Raise The Roof: What To Expect From Our Upcoming Capital Development Project
As Raw Material embarks on an ambitious redevelopment project, we aim to make our multipurpose space, more functional, more eco-friendly and more accessible for everyone.
For more than a decade, we have been based at Robsart Street in Brixton, in a multipurpose, three-storey building that has become synonymous with Raw Material. The building, together with its facilities and location have proved to be ideally suited to delivering on our charity’s mission of ‘making a creative life a tangible reality’ for the communities we serve. It’s also been instrumental in our organisation’s development, as we have expanded our programming portfolio, begun hosting public events, offered more opportunities to members of the community, and acquired more funding in support of all of this. Such incredible progress puts us in the fortunate position of being able to consider upgrades to our building - now a key factor in making Raw Material better for everyone.
Thinking about how to improve our building returns us to questions surrounding the needs of our communities . We have always strived to make Raw Material as inclusive and accessible as possible to those with diverse needs. This was a major consideration in our redesign alongside sustainability, efficiency and opportunity for flexible multi-purpose spaces reflecting the diverse creative sector and ecosystem we are part of and support.
As Raw Material grows, we also diversify the ways in which we engage with the community. Recently, we’ve made our premises available for use as co-working spaces, public events, exhibitions and even yoga. These give us cause to reflect on how to make our premises maximally useful and valuable for the future, and so our redevelopment plan includes very significant upgrades to our third floor space, formerly a digital audio production suite to become a spacious, multipurpose co-working and event space. We hope this will bring an increased level of flexibility and multifunctionality to the building opening Raw to a range of uses by the community. Our aspiration is that this versatility will not only generate additional revenue for our cause, but hopefully also develop creativity, entrepreneurship, and collaboration amongst our community.
Lastly, no renovation would be complete without some modernisation! We’ll be making less visible but equally important general upgrades to many of our resources and facilities as well as bring the whole building in line with modern standards of eco-friendliness and sustainability. This includes a low carbon retrofit throughout the premises and the utilisation of more energy efficient appliances.
This remarkable leap forward that we are able to take as an organisation has only been possible with the generous and substantial support of the Arts Council, LB Lambeth Council, and the Q Trust amongst other supporters. Sincere thanks to them as well as to all Raw’s continuing funders, staff, and community.
The capital works are set to commence in September and Raw Material will temporarily relocate to St Vincent and Paul’s Community Centre in Brixton continuing to deliver our much-loved programmes and projects from there. More information about the move can be found below.
