Community crowdfunder launched for new arts space

The team behind a community radio and TV station have launched a crowdfunder to help reopen a historic Sheffield pub as a live arts and media venue.

Sheffield Community Media, which runs the Sheffield Live broadcaster, bought the former Tap and Barrel pub on Castlegate earlier this year with help from social investment lender The Key Fund.

Now the group is inviting the public to become community shareholders and co-owners in the development of the building.

Steve Buckley of Sheffield Community Media said: "We are now inviting people to help us realise the full potential of this building as a venue for live music, performing arts and media, owned by and run for the benefit of the community."

He said: "This has always been the plan.

"The funding was in place to make the building habitable and to be able to move our studios into it but to bring it into public use requires additional funding and we need people to get on board.

"By the middle of next year, we'd like to reopen the building to the public as a pub, cafe bar with a live arts and performing arts focus, bringing in local musicians, theatre and spoken word."

The group, which hopes to move across from its current home at the Workstation by the end of the year, aims to raise £150,000 through community shares and bonds and possible arts grants.

Buckley said community shareholding projects had been successful elsewhere in the city.

"The Gardeners Rest pub, Portland Works and Sheffield Renewables have all invited people to become owners in a community benefits society that is set up on a one-member, one-vote basis and gives the shareholders an opportunity to influence the direction of the organisation," he said.

No name has yet been chosen for the new building which is situated opposite Lady's Bridge and at the corner of what was once the inner courtyard of Sheffield's medieval castle.

Sangita Basudev, co-founder of Sheffield Live, said: "So many people have shared with us their memories of the pub and its neighbourhood and their hopes for what it can become in the future.

"Now we need people to get on board, as community shareholders, to help raise the investment needed to restore and renew this unique city centre asset."

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