I spent a chunk of this week helping to put together a nomination to get a venue listed as an Asset of Community Value. I won't say which one, because the application is currently being considered and I'd rather tell you about it after that happens than raise any possibility of it being obstructed.
Obviously I know not everyone reading this runs a venue, or works in one, although I would guess that most of you will have thought about what you can do to support them beyond buying a ticket and queuing for the bar. For that majority of you, here’s a heads up; in terms of what you personally can do after you’ve read this, short of lodging your own ACV application for somewhere you care about (which you should definitely do, there are some links below), this week's edition might be a bit technical and nuanced unless you’re actively involved in unlocking the door of a venue on a regular basis. I want to talk about something spectacularly tedious but, it turns out, increasingly important, the kind of admin that ends up right at the end of the enormous long list of things that have to be done but which, increasingly, can be the entire reason the room's still standing to be filled.
Asset of Community Value status is a bit of the Localism Act 2011 that gives a community an actual fighting chance when a building they love comes up for sale. Get a building listed, and once the owner announces they intend to sell it, a clock starts; six weeks for the local group that holds the ACV to say they're interested, six months after that to raise the money and put a serious bid together. It doesn't force anyone to sell to you, although the government is busy working on that point to turn the Community Right to Bid into the Community Right to Buy. In its current form, ACV doesn't even guarantee a discount. But it does buy the local community time, which sounds unglamorous right up until you remember how many beloved buildings in this country have been lost not because nobody wanted to save them, but because nobody had six months' warning that saving them was suddenly on the table.
What I mainly want to tell you about this week, though, is that when I was working with the team to put together the ACV application for this particular venue it struck me that a significant change had taken place in the work we had to do to support these applications. And that another, equally significant, change was possible and really is the next step required. It may seem like quite a small thing, but for this ACV I didn't have to explain to the council what a Grassroots Music Venue is.
The fight to get government and other key stakeholders to accept that such a thing as a Grassroots Music Venue exists has been won for some while now; nobody needs persuading in 2026 about the existence of such a class of premises or organisation the way they would have in 2013. What a GMV is, as I have previously written about, is littered through government statements, policy announcements, funding opportunities, select committees and all sort of other legal frameworks which define, acknowledge and recognise them. Just about the only people left claiming they don’t know what a Grassroots Music Venue is are PRS for Music, and they are only saying that so they don’t have to do the work grassroots songwriters need them to and sort out an appropriate tariff for a distinct sector.
What I did have to do, in one section of the form, was set out the case that this particular building actually is one, provide the evidence behind that assertion, and validate that based on the definition established by Music Venue Trust over 12 years of work, what this particular council is looking at right now is an ACV application to protect a thing they know all about, they just might not have known this was one of those. I wasn't building an argument from nothing, I was simply pointing at all the things that already exist, MVT's own data, the definition itself, ten years of precedent, and lining them up against one building.
In this case, it wasn't an immediate crisis, just a pressing matter, and nobody was in urgent danger of losing anything. But it was still a much slower section of the form than it needed to be, and that’s what I am writing about today and what I want venue operators and staff reading this to get to work on at the next available opportunity. Because nothing about the venue's own public existence had done any of that pointing in advance; not the website, not the sign above the door, not the email footer, not its own registration with Companies House, nor any of its available legal or societal definitions. A thing called a Grassroots Music Venue exists, and the relevant local authority that can grant an ACVB knows all about what that is, but the venue itself has been too busy actually being one to do anything about telling anyone about it. As far as the British state, and most of the British public, were concerned it might as well have been a vape shop or an American Candy Store.
The issue here isn't just limited to the one I was dealing with on Wednesday, not by a long-shot. The challenge is spread across all kinds of places that have emerged organically to be GMVs but have not ever stopped to look at what their own registrations, communications, or public facing statements say they are. I'd put real money on there being a working, touring, sold-out-on-a-good-Friday venue somewhere in this country still registered as a launderette, because somebody's lease started that way in 1994 and nobody's had the spare afternoon since to fix it. I'd put money on one filed as a taxi office. I know for a fact, because I checked it myself this week, that there's a proper Grassroots Music Venue currently sitting on the Companies House register as a bowling green; you know, with grass, a jack, a pavilion, the whole gentle business of lawn bowls. That particular building has hosted several thousand touring artists and not one game of anything played outdoors, but an official sat in the government’s Valuation Office Agency, in Treasury deciding on a tax advantage, or in DCMS designing the latest part of the Music Growth Package, has no way of knowing that. I mean, we can tell them and try to persuade them, but they do tend to keep coming back to us saying ‘do you mean this Bowling Green?’
