When one venue drinks the rain

Rory Wilmer
2 hours ago
11 min read

Future Yard announced its arrival in bold style, in this picture from March 2020

How cultural funding on merseyside is mistaking visibility for vitality — and quietly starving the grassroots.

Merseyside has been telling itself a reassuring story about music. It’s the modern civic fairy-tale: culture as regeneration engine, creativity as economic driver, live music as proof that a place is “on the up”. Put enough money into the right institutions, the story goes, and the benefits will ripple outward. Jobs. Pride. Identity. Momentum.

It’s an attractive narrative because it feels progressive and measurable. You can point to buildings, programmes, press releases and headcounts. You can demonstrate activity. You can say something is being done.

But culture has an awkward habit of refusing to behave like infrastructure. It doesn’t scale cleanly. It doesn’t respond predictably to capital injection. And it rarely rewards concentration. Culture behaves more like an ecosystem than an asset class: water one plant too heavily and you don’t just waste water — you quietly dry out the soil around it.

That imbalance is now becoming difficult to ignore across Wirral, Merseyside, and the Left Bank of the Mersey. Large sums of public money are flowing into music-adjacent initiatives framed around innovation, skills, sustainability and “future growth”. At the same time, the small venues — the low-margin, awkward rooms where artists actually learn how to be good — are operating one shock away from closure.

The grassroots sector has been unusually honest about this fragility. Music Venue Trust has repeatedly warned that average operating margins for grassroots venues sit around two to three per cent, with more than half of venues making no profit at all. One bad winter, one cancelled tour, one rent hike, one spike in energy costs — and a venue is gone. Not with a bang, but with a quiet social post thanking everyone for the memories.

Yellow building labeled "FUTUREYARD" next to a pink-roofed structure with green framework, surrounded by trees and people. Lively atmosphere. — New £2m plans for Future Yard that could be approved. Credit: Architectural Emporium Ltd

Against that backdrop, the rise of heavily subsidised venues changes the local terrain in ways that are rarely acknowledged out loud. A venue with public backing can absorb losses that would sink an independent operator. It can programme more adventurously, guarantee artist fees, invest in marketing and infrastructure, and wait out lean periods. None of this is immoral. But none of it is neutral either.

FutureYard sits at the centre of this dynamic. It is often presented — and not without reason — as a cultural success story for Birkenhead: a professional, visible, publicly supported venue with ambition and scale. It has benefited from Town Deal funding, Arts Council support, and social-investment loans secured against property. Its leadership has spoken openly about civic ambition, skills development and reshaping what a music venue can be.

On its own terms, that’s admirable. It’s also precisely why scrutiny matters more, not less.

Because when a venue is materially supported by public money, it stops being just another participant in the local ecosystem. It becomes part of the weather. When one venue becomes the obvious answer to the question “what are we doing about music?”, attention, artists, audiences, partnerships and funding conversations naturally gravitate towards it. The smaller rooms don’t lose out because anyone intends them to. They lose out because gravity works.

Future Yard’s own financial position sharpens this picture rather than softening it. The venue has reported operating losses in at least one recent year, and its leadership has spoken publicly about the need to become less reliant on grant funding. Those statements aren’t confessions; they’re honest reflections of a model that, even with significant public support, is still finding its feet. Grassroots venues don’t get that runway. They simply fail.

You can hear the contrast when you listen to operators who are genuinely exposed to the market. Daniel Davies of Rockpoint Leisure, which runs Rockpoint Records in New Brighton, has been unusually candid about the economics of survival. Seeking extended hours, he explained that “we take half of our weekly turnover in ten hours on a Friday and Saturday. That allows us to open on Mondays and Tuesdays when it costs us to be open.”

That’s not cultural rhetoric. That’s arithmetic. It’s what standing on your own two feet actually looks like.

Davies has also spoken openly about the personal risk involved in regeneration-led cultural work, describing selling personal assets to keep projects alive. Whatever one thinks of his style or politics, the point stands: independent venues are underwriting culture with personal risk, while institutional venues are underwriting culture with public money.

A band performs in a dimly lit venue with red lighting. Venue is Rockpoint Records, Victroia Road, New Brighton. Three musicians play guitar and bass, standing on a patterned carpet, surrounded by brick walls. — New Brighton’s vibrant venue, Rockpoint Records, is shaking up the local live scene with the launch of a fresh, first-of-its-kind open mic night designed specifically to champion original music.

This is the structural tension Merseyside keeps stepping around. We are effectively running two music economies side by side. One is expected to be commercially viable while also doing cultural heavy lifting. The other is allowed — even encouraged — to operate as a civic instrument, supported by public funding and partnership structures.

