The Walsall Incubator

Those of you familiar with my writings on Steem will know that I circle around the same topics over and over. I have a thing for turning old industrial spaces into something renewed… retro-fitting the space to make it usable in the 21st Century.

Have a look at this building:

Fabulous, right? It’s the old Highgate Brewery in Walsall, West Midlands, UK. Close to the town centre, 3000sq metres, 1.25 acres around it. Half a mile to the train station. It's being sold for around £950,000.

It’s been standing idle for years. It’s been in several auctions, but no-one wants it. Eventually it’ll be bought by some property developer that will demolish it, and fill the site with those horrible rabbit-hutch new-build houses this country is being infested with.

My alternative vision: That I and some like-minded people could raise money and buy the site and turn it into a whole host of things:

• A incubator for blockchain developers (perhaps providing backing for projects, or helping them raise money)
• A (free) Bitcoin/crypto Meetup space (just perfect for Steemfest5!)
• A crypto shop
• Conference space (free space for anything blockchain related)....it would become the Midlands blockchain hub)
• A cafe/bar (that accepts crypto payments)
• A co-working space (there are at least 6 universities within 10 miles of here. This could be the cheap space Computer
  Science new-grads come to work on their visions after graduation)
• A corner of it (for which I’d pay market rent) for my homeopathic practice
• Workshops for local entrepreneurs
• A social space
• Outdoor social space including firepit. A workspace that becomes the place you want to hang out in later
• A micro-brewery (well it IS an old brewery)
• ‘The blockchain bunkhouse’ - low-cost hostel for digital nomads passing through, or needing somewhere cheap to live while they work on their crypto launch!
• ….more!

Here’s another picture:

It has potential right?

So I need two things. A team to share my vision, that have complementary skills to me (marketing, fund-raising, building, evangelising….lots of things!), and a way of raising finance. Maybe an EOS airdrop where we tokenise and sell the vision to the EOS community, or we create a security token using something like Polymath (https://polymath.network/), or maybe a whale that wants to be part of this vision.

I see banks of solar panels on this open space powering the whole site. An LED lighting system projecting the Bitcoin symbol onto that chimney stack at night.

Imagine being part of this. Seeing it become a beacon in the blockchain space AND an example of some people, without any government help whatsoever, re-imagining and re-engineering their built environment to create abundance for those around them.

So please share this post and comment if you’d like to become part of this. Let's build something.