From the Ground Up: Inside the DIY Spaces Going Against the Grain

In 2024, the outlook for grassroots music venues looks bleak. In the first quarter of the year, an estimated five clubs in the UK went out of business each week – casualties of developers, noise complaints and the cost of living. But amid all the gloom, there is a note of hope. Across the country, enterprising music fans are bucking the trend, building new spaces where community – not commerce – reigns supreme. Here are their stories, and how you can do the same…

Frazer Scott, one of the co-founders of queer-led DIY venue and community space Gut Level, is reflecting on its original home: a garage under a railway arch. When securing the lease, they’d made out it was going to be a recording studio, but really it was going to be a party space, as he explains with trademark warmth. “We were under threat of legal action straight away, so we had to be super underground with the way we promoted all our parties in that first space. We had a secret Facebook group that we’d invite people to.”

 Gut Level’s operation has since expanded. They use a membership model, putting on various arts and community-focused events and parties in a former café in the centre of Sheffield. Members can pay an annual subscription of £2 to access the space, or, if they are more closely connected to it, they can step up to a monthly fee between £4 and £20. The basic idea remains unchanged from the days of their covert Facebook group: throw parties and invite people to opt into the community.

According to the Music Venue Trust, 125 grassroots music venues either closed or stopped hosting live music in 2023, and 43 percent of grassroots venues made a loss. There’s been no respite this year, with the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) announcing that 67 nightclubs closed down in the first three months of 2024 alone, most of which – 48 in total – were independently run. Meanwhile, the government’s autumn budget contained a reduction in business rate relief from 75 percent to 40 percent from 1 April, 2025, which the Music Venue Trust has said translates to a sector-wide demand for £7 million in additional premises taxes. For scale, the entire gross profit across the 830 venues that make up the grassroots music sector in the UK was £2.9 million in 2023, according to the Trust. They warn that more than 350 grassroots venues will now face the threat of closure as a result.

Amid all this gloom, a ray of hope shines through as more and more people take matters into their own hands, building sustainable venues from the bottom up. Some have zero experience of running a venue, but they do possess the determination and guts to learn concrete ways of meeting precarity with solidarity, throwing beloved institutions a lifeline and starting new ones from scratch in cavernous fixer-uppers with support from their local community. It’s a shared labour of love that shows the cultural fabric doesn’t have to be shrunk to fit the short-term incentives of private landlords and developers. There is an alternative.

“We try to be as non-hierarchical as possible,” says Avi De, a member of the board at The Lughole, a DIY not-for-profit punk and hardcore venue in the Kelham Island area of Sheffield that runs its own “DIY or die” membership model. “All the board are volunteers – everybody on the bar, anybody helping out with the stage, though we do pay sound engineers,” De explains. The venue applies tiered ticket pricing to keep things accessible: tickets for under-18s are often a fiver and below, there’s a ticket tier for non-earners or people on low incomes, a regular ticket, and a solidarity ticket which contributes to subsidising future shows or supporting the venue. Volunteering on the bar can also be a way for people to see a show without paying.

This volunteer-led operation keeps costs down, which means they can do things differently. “We don’t need these kinds of external bouncers… we’re responsible for our community,” De says. They can be flexible on the premises they require, too. “The affordability of somewhere that’s already set up as a venue is way beyond us,” De explains. They were able to start from scratch in a former joinery workshop, including buying a new PA, after receiving funding from Arts Council England and Sheffield City Council, and raising a bunch from merch and memberships before the place was open. “There’s a real community coming together to make this work,” De says.

The process isn’t always so smooth. For Gut Level, getting started in their current space meant spending nine months renovating it to meet the council’s criteria. Scott recommends anyone establishing a new space should be meticulous when going through the guidance. “For example, the staircase we had in our current space was like 20 cm off being suitable for a licensed venue,” he says. “We had to rip the staircase out, which involved demolishing some of the floor, changing the entire floor plan of the building – and it’s 20 cm of stair. If we had gone through that guidance and questioned it before, it would have saved us like 30 grand and a shitload of time and effort. That was only possible because we had loads of support, but if you’re just starting out, that’s just gonna fuck you straightaway.”

Things were simpler for artists Mikolaj Szatko and James Johnson when they set up their artist-led DIY space, EXIT, in a former strip club in Glasgow. The premises already had a licence attached to it, Johnson explains, and physical infrastructure, like a bar, meant it was almost ready to go. “We were lucky, it had so much character already,” he says. “We painted upstairs, but downstairs we basically just scrubbed the hell out of everything and then it’s pretty much exactly how it was before. Put a sound system in there, made it clean!”

