Heartbeat of Nottingham’s creative sector

The company behind Fisher Gate Point – Offshoots (East Midlands) – is a not-for-profit community interest company. We host and deliver workshops, creative projects and events across many different arts strands to community groups in our space, which also features the city’s first female-led recording studio.

The space can host a wide range of events for multiple groups that produce or engage in culture in some way, irrespective of whether they make money.  Here, artists can get their work seen, craft makers can get their works sold without paying for expensive premises, communities can come together to learn new skills and audiences can experience artworks that wouldn’t otherwise get exposure.

This enables discussions about growing the arts in the city and about how to nurture new talent, keeping pipelines open for grassroots artists – across all artforms – to experiment. Small businesses can grow without the usual prohibitive expenses – as rent is shared and all groups benefit from the footfall generated, rather than competing in an open market.

Reversing the decline of city centres

Wherever people come together, income is generated. And places that provide a multitude of ways to engage people in art do bring people together. There are successful models all over the UK. Take Brighton City Centre, for example, whose council refused to give up their high street to big, international brands in the 1980s and the Custard Factory in Birmingham. When rents are kept low by sharing, innovation thrives.

Fisher Gate Point is shared by groups and individuals – from creative businesses to artists. We think the only way to regenerate and reverse the death of the UK’s high streets is to reduce rents and allow people to take over spaces and fill them with wonderful, eclectic art. That’s how to get people back into city centres. We at FGP are trying to do our bit to make that happen.

Over the last five years, we’ve organically become a significant heartbeat in Nottingham’s creative sector and are now the beloved home to many cultural leaders and young collectives. As directors of the company, myself and my wife Tricia always struggled to find spaces to deliver the variety of projects that we wanted to provide for communities. We knew that other companies were in the same boat.

When we found the Fisher Gate Point building, it was a higgledy-piggledy mess of an old business space with random offices of all sizes tucked away from each other, but we could see there was potential to open it up so we could facilitate lots of arts organisations that like us, only needed small offices, but needed larger spaces to deliver their projects.

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Poets off the Endz performance at Fisher Gate Point

The story now

Fisher Gate Point is now home to six separate independent creative companies including 17 artists who have their own studio spaces, an artisan shop for these in-house artists to sell their work and a café bar open to the public and our workshop attendees.

We have secured funding to deliver a regular women’s group (Sugar Stealers), a men’s group (Man Up Man Down) and a music-based youth group (Circle of Light) who make an album in just three weeks every year followed by a live showcase on World Mental Health Day. The young people even can even gain a Rock School London qualification through this project, which is all completely free for participants.

The large community rooms are now rented by community groups who use the affordable space to deliver workshops across acting, dancing, capoeira, improv, comedy and poetry sessions and wellbeing sessions such as yoga or sound baths. We’ve even had boxercise classes. Events include regular gigs in all genres, comedy nights, poetry nights, film nights, open mics, jam sessions and theatre performances.

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Tricia and Ian Gardiner (centre), founding directors of Fisher Gate Point

Looking to the future

We spend lots of time writing funding applications to ensure we can continue to deliver quality arts provision to community groups. To date, we have been funded by Arts Council England, Youth Music, National Lottery, Children In Need, Comic Relief, Sport England, People’s Health Trust and many others.

The final piece of the jigsaw – for everyone to be able to use the building whenever they wanted – was put in place when, after five years, we secured funding from the Youth Investment Fund to open the cafe, the artists’ shop and a dedicated computer suite room.

The income generated by the café bar when people attend events or come in just to eat is helping provide sustainable income alongside our public funding, to keep the whole space open and thriving.

We believe that participating in and experiencing the arts is vital for everyone’s mental health and wellbeing and we think the building is now perfectly suited to help those things happen.