Stack in independent venues
On Friday last week I visited a brilliant theatre project in Hammersmith called Scrum, and on my way home I decided that we should set up a network of independent venues across the UK that receive our magazines for free. Do you work in an independent theatre, cinema, gallery, cafe, or other space that would want to share our magazines with its visitors? Or is there a great place near you that you’d like to recommend? If so, use our independent venues form to tell us about them and we’ll set up a free subscription.
Scrum is based in an old council building, and from the outside it looks like an odd little fragment of municipal architecture, dwarfed by its neighbours on either side and overshadowed by the flyover that rumbles away beside it. But inside it’s enormous; a huge space that they’ve turned into three rehearsal studios, a co-working space for writers, a designers’ workroom, and a photography studio. They’re in the process of converting the old council archive into a 250-seat theatre, and they’ve done it all as a charity with virtually no money, cobbling together grants and persuading people to donate their time and resources to create a beautiful and genuienly inspiring space.
One of the team at Scrum is a Stack subsciber, and when they moved into the building last year, they emailed to ask whether we’d donate a free subscription. I said yes and planned to stop by and see them, but Hammersmith is kind of awkward for me to get to, so it’s taken me months to make it happen. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but walking around the space I was bowled over by the scope of the project, and the overwhelming sense of warmth and positivity they have created.
Dominic Applewhite is one of the team’s co-leads, and as he took me on a tour of the building, he explained their mission of ensuring that theatre is available to all, not just those who can afford to pay. They exist to engage with actors and audiences from all backgrounds, enabling storytelling from many different perspectives, all of them outside the mainstream. In that context our magazines make perfect sense – they’re scattered across a large mezzanine area furnished with sofas and low tables, the ideal place for somebody to stumble across an independent publication they probably wouldn’t otherwise have picked up.
I left Scrum delighted with the way the magazines are being used, and determined to find more spaces where our magazines could reach open-minded, interested readers. Of course very few organisations have a huge and beautiful building to play with, but I feel like there must be lots of independent spaces across the UK where people would be open to discovering independent magazines from around the world. That could mean theatres, cinemas and arts centres, but also cafes, hairdressers and shops. The steady spread of chains means that these days huge swathes of Britain have become homogenised, but we want to support the sort of places that are emphasising difference and providing local character.
Last year we started sending our magazines to a handful of independent venues in Brighton, and that experiment is going well. At Pelicano Coffee Co the magazines are lined up on top of the shelves that hold their bags of beans. At Gloucester Road Barbers the magazines sit out on a table for customers to read. And at 17 Grams they’re placed next to the window, the ideal spot for people to read over a coffee. We provide the magazines for free, along with a sheet of stickers that tells readers the publication was supplied by Stack, with a discount code in case they want to subscribe for themselves. Every now and then one of the venues will tag us into a post on Instagram, and of course we love that, but there’s no stipulation on our part. The only thing we ask is that the magazines are displayed somewhere that people can enjoy them.
We started the experiment in Brighton because we realised that we need new ways of reaching people who haven’t already heard about Stack. I’ve written before about the fact that digital channels don’t work for us in the way they once did, and it seems likely those problems will only intensify in the coming years. So now we’re going all-in on the real world, and we want to put together a mega mailing list of the best independent venues across the UK. If you work for an independent theatre, cinema, gallery, cafe, hairdresser, or other Stack-friendly space, please use our form to provide the address details and we’ll set up a free subscription sending you a different magazine every month. Likewise, if you’re a regular in one of those spaces, or you know somewhere that we should definitely send our magazines, use the form to let us know and we’ll contact them to introduce ourselves. (And of course we’ll tell them you sent us.)
I’m afraid we can only offer this for venues in the UK at the moment, because shipping overseas costs too much for us to do it for free. But if you run a venue outside the UK, drop me a line and I’d be happy to provide a discounted subscription so we can get the magazines into your space. Thanks very much for reading this post, and I can’t wait to see what sort of independent spaces we can send our magazines to.
