The Tricycle Campaign is delighted and relieved to learn that our theatre won an award of financial assistance in Round 1 of the Culture Relief Fund. The money, over £360k, will keep the theatre afloat in 2020 and it can be assumed that the government will continue to protect this arts venue from permanent closure in Round 2 and beyond. Generous congratulates are due, deserved and hereby delivered. Long live the Tricycle.
I feel so very let down by Brent.
How can it be right that a theatre gets stolen by its Trustees moments after the public grant is removed?
The theatre is a public body in receipt of public funds, that owes its very existence to the support of Brent Council for 40 years, and has been repeatedly bailed out of perennial financial crises by the citizens of Brent.
It was Brent residents who gave the money to Brent for the Tricycle in the first place. Brent owns the freehold. Brent was hoodwinked by the theatre’s duplicitous fundraising. Two of the organisations supposedly consulted about the planning application have not received the consultation letter from Brent.
It seems to be a failure of local government on many levels and more generally, of local governance of the Arts.
The theatre’s Board is behaving like the venue is their private fiefdom, without accountability. Yet, Brent residents can’t get their council to represent their feelings. Not the representatives on the Board, not the Planning Committee, nowhere, it seems, is there a structure on whom the residents of Brent can rely. How can that be right?
I feel so very let down by Brent.
We have put together an email list of 31 activists who are contributing in different ways. Sadly, the theatre’s strategy is to stonewall us. They won’t answer any of our questions, eg about the consultation they claim to have done and the support they claim to have, as if they feared that doing so might dignify us.
Yet, we’ve held about 20 online conversations in front of 2,200 people… 106 people spoke against the name change, three in favour. We have 750 signatures on a paper petition and 1,250 on an online petition. We’ve spoken to hundreds of people face to face – nobody thinks the name change a good idea. The main reaction is incredulity.
Perhaps they know they cannot win a PR battle so are choosing not to engage in one but it’s an insult by a community theatre to the community it serves, in which it lives and it’s offensive to those who, for 35 years have regularly bailed them out of one crisis or another, including the 1987 fire. The people of Kilburn have saved the Tricycle before and intend to do so again.
