Weston Culture Fund Grant Success!
In January 2021, Garfield Weston Foundation announced over £30million in grants to support the cultural sector in response to the devastating impact of Covid-19. We are delighted to share that Play to the Crowd has been awarded a significant grant of £205,865 from the Weston Culture Fund to help us continue to improve and extend our offer, accessibility and audience experience at Theatre Royal Winchester.
Many will remember that in September 2019 we successfully completed the first stage of a capital project, which transformed Theatre Royal Winchester’s foyer. Our plans to develop the next phase of works in 2020/21 were then derailed by the pandemic. Yet the closure of the building gave us space to develop our plans afresh and, with this fantastic grant, we are now ready to proceed with several elements of the next phase.
These include the installation of live streaming into our auditorium, external works to our doors, windows and Tower Street entrance area to develop our outdoor space, and the inclusion of a better-positioned accessible toilet.
In many ways, these initial plans have become all the more urgent and necessary as a result of the pandemic and we hope that this investment will help support our charity as we move to reopen. So watch this space!
“We all want and need our cultural sector to thrive and, if anything, our time away from the arts has shown just how important they are to us – bringing much needed pleasure and enrichment to our lives. Arts organisations are desperate to re-open and get back to what they do best, and we hope that this new funding will help many of them do exactly that.”
