Artists, shoppers and businesspeople have all benefited from an innovative project to make the best possible use of empty shops in Coventry.
Coventry Artspace, acting as arts development team for Coventry City Council and working closely with the council’s property team, brought together a range of partners to manage a number of spaces in City Arcade. This is a covered space made up mainly of small units and sited on the edge of the city centre.
Visual arts projects were first to move in, including the gallery space Unit One, the innovative public studio I Love Artspace Bursaries project, and the curated Castle & Elephant gallery. As well as increasing footfall, these projects have generated national media coverage, including a Radio 4 magazine feature, and been recognised by specialist journals and magazines.
Performing arts have also found a home in City Arcade alongside the visual arts spaces. Theatre Absolute uses an empty fish and chip restaurant as a small scale ‘shop front theatre’ based on a model from the USA. The venue opened in December 2009 with a rehearsed reading of Theatre Absolute’s ‘Car’, and its most recent production, ‘Breathe’, was described by one visitor as ‘not so much a trip to the theatre as an experience in itself’.
‘The Bubblechamber’ is a project run by Mercurial Arts, primarily a dance company which makes extensive use of new media and technology. They are using a large empty shop with a series of very different spaces for workshops, classes, multi-media installations and performances.
Both Theatre Absolute and Mercurial Arts are using their spaces to generate new productions – products which can be sold to a national market – at a far lower cost than if they were to take a traditional route and use rehearsal rooms, theatre space and a full-scale production.
Overall, the mix of projects, and additional short-term use of other units by groups such as the Scouts, has seen additional footfall driven to City Arcade and may have identified a long-term branding and mix of use for the space, creating an adaptable arts centre based in empty shops.
http://www.creativeprocess.org.uk/news/empty_shops/
This post has been taken from our submission to the Mary Portas review of the future of the high street. The submission was a joint project, carried out in collaboration with Action for Market Towns, Empty Shops Network, Incredible Edible Todmorden, Meanwhile Space CIC, MyCard , Research 00:/ [zero zero], Res Publica and Wigan Plus. Look out for more information on this in the next few weeks.
A version of this post can also be found at http://living-places.org.uk/