Podcast: Arts Impact Chats: Nichole Herbert Wood, Second Floor Studios

Nichole Herbert Wood heads up Second Floor Studios & Arts, which provides high-quality affordable studios and facilities for visual and fine artists, crafts makers and designers, an increasingly scarce resource in London. A 2014 GLA survey suggested that over 30% of London’s studio spaces would disappear within 5 years, causing a supply crisis in a market with growing demand.

Social investment from the Arts Impact Fund has enabled Second Floor Studios to develop a long leasehold site in Lewisham, the Deptford Foundry. The new site is critical to the organisation’s establishment of a sustainable, autonomous business model, and required funding in order to acquire the lease and fit-out the site. Having a long-term lease means that they can provide much needed security for artists, who are often driven out of the inner city as the spaces they occupy get redeveloped or their short-term leases need to be renewed, which typically results in unaffordable rent increases.

Seva and Nichole discussed the challenges facing artists working in cities, the tensions created by gentrification, and the difference that investing in grassroots cultural communities makes to a city.

This was a live recorded podcast with the opportunity to ask questions via chat. This podcast is for people with an interest in arts, culture and heritage, artist-led initiatives, the artist studio sector and social investment in the cultural sector.

Read more about how Second Floor Studios used their Arts Impact Fund loan in their case study.

The recording is available above and you can access a full transcript of the webinar here.