Hornsey Town Hall will not be a community arts centre.
In fact, there will be little to no meaningful role for the community at all. No planned schedule of events, community engagement projects, let alone anything for kids.
The building will be available only for dry hire, at prohibitively high rates.
This is not the community arts centre that was promised, nor does it make the building genuinely accessible to the people it was meant to serve.
This year’s Crouch End Festival (June 13 to 20) will not be able to use the Town Hall due to costs.
This is a betrayal of the Crouch End community, and of the wider borough. So it is no surprise that the arts and creative community are furious.
This approach prioritises money over people. There is already talk of boycotting the venue, although most community groups are priced out before they even reach that point.
One estimate suggests that hiring the Assembly Hall would cost a community group close to £3,000 for room hire and additional costs.
By comparison, a similar-sized local venue, Holy Innocents, charges around £300, which includes lighting and a PA, and it has better acoustics.
One attendee at the meeting told me bluntly that the owners and their appointed operators simply do not care, though this was expressed with considerably more emotion.
Unknown to two people I spoke to in General Projects (which manages the space hire and workspace), the building is currently being sold – a process likely to take another six months. In the meantime, nothing is happening.
No surprise, as the building isn’t finished yet, that their commercial ambitions are falling short – bookings have already been lost because key spaces, including the Assembly Hall, remain unfinished.
This is the hall where the Kinks and Queen once played, yet there is no PA system, AV (audio visual), lighting, and not even a power socket on the stage! And only enough chairs for half an audience.
While the restoration work has been amazing, look at any image of the hall before and now and you’ll see it’s just the bare bones of what it was. On the Town Hall website it shows the artist impression – a full show with curtains, backdrop and lights – a very deceptive image.
There are also no catering facilities. As one event organiser put it: “Let us know when it’s actually finished.”
Yet there are no short-term plans to complete the fit-out. No budget we are told.
This situation is also a serious blow to Haringey’s Borough of Culture ambitions for 2027. Another great venue has effectively been brutally removed from use.
What was once a thriving, genuinely brilliant community arts centre under ANA was lost when the building was sold in 2015. Under the Far East Consortium, that loss has become permanent. So much for promises.
To quote one member of the community, “First the town hall was sold. Then the new owners sold the community down the river.”
A word of advice to the current and future owners, from an artist who is very upset, “Hell has no fury like Crouch End scorned”.
- Chris Arnold is co-founder and director of the Crouch End Festival.
