Arts Council Grant – The Continental & The Ferret
The Arts Council award from the Cultural Recovery Fund is split between two venues, The Continental and The Ferret, which in the absence now of the council and UCLan venues are essentially the primary music and arts venues for Central Lancashire area, encompassing a population of nearly 330,000 people.
The music and arts side of the venues have always been run on a not-for-profit basis and, indeed, over the years has been heavily self-subsidised in order to be sustainable. Our commitment to this has never wavered, despite the hard work and time it has taken to provide a quality programme of events in Preston. The Ferret is a dedicated grass roots music venue – something which is incredibly important in less fashionable cities like Preston and comes with a big responsibility; because if you can’t make it work then that resource disappears, leaving such a big hole in the Preston music scene.
There is a crisis in the arts, hospitality and entertainment business, and many places may not survive. The Arts Council have recognised this and secured funding so that arts and culture venues survive and, more than that, thrive once we come out of the other side of this. Remember even before this pandemic, music venues were closing by the dozen and the network of venues were under severe threat of a death by a thousand cuts. Without venues to play at, one of Britain’s major successes withers.
This funding secures the future of both venues as performance spaces and, indeed gives us the funding to come back better than ever, to support artists, staff and technicians, and help subsidise shows, enabling us to be ambitious with what we do in our spaces. It also allows us to help other art forms that struggle financially, such as theatre and literature. This is the point of the Culture Recovery Fund, which we were fortunate enough to get an award from – if venues can come out of this in reasonable shape, then the whole sector can start to recover and we can get vitality back into the music and art world.
We will continue to run both performance spaces on a not-for-profit basis and will aim to continuously improve what we do. Once performance is permitted again, even in a distanced fashion, we intend to roll out a programme at the earliest opportunity. We also plan to provide some opportunities and support for local organisations and individuals, in whatever art forms, who would like to use our programme and our spaces. Please get in touch with your proposals to: robyn@newcontinental.net .
We know at times, as we go into winter and increasing lockdowns its easy to feel things are bleak and wonder what will be left at the end of it all. We can now guarantee that at the end of all of this there will still be shows to go to and enjoy in Preston and we intend to use this award to make the city in some small way, a better place to live in.
