Minami Kobayashi recently moved from her studio space in the loud and constantly moving Covent Garden to a peaceful 19th-century church in the centre of a quiet Islington square to take up residency at the Florence Trust.
“I like the quieter area; Angel has such a good vibe,” she says. “Everyone in the studio is very lovely and talented so I get really inspired by them.”
The Florence Trust is a self-funded international artists’ residency that has been in Islington for almost 35 years. Its current home is the Holy Trinity Church in Cloudesley Square, an impressive building built in the 1820s by Sir Charles Barry, who also rebuilt the Palace of Westminster. The Trust was launched in 1990 by the painter Patrick Hamilton.
From outside, you would never tell that the large church is home to 15 artist’s studios. Steven Albutt, the Director of the Florence Trust, and Yuka Namekawa, the Programme Director, greeted me at the door to show me around the space. “The Florence Trust is properly unique,” Yuka says.
Steven and Yuka rejoined the Trust in 2019, after nearly a decade away from the project. They are both artists and were residents of the Trust in 2008. Steven spent some time working in the city before returning to university to complete a fine art degree, and Yuka is a classically trained Japanese sculptor.
The Trust lost its home in St Saviours, Highbury in 2019, after some financial difficulty and their lease was ending. But Steven wanted to save the Trust: “We committed to the trustees to try and save the residency and find a new home.”
Their current agreement with the Church of England is that they pay bills and maintain the church while the owners try to find funding to complete repairs of the space, meaning that the Trust’s lease is only for 15 months. The studios non-permanent and are not attached to the walls of the building.
The personal importance of the project to both Yuka and Steven was clear. Steven explains: “We were both invested in it because it made a difference in our lives, having a year in a studio in central London that was affordable.”
‘It made a difference in our lives’
Steven Albutt
Yuka moved from Japan to take part in the residency. “When I applied for the Florence Trust many years ago, I was struggling with my practice, and I wanted to change. So, I wanted to come to London from Tokyo.”
They want to make sure that they rent the studio space to artists who need it. “It was about giving people a sort of a route into London who hadn’t necessarily been to the London schools or were coming from abroad and didn’t have London connections,” Steven says.
At one pound per square foot, Steven says he thinks it is the lowest studio rent in the city. It’s common to find rent for over triple the price in London. “We want to provide this opportunity to the artists who really need this space and who really are struggling financially,” Yuka explains.
Steven says they keep this at the front of their minds when they’re looking through applications, as they aim to identify people who would “really genuinely benefit from a year with that kind of support”.
“We also then put money back into the artists,” he says. “We pay them to do some of the workshops. We take them out for events, trying to build rapport and group cohesion. Yuka and I volunteer half of our time and then we get paid a small amount for the time we put in.”
Liam Fallon is a sculptor renting studio space in the residency. At his previous studio, he was on a rolling contract, which made his workspace less secure. He says it’s nice to be working somewhere “secure for the full year of the residency”.
Since their time at the Trust in the late 2000s, Steven and Yuka have set up studios throughout the country, such as in Leicester and elsewhere in London. They stressed their projects aim to make a positive impact on the community: “The Florence Trust is about trying to situate community interest companies within neighbourhoods that would change them in a good way, rather than how it used to be when we first came to London. All these artists’ studios were landing in usually quite poor neighbourhoods, and then becoming a spear tip of gentrification.”
As a part of this, artists are running free workshops in the church, such as upcoming natural dye workshops on 26 March, 30 March and 1 April.
Looking to the future, Steven says he would love to find a permanent home for the Florence Trust: “We’re very lucky to be allowed to use the building temporarily. But the building does need to have a long-term solution for it.”
