to an external developer who could easily extract £X/sqm from purely commercial activity that would be channeled out of the local economy. He would not have spent nine years of his life lovingly restoring the building piece by piece for the purposes of creating something of significant long-term value to the town. And he would not have established QMM as a CIC with an asset lock, and selected the directors he has, and these directors would not have taken on the challenge of securing a social enterprise loan or taking the time to thoroughly investigate more costly low carbon redevelopment solutions.
QMM’s business model needs to be financially sustainable and so money is always going to be key factor in everything it does, so generating profit is critical to success; but it’s imperative that this money stays in the area and finds its way into the local economy, not not out of the area or simply into the pockets of the owners and directors.
That’s fantastic, thanks for your enthusiasm. We are already consulting widely with local stakeholder organisations, for example, Future Morecambe, Stanley’s Community Centre, the Chamber of Commerce, Morecambe BID, Lancaster & Morecambe College and Lancaster University to put in place partnerships that will allow us to engage broadly with members of the local community. We hope representatives of organisations like this will join a QMM CIC Steering Group once launched.
We will also launch a Friends of Queen’s Market initiative to ensure we have an open and effective dialogue with individuals, so we can hear your ideas and perspectives, and get your thoughts on ours. We need a few more things in place before we can initiate this, but feel free to get in touch using our contact form above.
We are planning a series of consultation events over the next 12 months that will provide opportunities for members of the public to come in and look around. The majority of the space inside is still a building site, so we absolutely need to ensure that it’s safe and accessible, that PPE is provided and everyone is protected by appropriate levels of insurance cover.
If you would like to join our mailing list to find out more about when these events are happening, or ask about anything that we have not covered in this document, please get in touch with the contact form above.