That is not a level playing field, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

Once public money is involved, the questions stop being purely economic. They become governance questions. Standards questions. Pluralism questions. Not because culture must be neutral — it can’t be — but because civic institutions are expected to be fair, careful and accountable.

Man with a beard, wearing a gray hooded sweater and beaded bracelets, sits with arms crossed, smiling subtly against a black background. — (JTA) — “This is my antisemitic song,” Tamer Nafar, a Palestinian-Israeli rapper, said at the opening of a conference on Gaza last month at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I know it might sound [like] R&B stuff, but don’t think of Rihanna when you sing it, don’t think of Beyonce,” he continued. “Think of Mel Gibson. Go that antisemitic. Let’s try it together because I need your help. I cannot be antisemitic alone.” Nafar then launched into “Mama, I fell in love with a Jew,” a joking song about a Palestinian who becomes infatuated with an Israeli woman soldier while stuck in an elevator. (Sample lyric: “Was it meant to be? Could she be the one?/Her name is not Janie but she’s got a gun.”)

In January, Future Yard hosted the Israeli-Arab rapper Tamer Nafar. This is not about what was or wasn’t said on a Birkenhead stage. The controversial remark often referenced — involving explicit anti-Semitic language — was made elsewhere, at a US campus event, and was not promoted by the venue. That distinction matters. But so does context.

Israel is a democracy in which roughly two million Arab citizens hold full citizenship, legal equality and the freedom to criticise the state — the very freedom that makes dissenting artists possible in the first place. In many neighbouring regimes, dissent of that kind would result in imprisonment or worse. The irony is not subtle: the political space that enables critique is the thing being denied legitimacy.

The question here is not whether Future Yard should book political artists. It’s why a publicly funded venue appears to platform artists aligned with a narrow ideological current — including individuals associated with explicitly anti-Semitic rhetoric — without visible counterbalance or contextual framing. There are numerous Israeli musicians, Jewish and Arab alike, across genres from hip-hop to metal, who articulate different perspectives and who are never booked. That absence is noticeable. Patterns don’t require conspiracy to be real.

If Future Yard is a publicly funded civic platform, where is the balance? Tuna is one of Israel’s most successful contemporary rappers — culturally rich, widely loved, and conspicuously absent from Merseyside line-ups. Why do some voices travel, while others never seem to arrive?

Public funding doesn’t demand neutrality. But it does demand pluralism. Without that, a civic platform risks drifting from hosting culture into signalling ideology.

JC and YourParty speaking at Future Yard October 2025

That question of balance doesn’t stop at music programming. It becomes harder to ignore when the venue itself begins to function as a political stage.

In October 2025, Future Yard hosted Jeremy Corbyn for a public speaking event in Birkenhead, in the immediate orbit of the launch activity around Your Party on Merseyside. This was not a fringe appearance, nor an abstract discussion. Corbyn remains the central figure of a political movement that defines itself, in part, through an explicitly anti-Zionist worldview. That context matters, not because venues must avoid politics altogether, but because Corbyn is not a neutral or uncontested figure in public life.

During his leadership of the Labour Party, the party was formally investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which concluded that Labour was responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination in its handling of antisemitism complaints. Those findings related to failures of leadership, process, and political culture during that period. Corbyn was subsequently suspended by the party after publicly disputing elements of the EHRC report. These are not matters of opinion; they are matters of record.

So when a publicly funded cultural venue provides a platform to Corbyn, it is not merely hosting “a speaker”. It is making a judgement call about the kind of political activity it is willing to facilitate, and the kind it is not. Taken alongside the absence of countervailing voices elsewhere in the programme — whether musical or political — a pattern begins to form. Not a conspiracy, not a hidden agenda, but an ideological gravity that pulls consistently in one direction.

This is where the funding question and the cultural question finally meet.

A venue that benefits from public subsidy, civic branding, and institutional support is no longer operating solely as a private hire space. It is operating as a civic platform. And civic platforms are expected to exercise a higher standard of care, particularly when they intersect with live political movements that are themselves deeply contested and, in Corbyn’s case, inseparable from a period widely regarded as the most antisemitic chapter in a major UK political party’s history.

None of this is about banning speakers or policing opinion. It is about proportionality and pluralism. If a publicly supported venue repeatedly hosts voices from one ideological current — whether through music, activism, or political organisation — while other perspectives remain conspicuously absent, then questions of balance are not only legitimate, they are unavoidable. At that point, it is reasonable to ask whether public money is supporting culture, or quietly underwriting a particular political milieu.

And once that line is crossed, the conversation stops being about taste or programming preference. It becomes a question of governance, judgement, and the responsibilities that come with being treated as a civic institution rather than just another room with a stage.

