Creative Crawley launch new space and Spring programme with spectacular performance in County Mall

At the end of the shopping centre, where Debenhams used to be, you might have seen shoppers breaking into dance, giant pink bears walking around, and extravagantly dressed dancers coming down the escalators. If you did see this, you weren’t dreaming.

It was all part of Creative Crawley’s launch event for their new space and Spring Programme.

The arts charity invited guests including MP Peter Lamb, council leader Michael Jones, residents and trustees, to the event to see the new space in unit 79/80 of County Mall.

The unit is a flexible gallery, performance and hangout space, which is open from March 28 to June 22, 2025 and is in partnership with Audio Action and funded by the Arts Council. It is also supported by Pop Up Culture Crawley, Towns Fund, UK Government and Crawley Borough Council.

The guests could look at the exhibition in the long gallery called Making the Invisible Visible by Eric MacLennan and they were treated to a dance spectacle Super Normal, Extra Natural by Requardt and Rosenberg (see highlights in the video at the top of this page).

Louise Blackwell, Creative Director, Creative Crawley, Adam Joolia, CEO AudioActive, Steve Sawyer, Chair of Trustees, Creative Crawley and Executive Director, Manor Royal BID and Mawadda Edbagi, Creative Assistant, Creative Crawley all spoke at the event. You can see their full speeches in the video at the top of this page.

Mr Sawyer said: “Never before has it been so important, never have our high streets, our towns and our cities needed this kind of thing more. So often arts and culture is seen as the cherry on top of the cake. The fun thing that you do are if you've done all the other serious stuff. But I would argue that arts and culture is a fundamental ingredient of the cake. Places we care about need to be reimagined, they need to be reinvented and they need to be revitalised and the arts can do that.

“But vision without action is just a lovely dream. But when vision is aligned to positive action, then you can realise something tangible, something that can make a real difference. And so here we are today. Creatively speaking, something is happening in Crawley. My hope is that we can build on this. But that is not guaranteed.

“The last time I was stood here, it's a very short amount of time, but the amount of work that's happened and the rate with which it's happened has just been something quite phenomenal. So I just wanted to say thanks and congratulations to Louise and the production team at Creative Crawley and Sophie and Sam for making this happen.”

In the new space, there is a sound booth run by partners Audio Active. Mr Joolia said: “For the last few years, we've been really hoping to cement our long-term commitment to the town by developing a permanent space. I'm not going to lie, it's been quite a challenging journey.

“It's not easy to acquire and develop a space but one of the things I'm so excited by with this project is that it's a really important rung on the ladder to that journey and what I really hope for this space is that we just prove the hell out of the concept and the town at the end of it all goes, ‘this cannot stop’.”

Louise Blackwell told the guests it costs £13,000 to keep the space going. She said: “This space here is public facing. Not today, but normally there's a 50 seat flexible theatre at the back of this space. You'll see it on the images. There are meeting rooms, there's a gallery and there's also a greenhouse and all of this is available to hire. It's for you. It's for the people of Crawley and it'll look different every time you visit. So use it now because by the end of June it will be gone.”

Louise added: "£13,000 a month is £155,000 a year and that's just to open the doors. To fill it with amazing and inspiring artworks and market them to make sure people come is a whole lot more. That's why we're only open until the end of June. We'll make a how-to guide so others can take it on after us and build on what we have done.”

Creative Crawley also has a space in Town Barn Road, West Green and resident artists can work, collaborate and share their multi-disciplinary practice with each other, other creatives and local residents.

Both spaces are available to hire on a pay what you want basis for Crawley, West Sussex and Surrey-based creative practitioners.

To find out more, visit creativecrawley.com.