WATCH THIS SPACE; Landlords have come up with an innovative solution to the slump in commercial tenants -- turning over 'slack space' to galleries and creative projects, as Nick Curtis explains.

Byline: Nick Curtis

THE recession has its upside, for artists at least. Property owners are loaning or cheaply leasing empty retail space or buildings on stalled development sites -- known as "slack space" -- to galleries and creative enterprises.

This is a different arrangement to the pop-up shops, happenings or performances that sporadically occupy derelict buildings. Instead, it's an ongoing arrangement aimed at keeping parts of the city alive, and it's beneficial to all. The arty folk get centrally located space on generous terms. Owners know their property is being cared for until another commercial tenant comes along. And the public gets something infinitely more pleasing than the empty shopfronts that afflict our creditcrunched high streets like missing teeth.

Property company Capital and Counties (Capco), which has owned Covent Garden market since 2006, has been a pioneer of this trend, under an initiative called Art Tank. When an accessories retailer, Mint, vacated a small space in the market's central concourse in July, Capco handed it, gratis, to Notting Hill gallery London Miles, which specialises in "lowbrow" international art by illustrators, comic artists and the like.

"We pay a contribution to service charges and get the space free for as long as Covent Garden will have us," explains the gallery's owner Phil Coleman. It has increased the profile of the gallery beyond the art-collecting cognoscenti: "Passing interest is much greater." Similarly, visitors to Covent Garden have been entertained by eye-catching art and live events: this Thursday Japanese artist Dragon 76 will paint a mosaic of canvases along the unit's back wall.

When cosmetics company Lush vacated the larger unit next door, Art Tank donated it for nine days to RCA graduate Matthew Plummer Fernandez. From today it will be home for three weeks to DIY London Seen, an exhibition of works by lesser-known artists curated by Lee Johnson and Bakul Patki of Watch This Space. There's a giant, mirrored bear by the door, graphic art and a sound and light installation in the vaulted basement. "Feedback has been fantastic," says Bev Churchill, brand director of Covent Garden, of the Art Tank initiative. "Visitors really enjoy seeing something different alongside our mix of independent shops."

Over at 105 Westbourne Grove, meanwhile, 21-year-old Tom Russell is preparing to open Wonderland West, a mini-market for young designers, artists and photographers in a former scooter showroom. A sometime student at London College of Fashion, he came up with the idea when the removal of a tumorous kidney put paid to his career as the drummer for a rock band.

Russell's family has actually owned this building for four generations, so he has taken over the lease "on favourable terms", and plans to rent out stalls to both up-and-coming and established talents for around [pounds sterling]100 a day from Thursday to Sunday. "It'll be ideal for people who can't afford 50 grand for a full lease round here," he says. "And it's a way of seeing what the area will bear."

Better to test the water, he suggests, with businesses that can come and go for a small outlay, than to refurbish the building for a hair salon (one actually bid for the lease) that might go bust in three months.

And it's not just in wealthy west and central London that the slack space movement is gathering pace. Deptford, in south London, has for some time challenged Hackney as an edgy arts hub, so naturally it got in on the game early. Developer Cathedral Group has been active in the use of slack space, and as a partner in the Deptford Project has helped create a market on the site of a planned Norman Foster development near the station. "We are desperately keen to use slack space," says Cathedral's chief executive Richard Upton. "It involves art, it involves community, it involves a decent cup of tea and is about creating places where people want to live and feel happy. Many developers have created soulless blocks of flats and then they wonder why they are difficult to occupy when a real market correction occurs -- like recession."

It's happening all over the borough. Earlier this year Anthony Gross, a local arts organiser, found himself outside a magnificent listed Edwardian police station on Amersham Vale. A private developer had hoped to turn it into luxury apartments -- until the credit crunch hit, that is. "I put in a proposal to take over the building, on full rent, and got it for seven years," says Gross.

He opened a gallery in the gym, a cafe in the fingerprint room, artists' studios and music rooms in the offices and cells, and turned the cop shop into a fullyfledged arts centre. He shows hip young artists from England and Europe, puts on shows by students from Goldsmiths and Camberwell Art School, and gigs. "The economic model is a tough one, but the cafe and the studios bring in income," he says. "More importantly, it seemed to be a way of capitalising on the momentum of local creativity, which lacked cohesion."

Nearby, the arts collective Utrophia has taken over a Fifties ice-cream factory that was due to be demolished. "We pay a market rent, but it leaks, so they can't charge us very much," says Ben Cummings, one of Utrophia's members. "Realistically, the site isn't going to be developed any time soon." Utrophia stages large-scale exhibitions and events -- artist Emily Paige Short is currently showing a huge wooden Zeppelin in one of the bigger spaces -- and is about to mount its first country festival, Mellowcroft, in Wales. "The bloke who owns the land has seen what we do in the city and wants us to do it in the country," says Cummings.

Down in genteel Herne Hill, the owners of a defunct Apollo video store lent the building for the month of June to the local residents' Forum, which turned it into a thriving community arts space. An empty Woolworths in Leytonstone, which had reverted to council ownership, was turned into an art gallery in June.

Scant weeks ago on these pages, Evening Standard architecture critic Rowan Moore suggested that the "slack space" hollowed out by the recession could prove a boon to London, just as the Roundhouse engine shed in Chalk Farm was colonised in the Sixties, or the lofts of Shoreditch revitalised by artists in the Nineties. Look outside. It's happening.

www.londonmiles.com www.utrophia.net For details of DIY London Seen, go to www.watch-this-space.org.

www.wonderlandwest.blogspot.com

CAPTION(S):

Independent spirits: left, Emily Paige Short in Utrophia's Deptford building. Right, Tom Russell is setting up a market for designers in Westbourne Grove

Space invader: curator Lee Johnson with an exhibit at the DIY London Seen show in Covent Garden

PICTURES: DANIEL HAMBURY