Man turned boredom at home into plan to save the high street

A man is hoping his new creative hub will change his community for the better.

Dr Eric Lybeck, 43, from Southport, has spent much of his working life commuting long distances. This made the recent rise in working from home a welcome development.

However, Dr Eric felt something was missing as he continued his work as an academic at the University of Manchester from his Merseyside home. He told the ECHO: “I was working in Manchester and living in Liverpool. I liked having no commute but did not necessarily like always being at home.

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“Then I set up something with other people, where all of us academics could work together - some of us worked in Leeds, some in Sheffield, some in London. I started at Liverpool Athenaeum near The Bluecoat. It kind of worked but it wasn’t really set up for creatives.”

Dr Eric decided to put the policy that won him a £10,000 award in an academic essay competition into practice. He believes that, as universities in city centres such as Liverpool have grown bigger, a phenomenon called ‘youth flight’ has started, where young creatives and professionals move out of smaller towns such as Southport into larger areas, damaging the local economy.

Dr Eric said: “We’ve expanded higher education to a large extent and that benefits cities but for places that we now call left behind, places that young people have moved away from, we need to have strategies that bring them back. Independent of that, I was working with Baltic Creative during the pandemic about suggesting coworking spaces for academics who work in different spaces to where they live.”

He decided to put his theory to the