If you’re setting up a new space, it’s important to make sure there’s a balance of skillsets in your team. For his money, Scott recommends having someone who’s good with finances, someone who knows DIY and maintenance, and someone who can handle social media and graphic design duties. Gathering the right people around you can also stave off imposter syndrome. Lenny Watson is one of the co-founders of south London collective Sister Midnight, who are working on opening a venue in Catford. Lewisham Council have given the group a ten-year rent-free lease on a derelict building in exchange for them bringing it back into use, which requires substantial renovations. It’s a massive project, but, Watson says, it’s important not to be overly intimidated by technicalities. If you don’t know anything about alcohol licensing, that just means you don’t know anything about alcohol licensing… yet. 

“You can learn about these things,” she says. “I mean, I knew nothing about planning permission or the architectural design process when we started this project – I don’t have a background in any of this stuff; my degree was in fine art – but we have incredible architects. Shout out Beep Studio! They have just guided us through the process, so it really is just about getting the right people on board who have that expertise… It doesn’t have to be this overwhelming, all-at-once, huge learning curve.”

The first thing Sister Midnight did when they were starting their current campaign was to reach out to a co-operative practitioner. They worked with Dave Boyle, director of the Community Shares Company in the UK. He helped the group identify specific grants that supported them while they were deciding on the right legal model and getting set up as a co-op. “A lot of that is like, very specialist advice,” Watson cautions. “I wouldn’t want to put anything in an article saying to someone, ‘you should be a community benefit society’ or ‘you should be a CIC [Community Interest Company]’, because it’s so specific to each individual person’s situation. But that’s exactly why I decided to train as a co-operative practitioner as well, so that we can give this advice. My message to anyone reading this would be to get in touch with Sister Midnight if you want to do something similar to what we’ve done, because we’re willing to help, and we can signpost you to the support and resources that you need.”

The group made use of community shares to raise funds from backers. As an approach, it’s a bit like crowdfunding, but with a participatory element: everyone who bought a share became a member and has been involved in the democratic process of running the organisation.

But what if you’ve been in situ for ages and only now find yourself facing down the risk of closure? One initiative that’s been helping stem the tide is Music Venue Properties, which was launched by the Music Venue Trust to help rescue venues that are under threat. 

The Bunkhouse in Swansea is an example of the scheme working. “They were pretty turbulent times,” says Jordan McGuire, who runs the venue. He describes “an uproar” in the community when the landlord was looking to sell up and the venue faced closure. “There were people [in survey responses] discussing how the venue has helped them with their mental health issues, how it accepts them when they don’t feel accepted in other parts of society, and how they’ve found a place to express themselves when they can’t express themselves elsewhere.” Following support from the local authority, Labour, Plaid Cymru and the music community in Swansea, McGuire says, Music Venue Properties’ offer to buy was accepted. “By the end of it, we won, really!”

Campaigning at the national level looks like it may be beginning to bear fruit, too. In November, the UK government accepted proposals made in a report by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, including that the music industry should introduce a voluntary levy on stadium and arena tickets to raise funds that can be distributed to grassroots venues, artists and promoters. The Music Venue Trust seems confident that there is real momentum behind this move. “It’s now a question of how and when, not if, the grassroots ticketing contribution is enacted,” a celebratory post on their Instagram page read. “The ball is in the music industry’s court: act voluntarily or face a statutory levy.” The post calls this update “the single most significant shift in over 50 years of British music”.

Until then – and beyond – grassroots venues will keep making it work. A common theme is how much they’re doing beyond putting on shows. Wharf Chambers in Leeds is a co-operative and members’ club that also happens to be a home for noise and experimental music in the city (a random search for a show there brings up Dadaist collaged gunk-noise from Bird Brains). The space also operates a lending library, with books on race, gender and sexuality, queerness, diaspora, class and radical political thought that are free to borrow. Meanwhile, venues like The Lughole and The Bunkhouse aren’t just offering a stage for new bands to perform on. They’re also places where new promoters can learn the craft, and young people can go to their first gig.

“We had our first lot do their first shows last night,” McGuire says, discussing the course they’ve been running for 16-24-year-olds in south Wales to learn the art of gig promotion, which culminates in the students putting on a show at The Bunkhouse. 

“There were 90-odd people in – for the first show they’ve ever put on!” he says proudly. “If I got 90 people into the first show I ever put on, I’d have been laughing.”