And this is where the behavioural mistake becomes clear. Funding bodies tend to fund what they can see and measure. Big venues with glossy narratives, impact reports and bid-writing capacity look like success. Small venues with fragile finances and messy outputs do not. This creates a substitution error: institutions are mistaken for ecosystems, and visibility is mistaken for vitality.

The same error shows up in how “protection” for grassroots venues has been framed nationally. In 2025, government announced new measures to give music venues greater protection from noise complaints by strengthening the agent of change principle. Developers, not venues, would be responsible for soundproofing new residential buildings near existing music spaces. It made good headlines. It sounded like action.

But it wasn’t money.

Person in a yellow plaid shirt sits on a stool in an empty music venue. Purple stage lights and equipment in the background create a vibrant mood. — **New £2m plans submitted for Birkenhead’s Future Yard -** **Craig Pennington. Credit: Sam Ryley**

There was no ring-fenced capital funding for venues to retrofit buildings, upgrade sound systems, or resolve existing disputes. No regional breakdown of support. No material relief for venues already under pressure. Protection arrived as policy, not cash. At the same moment Music Venue Trust was reporting that one grassroots music venue closed every two weeks in 2024.

In places like Wirral and Merseyside, the gap is glaring. Venues that were culturally active, economically viable and clearly exposed to planning and noise pressure saw no meaningful capital support materialise. If this was a programme designed to protect grassroots music, its effects never reached the ground.

This isn’t a story about bad people. It’s a story about incentives. Fund what looks legible. Fund what signals momentum. Fund what can speak the language of policy. And slowly, quietly, starve the undergrowth.

Culture doesn’t work like infrastructure. It grows sideways — through risk, failure, half-empty rooms, promoters who keep going because they believe something might happen if they do. Remove enough of those spaces and you’re left with impressive buildings and nothing feeding into them.

So the real question public funders now need to confront isn’t whether projects like Future Yard should exist. It’s whether the current balance of investment is quietly hollowing out the ecosystem those projects claim to support. Because if Merseyside continues to confuse monuments with culture, it may end up with beautifully lit stages — and no scene left to step onto them.

And once that happens, no amount of money will fix it.

appendix A: grassroots venues — the numbers behind the narrative

Music Venue Trust reports average operating margins for UK grassroots venues at around 2–3%.
More than half of grassroots venues operate at break-even or a loss.
The sector has been described as one major shock away from collapse.
One grassroots music venue closed every two weeks in 2024, despite emergency interventions.

These figures describe survival, not growth.

appendix B: funding asymmetry — orders of magnitude

Flagship / anchor venues

Funding measured in hundreds of thousands to millions
Multi-year commitments
Capital investment plus revenue support
Framed as regeneration, skills or innovation

Grassroots venues

Typical grants of £1,000–£5,000
Short-term or pilot schemes
Framed as relief or emergency support

This is not a moral judgement. It is a structural description.

appendix C: protection without cash — the soundproofing gap

Government policy has strengthened the agent of change principle, placing responsibility on developers to soundproof new residential buildings near existing music venues. This has been presented publicly as “greater protection” for venues.

However:

No equivalent ring-fenced capital funding was distributed to venues themselves.
No regional breakdown shows meaningful support reaching Wirral or Merseyside grassroots venues.
Venues already facing noise disputes or planning pressure received policy reassurance, not material relief.

At the same time, Music Venue Trust reported ongoing closures and extreme fragility across the sector.

The question is not whether policy intent was positive. It is whether “protection” without funding meaningfully improves survival odds.

appendix D: governance changes and areas for further scrutiny

(based on publicly available Companies House records)

This piece does not allege wrongdoing. However, where significant public funding and secured borrowing are involved, changes in governance and financial structure warrant transparent scrutiny.

board and director changes

Companies House records show that founding directors have resigned from the board of Future Yard CIC:

Craig Pennington — appointed 8 February 2019, resigned 16 July 2025
Christopher Torpey — appointed 8 February 2019, resigned 16 July 2025

The organisation is now governed by a reconstituted non-executive board appointed during 2024.

secured lending and property charges

Companies House filings also record:

Secured loans in favour of social-investment lenders
Fixed and floating charges against venue properties
Charges covering the company’s assets and undertaking

Such structures are legitimate and increasingly common in the cultural sector, but they introduce additional layers of risk and responsibility when combined with public funding.

areas for deeper examination

Without asserting any impropriety, an informed observer might reasonably ask:

How do secured loan terms interact with public grant conditions?
What safeguards exist to protect public investment in the event of financial stress or restructuring?
How are borrowing decisions overseen during periods of director transition?
What reporting mechanisms ensure accountability to funders, partners and the local community?

These are not accusations. They are standard questions in any publicly supported civic institution.