The reputational damage to Preston City Council as a result of the long-running Guild Hall saga is ‘pretty serious’.
That was the verdict of Matthew Brown, Labour leader of Preston City Council, who was speaking to Blog Preston as part of an interview that included questions focused on the out-of-action venue.
The immediate future of Preston Guild Hall has been uncertain since it was confirmed back in January that the material RAAC, dubbed ‘crumbling concrete’, had been found in the roof panels of the Grand Hall and Charter Theatre venues within the 50-year-old building.
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But the venue has been in limbo for some time before that. In March last year the city council confirmed the venue was fully back in council control after a legal wrangle with the Rigby estate was concluded. The legal battle began in May 2019 when the city council claimed the late Simon Rigby had breached conditions of the lease and took up possession of the building. That move came after in 2014 the city council had handed Mr Rigby the venue for £1.
Brown told Blog Preston: “The decision to outsource the management of Preston Guild Hall was taken in 2014. Myself and other cabinet members were privately uneasy. But we faced a situation where we had huge cuts, life-changing cuts. So going with a locally-based business seemed to be the best thing to do if we couldn’t afford to run it ourselves.
“In hindsight, the reputational damage to the city council is pretty serious and we want to avoid that in future. In terms of the fact that it didn’t go right and obviously it resulted in legal action and the rest of it.”
The topic of Preston Guild Hall’s future, and the city’s wider events offering, was a primary concern of Blog Preston newsletter subscribers when we asked if they wanted to submit questions for the interview.
But with the venue struggling for success in various forms over the last decade, and seemingly little appetite for anyone to run 53 Degrees as a venue that regularly attracts big names to the city, it has left questions over viability even if the structural issues can be overcome.
Brown said: “It was losing money, we do know that. We are hoping to open the Guild Hall foyer, which we can run ourselves or with another public sector partner or even involve other entertainment venues.
“Ideally I’d like to run it back in house, but we’re going to need a lot more money to do that. One option we do have is whether we can attract Arts Council funding because venues generally make a loss and venues of that era make a bigger loss.
“We really do care, within this Labour council, we do want to get that back as soon as we can. We just can’t do everything all at once and some of the constraints that are put in by central government make that really difficult. We want to bring the venue back as soon as we can. And then we’ll see how we can deal with the rest of it.
“I’ve been to 53 Degrees, I’ve been to the Ferret, I’ve been to the Continental and I’ve been to the Guild Hall for concerts. 15-20 years ago, people were coming to all of them. So I think there is an appetite for it. We’ve got a much larger student population now than we did back then. We’ve just got to get things all working together.”
You can read Blog Preston’s interview with Matthew Brown, leader of Preston City Council, in full here.
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