See inside the new Burgess Hill Creative Community Hub

The vision for the Burgess Hill Creative Community (BHCC) goes beyond providing opportunities to participate in creative handcrafts to those who might not otherwise be able to access them. They believe that the presence of a thriving and inclusive arts and crafts workspace in the centre of the town could be the catalyst to ignite a new identity for the town itself, moving Burgess Hill from its current malaise as a failing ‘big brands’ retail centre and into an exciting regeneration phase, culminating in it becoming a destination shopping place for smaller, artisan and traditional retailers – in the spirit of Lewes, Brighton’s North Laine, Chichester, Woking and many other small towns nationally who have been successfully reborn with a new focus.

The new Hub is smaller than the previous one, opposite the old New Look store, but it's clean, new and offers alot inside. There are two downstairs rooms, the main room is mostly used by the sewing and art groups the first part of the week, and on Fridays a craft group meets up and uses the space. There's a big cutting table available for people to use, which is very useful when making large items like quilts. A second, smaller downstairs room is home to the kitchen area at one end, and at the other is where the weavers work, and home to several looms.

Upstairs there's a pottery studio, with a kiln, potters wheels and tables where members can mold their cclay. Jo said "We're not an actual teaching group, but we share our knowledge, so I think with the expensive clubs, alot of it is because they have to pay a teacher, but we tend to just share our knowledge."

Jo explained that the hub is run on a membership basis, to become a member it's £30 a year, and then people pay for a session. "For pottery it's £5.00 for a session of up to three hours, and then there's a small charge for the clay. For the other groups it's £3.00 a session. You can have a cup of tea, a biscuit, and people sometimes bring cakes!"

"Sewing it's five hours a session, because by the time you've got your sewing machine out, had a cup of tea, you'd be packing it away again if it was three hours" Jo laughed, "we're a very social group!" "We've got a couple of sewing machines here, but we can't guarantee that they'll be available. So most people bring their own, and you tend to get to know your machine. You bring your own materials and we work on our own projects, but sometimes our members group together if they decide they want to do something particular. Or you can do whatever you want to do, you don't have to join in, and that's the same with all of the groups really."

"The craft group is four hours, the art group and weaving are three hours. At the moment you don't have to book to attend a session, but because we've moved to a smaller premises, we might find that we may need to start a booking system, but all the time we don't have to do that then people can just come to the sessions. The opening hours for the Creative Community Hub are Monday afternoons, Tuesday all day, Wednesday and Thursday mornings 10-1pm, Fridays 10-2pm.

We also have a crafters market here every three months, and we've got a Christmas market here on December 13th, with people from the crafting, sewing, pottery, weavers coming to sell what they've been making. And on the 14th December we'll have a free origami workshop herel running between 12-6pm. It's a good place to be!"

Pop along and see one of the volunteers to join