Who are we?

Woodend provides purpose-built managed workspace to support individuals, companies and enterprises, operating in the digital, media and creative sector. Our primary focus is to encourage new ideas and talent and help create and sustain new and existing businesses.

The building is special and distinctive. The original site comprises a Grade ll* listed marine villa, built in 1835 for the civil engineer, George Knowles. The house overlooks the English Heritage-registered Valley Gardens below, and onwards to the sea, in Scarborough’s beautiful South Bay.

Lady Louisa Sitwell bought the house in 1870. She added a splendid double-height conservatory and a few years later her son, Sir George Sitwell, added a new wing with a library modelled on his family home at Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire. The ‘folly’ tower in the garden was probably built with the original house, but Lady Louisa had ovens installed so that it could be used as a pottery (a Miss Lloyd taught several generations of Sitwells to decorate pots in there).

The house was the birthplace of Edith Sitwell in 1887 and played a strong role in the literary lives of Sir George’s children (Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell) until he eventually disposed of it to Scarborough Council in 1934. The Council operated the Wood End Museum Of Natural History in the building up until 2006, when it was adopted for the creative workplace development.

The re-development of the site has completely refurbished the listed buildings and incorporated them into a new and distinctive workspace solution of the highest contemporary architectural quality. Two new extensions are intended to complement but not copy the historic building and the designs are clearly distinctive and in keeping with the surrounding architecture.

The main three-story extension lies in the footprint of the former walled garden to the rear of the building, and is finished in complementary ashlar stone, with zinc bays and brick screen walls. The new workspace includes a roof of flowering sedum which will change colour with the seasons. A further extension of workspaces has been added in the garden between the Sitwell Villa and the reconstructed folly, in the manner of a kitchen garden glasshouse, screened from plantation hill by the original garden wall.

Woodend is operated and managed by Creative Industries Centre Trust Limited, a not-for-profit company that leases the building from Scarborough Borough Council. The Trust is committed to assisting and supporting the growth of the creative industries sector in the area through the provision of quality workspace and programmes that attract and develop new business and jobs in the sector and support cultural regeneration.