Quest for a new home

We've outgrown Bridge Street. The room holds 80 people standing/dancing gig and 50 seated, which limits the acts we can host and the number of things we can run at once. It has no wheelchair-accessible toilet, so we can't yet welcome everyone. Our landlord is selling, so we have no security either. So we need a new place.

What we’d do with a bigger space

In Nelson we have some great institutions with the Suter, Theatre Royal, Red Door Theatre, The State Cinema and Tāwera. But we don't have many spaces to experiment, develop and test things out before performing, displaying or showing at those spaces. We hope to be the place to fix that.

Nelson City Council's 2022 Community Arts Facilities Gaps Analysis identified a gap in contemporary music venues, particularly for youth bands to play to youth audiences, and named a 120–150 seat black box theatre among the venues Nelson needs. The same report found that the loss of the Artery, later the Hub, is still felt by the arts community. So we'd provide a live music venue and a black-box theatre, alongside rehearsal rooms and a community recording studio. Artists in the report's survey described affordable rehearsal space as a real challenge, and many rehearse at home.

We'd also make it a place to gather. A Grand Lounge and Common Room would be open to different groups at different times of the day, with a meeting room and a kitchen. We'd expand the Repair Café, which we already host, and add an instrument and tool library. We would have coffee after 2pm!

Some inspiration images: