Bristol’s The Croft seeks new future through community ownership

Music Venue Properties (MVP) has announced a new phase of its ‘Own Our Venues’ project to secure the future of seven new music venues across the UK – including The Croft.

The Own Our Venues initiative removes grassroots music venues from commercial leases and places them into community ownership. That means long-term venue stability, which means more cool music, and more gigs. Winning.

These guys have already secured the future of Athertone’s The Snug, The Ferret in Preston, Le Pub in Newport and Swansea’s The Bunkhouse. And they’re at it again.

The ‘cultural lease’ sorts venues out with long-term security, something that’s pretty much absent from commercial leases, which are typically just 18 months long. Cultural leases promote fair, sustainable rents, offer annual contributions toward essential maintenance, and grant venues ongoing support in areas such as financial sustainability and operational best practice (to be honest, that last one sounds a bit interventionist for our liking). Either way, the support helps venues promote live music while shielding them from the financial pressures of the commercial lease market. And The Croft is one such venue they wanna help out.

A quick bit of backstory for the uninitiated: The Croft was a cornerstone of Bristol’s live music scene, famed for its  intimate 110-capacity live room and 250-capacity club space. It hosted early performances from acts like Arctic Monkeys, Bastille, Ed Sheeran, IDLES, and Bring Me the Horizon. After  operating as The Crofters Rights, the venue closed in August 2024, but plans are underway to revive it under its original name (wahoo!). The relaunch will be led by the people behind The Mothers Ruin, The Crown, and Exchange — ie, key players in Bristol’s vibrant music community. 

Marc Griffiths, from World Famous Dive Bars spouted the following corporate, probably AI generated paragraph on the matter: “We are really excited to be working with Music Venue Properties and the team at Exchange to bring The Croft back to Bristol. The team at World Famous Dive Bars are made up of musicians, promoters and music fans and we all  see that a huge hole has been left in the Bristol grassroots music ecosystem since The Crofters  Rights closed in August 2024. We are honored to be part of the effort to bring back this vital, and  quite frankly legendary, GMV through community ownership.”

Here’s hoping that, should the venue re-open, it’s more down to earth than the above quotation suggests.