None of this is happening because anyone involved doesn't know what their venue is. Every promoter, every booker, every sound engineer standing behind a haunted mixing desk at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday could tell you exactly what kind of room they're running and would be faintly insulted if you suggested otherwise. The gap has never been in anyone's head. It's sitting in a filing cabinet, or more accurately these days a hastily filled in database, completed once, in a hurry, by someone who's since moved three jobs and two cities away and never looked at it again.
In January this year Music Venue Trust announced its latest review of the grassroots sector and confirmed that there were, at last count, 801 Grassroots Music Venues operating in this country. We do it every January, its part of our Annual Report, and government, ministers, MPs, Lords, and the music industry itself, over the course of more than a decade, have gradually moved to the position where that number forms the basis on which they are building a whole range of support. And the more support they build, the more important it becomes not just to be defined by Music Venue Trust as part of that cohort and classification, but to define yourselves within it: We can try to sort out the fact we think you’re a Grassroots Music Venue even though your paperwork says you’re a bowling green, but it would be a hell of a lot easier for everyone if we didn’t have to.
It’s worth noting that a lot of these venues also did something else worth being proud of across the last decade, moving from ordinary for-profit trading into not-for-profit structures, community interest companies, community benefit societies, trusts; a different shift entirely, and a properly useful one, as it opens up discretionary reliefs, funding eligibility, and starts the road to community ownership. But you can be a not-for-profit and still be completely invisible to the system as a Grassroots Music Venue. And plenty of fantastic venues still are.
None of this is a criticism, by the way. Running a venue is relentless, exhausting, time consuming work, and if you're choosing between fixing the toilets before doors and checking your SIC code is right, you fix the toilets, every time, and you absolutely should. Nobody's ever lost a gig because their Companies House filing was out of date. But somewhere down the line of this work there's a business rate relief, or a tax benefit, or a funding stream you're actually entitled to that has to, as a matter of the mechanism, assume the system already knows what you are. If it doesn't, the fight to align your registration with the reality of what you're running starts from absolute scratch, at exactly the moment you've got the least spare time to do it. Worst of all, it can look like you are only deciding now to change your registration, your communications, and your public profile, simply to access the benefits that you should, if you are a GMV, be entitled to. Every time a beneficial position is announced for Grassroots Music Venues, and I am proud to say there has been a lot of that in the last few years, we get a flood of applications for spaces who want to be part of the Music Venues Alliance by claiming to be a GMV. Although so far no Bowling Green has tried it on.
None of this is hard to fix, and if you’re reading this and involved in a venue, it is moving into a phase where you need to prioritise fixing it.
Start with the registrations, because they're the really dull end of this and you might as well get them out of the way first. Every venue's got a SIC code sitting somewhere in the background, a Standard Industrial Classification, which is just the short number Companies House and HMRC use to describe what kind of business you actually are, almost certainly ticked once in a massive rush when the venue was set up and never looked at again by anyone. The existing SIC code you should have which makes it the clearest you are a GMV is 90040; Operation of Arts Facilities. There's a new SIC code for live music venues coming and MVT will be campaigning for you all to adopt it as soon as it is available. The day it lands, put it on. Don't wait for a quiet week, there isn't going to be one; just do it the day it's live, because until then you're whatever the old code says, and for plenty of venues that's a bar, a function room, or something even less accurate than that. It's not only the SIC code either. Your council, the Charity Commission if you've gone the not-for-profit route, whoever eventually ends up building a funding register out of all this, they're all reading a file rather than looking at the actual room, so if what's written down is vague, wrong, or from a different decade, that's what you are to them, whatever's actually happening on the stage that night. Genuinely, it would not hurt to produce a short letter saying what you do, who you are, and laying it out cleanly right now; we are a Grassroots Music Venue.
Next, get the words ‘Grassroots Music Venue’ on your signage, in your email footer, on any letter that goes out under the venue's name, on your website itself, actually written, those three words. Grassroots Music Venue, rather than left for someone to guess from a photo of a band mid-set. And if you're in the Music Venues Alliance, put the badge somewhere anyone can actually see it, not three menus deep on a site that hasn't finished loading by the time whoever's looking has already got distracted by cat videos.
You’re not a Bowling Green, nor are you, and believe it or not this is not about Tunbridge Wells Forum, a public convenience. You might be on a boat that used to be temporary stable for reindeer, but if you’re now a Grassroots Music Venue then take thirty minutes out of your week to say that.
Say it out loud and be proud. It’s a wonderful thing to be.
Really useful. Will get on changing our code from 90020 to 90040. Our VOA still has us down as bank. I did pay a company thousands years ago to challenge/change this but the VOA did nothing. Pubs bigger, and better location up the high street have a lower rateable value than we do by over £20k