“We Bought the Venue”: How Communities Are Taking Back Control of Cultural Spaces

From London to San Francisco, Helsinki to Sydney, a new cultural ownership model is emerging - and it might be the only thing standing between your local grassroots music venue and permanent closure.

The words Creative Land Trust don’t appear on the Music Venue Properties website. They’re not in our share offer, not in the brochure, not in any of the briefings I’ve handed to MPs, mayors, or venue operators. That wasn’t a strategy not to use the term - we honestly just didn’t realise that’s what we were.

We launched Own Our Venues because UK grassroots music venues were vanishing. Buildings were being sold out from under operators. Leases were expiring with no warning. The private market was eating up the cultural sector, and nobody was coming to save us.

So we tried something. We said: let’s buy the buildings.

Let’s ask music fans - the people who love these spaces - to step in where the market won’t. Not as donors. As co-owners. Let’s start a community benefit society, offer shares to the public, and see if we can raise the capital to transfer music venues into collective ownership.

A Community Share Offer lets anyone invest directly in an organisation that exists for community benefit - buying shares not for profit, but for purpose.

As I hope you already know, it worked.

We didn’t know then that what we were building had a name. That it sat within a global ecosystem of projects and people doing brilliant work we hadn’t encountered yet. But now we do. It’s changed my thinking.

At the Creative Land Trust Summit in San Francisco, I sat in a room full of people who have been doing this - or trying to - for years. Some for decades. Across housing, artist studios, theatres, galleries, co-ops, and collectives. People from Toronto, Austin, Seattle, Sydney, Helsinki, Calgary, San Francisco and beyond. All working to stop the cultural spaces in their cities being lost to rent hikes, development, or just plain indifference. What I found wasn’t just solidarity - it was inspiration. These aren’t just fellow travellers. They’re the pioneers. And now that I’ve seen the field, I understand how much we can - and must - learn from them.

At Music Venue Trust, we started Own Our Venues because we were running out of time. Venues were closing. Leases weren’t being renewed. Developers were knocking. Landlords were cashing out. And the entire UK touring circuit was starting to look like a colander. We didn’t have the backing of a government strategy. We didn’t have a housing authority. We didn’t have a city department whispering sweet regeneration clauses into our ears. But we did have some people that we identified as the core element to what we needed to do.

We had the audience. We had artists. We had operators. We had local communities who understood the importance of their local space. Joe Strummer said “Without people, you’re nothing”. So we asked the people to buy the venues.

Through a Community Benefit Society, we launched a national share offer, inviting anyone - for as little as £100 - to become part-owner of the future of UK grassroots music. Our model currently relies heavily on the live music community - local and national music fans, artists, promoters, record labels, and venue operators themselves. These are the people who stepped up not just with goodwill, but with investment. Yes we have been fortunate to identify some fellow believers along the way, Arts Council England and Figurative being the two most notable, and their support was essential. But comparing our model of supportive partners and willing co-conspirators to the international standard and you immediately stop and think; “wait a minute, have we missed something here?”

In our first round, we raised over £2.3 million and successfully acquired the freeholds of five grassroots music venues: The Snug in Atherton, The Ferret in Preston, The Bunkhouse in Swansea, Booking Hall in Dover and Le Pub in Newport. These buildings are now owned by the community through Music Venue Properties, protected with cultural leases, and operated for music, not the financial benefit of a private landlord.

In our second round, we’re going to buy another seven venues: Esquires in Bedford, The Joiners in Southampton, Peggy’s Skylight in Nottingham, The Croft in Bristol, The Sugarmill in Stoke-on-Trent, The Lubber Fiend in Newcastle, and The Pipeline in Brighton. Every one of them plays a critical role in the UK touring ecosystem. Every one of them is a heartbeat for new music in its city. And every one of them, if lost to commercial development, would leave a hole that might never be filled.

And only this week, standing in a summit room surrounded by veteran land trust builders, did I realise: we hadn’t invented anything new.

We’d simply plugged our own little bit of punk energy and motivation into the grid.

I met the team from CAST (Community Arts Stabilization Trust) in San Francisco - a model of careful stewardship and risk-sharing, giving artists time and room to grow within their buildings before they’re expected to buy.

I learned how Rally Austin - the cultural land trust serving one of America’s fastest-growing cities - is saving iconic venues with a mix of bond funding, long leases, and capital upgrades.

I listened to the vision behind Artist Space Trust in the Bay Area, building a future where artists can age in place, and leave behind permanent cultural homes - turning vulnerability into legacy.

I learned, for the first time, about Artspace - with 50-plus projects across 30 US cities - operating at scale, using affordable housing finance tools to embed art into civic life. The godfathers of an international movement we didn’t even know existed.

I spoke with people from cSPACE Calgary, Bow Arts, Helsinki’s Kaapeli, Sydney’s Creative Land Trust, and new organisers in Margate, Vancouver, Denver, and Toronto - all finding ways to anchor creative lives in permanent space. And I realised: We are part of this. We didn’t invent it. But we belong to it.

And now we know that, the opportunity is there to take what we have, add their ideas into the mix, and level up our ambition.

What makes Own Our Venues different isn’t that it’s better. It’s that it was born out of necessity - and built on community belief. But now we’ve seen what’s possible. So here’s what I am going to do next:

• I am going to build more partnerships - with philanthropists, local authorities, regional governments, social investors. We didn’t understand the huge potential for this before. Now we do - and we know who to ask.

• I am lifting our sights - we’ve seen cities with 10-year infrastructure pipelines. We’re going to plan further ahead, not just for which buildings we buy next, but for how we build permanent public interest ownership into the fabric of the UK’s music communities.

• We will always keep community shares at our core. But now we’ll explore cultural bonds, social impact funds, loan guarantees and even public co-investment, to deepen the model and make it scale.

• We’re being open - not just about what we’ve learned, but about how we share it. We want to collaborate, document, mentor and support others who want to buy their own venues - in the UK and beyond.

I came to this summit thinking we were running a successful campaign. I left realising we were building part of a cultural infrastructure movement with massive untapped potential.

We’re still us and always will be. Still grassroots. Still working venue to venue. Still borrowing gaffer tape to fix the tear in the speakers.

But now we’re connected. To a global community of people trying to hold space - literally - for culture. And we are prouder than ever of what we have done and the opportunity to be doing it alongside them. We don’t just admire what our colleagues have built - we are determined to learn from them, adopt what works, and raise our ambitions accordingly.

I still think we’re the upstart punks of this movement. But now we’ve read the History of Rock and we’re ready to write our difficult Post-Punk album, keeping the essence of what drove us to do this at our core but listening and adapting to the opportunities that colleagues across the world are telling us about.

Because as Sir Frank Turner always says, “We still believe”.

A massive thank you to Kenneth Rainin Foundation. World Cities Forum and Left Bank Co for making this event happen, and for making my attendance possible. It’s genuinely revolutionised my thinking.

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Want to join the movement?
The project to buy the next seven grassroots music venues only succeeds with you. Not the person next to you, not someone who you hopes does the right thing. Buy a share. Spread the word. Tell anyone and everyone, this is how we win. This is how we keep the lights on. Visit Own Our Venues and be part of it.