2 days ago
Meet the glamlords: the couple keeping creativity alive
There are slum landlords, and there are glam landlords. Geoffrey Pope, 90, and Christopher Ryan, 82, fall firmly into the latter category. When I meet the couple in their Brighton coach house, it feels like I am walking into a cross between the Liberace museum and the Old Curiosity Shop.
Filled with gold cherubs, chandeliers, baroque mirrors, candelabra, leopard print, Chinese screens, china dogs, Roman busts and mirror balls, it's surely Brighton's most glamorous home. At ten o'clock on a Friday morning, it seems entirely appropriate when Ryan offers me a glass of champagne.
'You can tell we're not minimalistic,' Ryan says, wearing big cherry-red glasses that Dame Edna would have coveted, and a polka dot blouse. 'It's just a modest humble abode.'
'There should be a touch of theatre in everything,' Pope adds.
Their decor may have hints of Marie Antoinette, but they're far from ruthless. Not only are they glamorous landlords, they're also generous. Round the corner from their coach house they own a mews, comprising Victorian stables with 12 workshops and a one-bedroom flat. The couple rent to creatives, at below market rent, and over the past ten years they've only raised the rent once. During Covid they told tenants, 'Pay us what you can.'
At a time when artists are being priced out of cities, and are losing affordable workspace, the couple are providing a lifeline. The average commercial rent has risen 39.71 per cent in five years in Brighton, according to the estate agency Knight Frank; the average residential rent has risen 44 per cent in the past ten years, according to Hamptons.
'Our idea is that if you look after people, and you're a good landlord, they'll be loyal to you. It's a harmonious situation,' Pope says. 'I love to see them getting on. You have to give people a leg-up.'
One of the beneficiaries of their largesse is Kate Jenkins. In the 1990s Jenkins, 53, a knitwear designer, was renting a studio in Hoxton, east London. 'And then all of sudden there was a dotcom boom, my rent tripled, and I remember thinking, I'm going to have to find something else to do.'
Jenkins ended up in Brighton, and in 2004 she walked past the mews and saw a 'for rent' sign. She has been renting a workshop from the couple ever since, and in 2014 moved into their mews flat. Jenkins has been the linchpin when it comes to recruiting fellow creatives to rent in the mews. Before the artists arrived, the couple were having trouble with their tenants. 'We've had a few conmen,' Ryan says.
The couple bought the coach house in 1989 for £220,000 after selling their Brighton antiques shop, Follies, which they lived above. The coach house was a garage with a flat on top and they converted it into a three-bedroom house. As part of the deal they also bought the mews. In the beginning the couple rented the workshops to a motley crew of car mechanics, electricians, spare parts dealers and, unbeknown to them, a prostitute who ran a brothel.
'We had a spate of terrible tenants,' Pope says. 'One chap was a Walter Mitty type, and he owed us £35,000 when he left. People came and went. We've had to take people to court and get bailiffs.'
The couple hoped that the rental income would be their pension, but many workshops sat empty. 'That was 1989, and we hit the recession,' Ryan says. 'Everyone was holding on by their fingernails. Geoff said we're going to have to get back into business, because we weren't earning anything.'
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The couple had run pubs together. They met in London 60 years ago — Ryan was the first male hairdresser in Peter Jones department store, Pope worked in window display at a men's suit shop in Soho — before opening a pub in Wiltshire, then Chichester and then a restaurant in Arundel, West Sussex. They moved to Brighton in 1983. In 1992 they bought Brighton's Regency Tavern and created a popular venue with a curious USP — a pub with camp decor that also served real ale ('we were open to everyone, from mink coats to overalls,' Ryan says).
The couple sold it in 2004, the same year that Jenkins arrived in the mews, attracting a stream of creatives, including Julie Nelson, a ceramicist, Bip-Art, a printmaker and workshop, East Side Print, the framer and gallerist Thomas Rainsford and an artisanal coffee roaster. 'From our experience the creatives are less trouble as tenants,' Ryan says. 'It just seems to work better.'
These are tough times for artists. One in three British ones doubt that they will be able to continue to work professionally in five years' time, according to a 2023 survey by Acme, an arts charity. Jenkins says many of her contemporaries have been priced out of the city. 'There's nowhere for creatives to go. It's really sad.'
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Jenkins pays £780 a month inclusive for her 700 sq ft studio. By contrast, her artist friend who couldn't find space in town pays £1,550 plus VAT for a similar-sized studio in Portslade, about five miles from Brighton centre.
Pope and Ryan don't regret missing out on thousands of pounds of rent. 'Happiness is more important,' Pope says. 'Knowing you've helped people along. I mean, I don't want to sound like a goody two-shoes. I'm not. I'm a businessman too, but I'm not a hard-headed businessman.'
The couple, who married in 2015, paid off their mortgage long ago. 'We're earning enough to make our life comfortable,' Ryan says. 'It sounds very Mary Poppins but we're not greedy. Better to have these tenants on the regular than all the rubbish we had before with people doing runners.'
The tenants know how lucky they are — few ever leave. 'There's zero affordable space in Brighton,' says Cath Bristow from East Side Print. 'Without the rent we pay, we wouldn't be able to survive.'
Helen Brown from Bip-Art agrees. 'Brighton has always been an artistic community, so if everyone is priced out it becomes a soulless place,' she says. 'We're blessed to have landlords who want to create an artists' community, rather than just taking the highest bidder. They know how much effort is required to run a business. In their lives they've had their nose to the grindstone, they've got their hands dirty.'
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Indeed, at the couple's first pub in Wiltshire in 1969 there were no flushing lavatories, only buckets in garden sheds, and it was Ryan's job to empty them every Saturday night. 'If you knew what we've had to do in our lives,' Pope says.
There are benefits for the couple too in having created this harmonious community in their golden years. Jenkins says: 'Everyone in the mews always keeps a lookout to see if Chris and Geoff are OK, although they are such a young couple in their approach to life they often seem younger than us.'
The mews has a family atmosphere. Pope and Ryan check on the progress of the artists; every year they all get together for Christmas dinner. The couple have proudly watched Jenkins's career grow from knitwear to food-themed knitted artwork, including a full English breakfast made entirely from wool. She has exhibited in London, New York, Hong Kong and Germany. 'It gives me a thrill to know that people like Kate are succeeding,' Pope says. 'I feel proud. She could be like a daughter.'
Jenkins says the mews has transformed her life. 'I would not have been able to achieve what I've done without this place. There have been times when I've had no money and they've helped me out by saying, don't worry, pay me next month. It's all those little things that have helped me become established.'
Jenkins and her partner, Mo, who ships vinyl records, moved into the mews's one residential flat in 2014. Pope and Ryan insisted on interviewing him first. 'It was almost like he was meeting my parents, or asking for my hand in marriage,' Jenkins recalls. 'Mo was so nervous.'
Pope thinks of the mews as his family, Ryan says. 'Geoff is very emotionally involved. He worries about what's going to happen to them if he dies.'
The tenants too are worried that a new landlord will not be so benevolent. Jenkins says: 'We don't talk about [the future]. It's the elephant in the room. They're such great landlords and we're so lucky.'
The couple say what sets them apart from most landlords is that their tenants are their neighbours; they have a vested interest in keeping them sweet. Do they think all landlords should follow their lead?
'If you're a hard-headed landlord, you're going to be that and you can't change what you are,' Pope says. 'But I think you go through life and you learn. You have to have humanity. Knowing how to treat people as you'd want to be treated yourself. That's my motto.'
Landlords of Britain, take note.
