A while ago, we made a proposal to run 350 Sauchiehall Street as a creation centre and performance venue. We envisaged a different model of managing an arts building, with contemporary performance at its centre, honouring Scotland's legacy of experimentation while looking forward and outward. Through collaboration between established companies and independent artists without permanent premises, we aimed to increase artistic ambition while sharing resources and reducing administrative bloat.
Our group of companies, and others, would be based in the building, make work there and gradually restore the building as a public-facing multi-artform venue. When our proposal went public, we received lots of responses from the artistic community in Scotland, and engaging with those responses - both the supportive and the critical - was inspiring and expanding. When Creative Scotland opened a call for Expressions of Interest in 350 Sauchiehall Street, we put forward a bid. This was our vision:
A group of nationally and internationally renowned Scottish theatre and dance companies and artists will collectively lead the building at 350 Sauchiehall Street. We’re joined by music promoter Andrew Thomson (Clyde Built Radio) to run a programme of music. Rosie Healey of Gloriosa is on board to run the restaurant and bar and we are consulting a potential visual arts partner. Our collective achievements include producing for the world’s most prestigious cultural destinations, writing BAFTA award-winning films, staging west end productions and winning Tony awards. Driven by vision and artistic ambition we will bring a refreshing vitality to the building and the city.
350 Sauchiehall Street will be a creation centre for our work, the work of others and an artist-led destination venue for Glasgow. It will encompass rehearsal and performance spaces, galleries, a canteen, bar and restaurant, administrative bases and civic space, with world-leading contemporary performance and art firmly at its core. 350 Sauchiehall Street will nurture direct participation in the arts for the citizens of Glasgow, an asset to the Culture and Heritage District in which it is located.
Our roots are in theatre and live performance, but our practices move between theatre, dance, music, visual art, film, installation, sound and participatory practice. We will bring interdisciplinary thinking to how we manage the whole building, treating its spaces as modular and porous rather than assigning them permanently to particular artforms. The main gallery, for example, might present a visual art exhibition in the winter, a performance in the spring, a space for civic debate in the summer, a making space in the autumn.
Driven by internationalism, the work we make here will take flight to venues across Scotland and around the world, while artists from elsewhere will come to Glasgow to present major work and fertilise new ideas across the city.
Building on the radical legacy of The Third Eye Centre, we want 350 Sauchiehall Street to become a public living room for Glasgow. We will build the range and frequency of public activity as the building develops; within three years, our ambition is that there will always be something on, for people of all ages.
Using a unique operating model, part of the infrastructure, human resources and funding of each founding organisation would go towards supporting the building. We will employ a small core staff team responsible for the day-to-day management of the building, supported by the shared resources and expertise of the founding organisations. We are talking to local entrepreneurs as potential partners and developing our proposal in consultation with Toneelhuis in Antwerp, who have pioneered a model of collective artistic leadership since 2022, alongside leading international creation centres such as CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Schaubühne in Berlin and Le Diamant in Québec as inspirations.
This was not simply a proposal to occupy a building. It was a proposal to help build the artistic infrastructure Scotland lacks. Under our custodianship, 350 Sauchiehall Street would have been a creation centre and artist-led destination for technically ambitious, risk-taking, contemporary performance in Glasgow.
Our proposal made it to the second stage (the ‘Final Bid’), as did all thirteen submissions. In addition, Creative Scotland invited new proposals from parties who had not applied for the first stage. However, our group decided not to proceed with a final bid. This is why:
Creative Scotland has made clear that its preference is to sell. We cannot buy the building. Our proposal was to combine our existing funding and resources, together with the resource of the building itself, to efficiently and effectively create and deliver the work CS funds us to make, at the same time as leading a thriving, living arts space. Our collaborative management model would increase the impact of every pound Creative Scotland is already spending on our individual companies and artists and on the building itself. But we cannot use our existing funding to physically own and maintain the building. Indeed, we struggle to see how any organisation with the intention to keep the building alive as a living, breathing arts space which prioritises artistic innovation, can afford to buy it. Creative Scotland has said it is willing to accept a proposal based on lease, rather than ownership. But we need more information to put such a proposal forward in good faith, and that information is not forthcoming. We understand Creative Scotland needs to oversee a ‘transparent’ process and that this precludes conversations with interested parties, but without truly understanding the parameters of a possible tenancy, we’ve concluded that the odds are too heavily stacked against us.
The bidding process was not the right one for our project. We need to engage in a dialogue with Creative Scotland, not a bidding process. We understand that if the aim is to sell a building, a bidding process is the appropriate avenue. But if the aim is to create a new piece of artistic and social infrastructure, dialogue is required between artists and funder. As a group of artists and organisations, we are proposing a different kind of building - innovatively managed, generative, experimental, and ambitious - and we believe that Creative Scotland wants something different too. But if we want a different outcome, we need a different process. Our group is, above all, a group of collaborators - that is how we came together and found unity and momentum. We are asking Creative Scotland to join that collaboration, and in doing so, to be ambitious, to invest in Scotland’s artistic infrastructure, and to fulfill its role not just as funder but as developer and influencer.
As our proposal developed, we became more conscious of 350 Sauchiehall Street's practical limitations. This has helped us clarify what a new space might need to offer. We have therefore decided to turn our attention to founding a new creation centre, performance venue and civic space that better suits our evolving ambitions. We invite Creative Scotland to meet us at the table.
We believe that, as Scotland's theatres face increasing commercial pressures, diminishing resources and growing artistic conservatism, there is more need than ever for a dedicated creation centre where artists can develop, produce and present ambitious, world-class, risk-taking, internationally-minded work. There are many possible shapes that this next building might take. At its centre, though, it is a place that nurtures the creation of ambitious contemporary performance. It could include many of the things we envisaged for 350 Sauchiehall Street: an affordable café, communal spaces and a programme spanning music, visual art and other disciplines. It would be a more flexible space, with greater scope for technical ambition and potential capacity for audiences.
This space does not exist in Scotland. We have the artists, but not the space – or more accurately, artists and space are inseparable: they nurture each other, change each other. Together they create a genuinely exciting home for a city's art. We invite Creative Scotland to work with us on this project.
Signed,
Civic Digits
Disaster Plan
Groupwork
Rosie Healey
Mamoru Iriguchi
Stewart Laing
Ivor MacAskill
Craig McCorquodale
Shotput
SUPERFAN
Vanishing Point