John Dean – Crime Writer

I am lending my voice in support of the campaign to save Aberdeen Arts Centre, which has come under threat of closure due to a financial crisis.

Although I have never visited Aberdeen, or its arts centre, the plight of such cultural venues reaches out to so many of us and, for me personally, touches a nerve.

As someone who played a part in the campaign to save Darlington Arts Centre in the South Durham town where I lived at the time, before moving to north to Scotland and Dumfries and Galloway, I know how such losses affect people in many different ways.

That closure was a straightforward case of the local council withdrawing all the funding from its arts centre, a move which would lead to the centre’s closure in 2012.

In Aberdeen, the scenario is a little different; once council-run, the arts centre is an independent organisation but financial support from the local council has long been important to its stability and part of the campaign against the threat of closure is to raise enough funds to persuade the authority to reinstate the money which it decided to withdraw.

The response from Aberdeen Arts Centre and its supporters has been to raise £180,000 which would return the organisation’s reserves to a sustainable level after it had to do dip into them to ensure that the centre kept going. The longer aim target is to raise £660,000 to cover the next three years, which would not only strengthen the organisation’s financial position  but also give it more chance to bid for funding from the likes of Creative Scotland’s Multi-Year Funding portfolio.

Different scenarios or not, all these types of cases – and there have been far too many them in the UK over recent years as council budget cuts cause grave problems for the cultural sector -,share some common themes.

The main one is that arts centres, and also libraries, play a central role in people’s lives. As happened in the Darlington campaign, and many others like it, disparate elements of the local community and arts world in Aberdeen have come forward to decry the closure plan, ranging from children’s groups to dance clubs, theatre groups to writers.

What you also find in such cases is that the threat stretches beyond the local community; Aberdeen has received support from figures in the national arts world and Darlington Arts Centre received support from everyone ranging from well-known musicians and famous actors to best-selling authors, all of whom argued that closing an arts centre is so much more than tearing down bricks and mortar, it also dismantles important part of community life.

The building that is now home to Aberdeen Arts Centre was erected in 1828 as the North Parish Church in the parish of St Nicholas. Built to accommodate more than 1,700 parishioners, it opened on 19th June 1831 and was in use for more than 120 years.

Following its closure in the 1950s, the building reopened as an Arts Centre in 1963. The £53,000 conversion installed a proscenium arch on the first floor and meeting rooms on the ground floor. It was the first venue of its kind in Scotland and, run by the City Council, it served the local community until 1998, when core funding was removed and the threat of closure loomed large.

The Aberdeen Arts Centre Association, led by Annie Inglis MBE, was established to ‘Save the Arts Centre’, and in 1999 Castlegate Arts Limited was founded to support the building’s ongoing creative activity.

The venue encompasses a 350-seater auditorium, a café bar, flexible spaces for performances, events, exhibitions and meetings; and the Children’s Theatre, the first of its kind to open in the UK.

Closure would leave a void for hundreds  who rely on the venue for creative expression, life skills, and social support. The loss would be far-reaching not only for local community groups, say supporters. With 35,000 annual visitors and 35 community groups using the venue, the Arts Centre’s shutdown would strip the city centre of a major cultural hub, directly impacting surrounding businesses, say campaigners.

Local restaurants, bars, shops, and hotels in the vicinity of the King Street venue all rely to some extent on event-driven footfall. Hospitality and retail sectors, already struggling in the face of a cost of living crisis, reduced footfall and ever-rising energy bills, would face a further significant loss, they say

Going back to the Darlington story, the campaign to save Darlington Arts Centre was led by the creation of a new volunteer-led organisation which was set up for the purpose and after the centre closed in 2012, I moved up from my role of Darlington for Culture’s Media Officer to become Chair.

Subsequently, we ran events of our own, created the town’s first annual arts festival and played a key role in the successful campaign to save the town’s two libraries when the council said that it would be withdrawing funding and that if the community wanted its libraries to survive, they would have to take the lead. In the end, the council relented and the libraries were saved, a decision that will forever be to the authority’s credit.

As with Darlington, the community in Aberdeen has responded to the threat of closure of the arts centre in similarly practical ways, from raising funds to giving local people a forum through which they can voice support.

If you want to help the team raise the fund that the centre needs, you can find out more, and donate, at Save Aberdeen Arts Centre | Aberdeen Arts Centre