Waiting patiently…

Image: Tomylees

We’ve been receiving lots of emails from local residents asking when the Waiting Room will reopen and what the plan is for 2015. So we thought now would be a good time for a little update.

After a restful festive break, our team came back for a month of planning in January. We had the intention of opening some time this month. Refreshed, we sat down to thrash out what we should focus on. We need to prioritise to make the most of our remaining time. We always entered into this project knowing the physical building has a finite life, ahead of the long awaited redevelopment of the St Botolphs Quarter.

During 2013/14 the incredible opportunity allowed us to prototype so many different things. We truly got to understand what a community owned, led and managed cultural venue might look like and how we could work to complement not replicate the existing cultural offer in the town. Last year we stuck to our guns and welcomed everything with an open door. Together, with your help, we think we created something quite special – with genuine promise.

This year has to be all about focusing on what worked and we need to refine our enterprise model – beyond the Waiting Room building – so we can sustain ourselves, avoid being funding dependent and maintain a cultural independence.

We’ve talked, we planned, we’ve changed our minds, we planned again and now we think we have a very capable bunch of extremely creative individuals with some quite special (albeit consolidated) ideas in mind for 2015.

Next steps…

As 2015 and the proposed exciting redevelopment moves full steam ahead, the landscape will undoubtedly change quickly around us. Ideas abound and with fire in our belly, our next steps are to work with the local partners who are involved in the redevelopment of St Botolphs to understand just how quickly things are like to change. We need to ensure our ideas and ambition are likely to have enough time to come to fruition. Otherwise we feel we’re best bottling the collective energy, reserving our resources, and considering pastures new sooner rather than later.

Thank you for waiting patiently, bear with us, these conversations take time, rest assured we are moving forward and we’ll be back with a vengeance as soon as we can.