The Stage

London theatres pool resources in bid to go greener

Published Wednesday 17 November 2010 at 13:59 by Natalie Woolman

Green arts organisation Julie’s Bicycle has set up a new partnership with 12 off-West End venues to make them more sustainable and help them cut costs.

Each member of the London Theatre Consortium will be evaluated by JB to gauge their carbon emissions, before developing ways in which they can work together. This will include sharing best practice and investigating practical options, such as sharing storage and joint procurement.

Green champions have been appointed in each of the venues and will meet regularly for workshops. Other members of staff, such as chief executives or stage managers, will meet on an ad hoc basis.

David Micklem, artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre, hosted the launch event for the project at BAC this month.

He said: “The reason we are excited about doing it as part of the consortium is that we will learn from each other. So, of those 12 theatres, some are just beginning to dip their toes into the water of environmental sustainability and some are quite a long way down the route to being much more efficient.

“One of the things facing all of those theatres is there is a wealth of information out there about what you might do - you might do any one of 500 things to improve the performance of your building, but I think what the consortium allows us to do is to say, ‘What are the three most important things we might do together and let’s do those well’.”

JB’s theatre associate director Sian Alexander added: “I think we are hoping to make each of those individual organisations more resilient and sustainable going forward, but we are also looking to do that to help the wider theatre industry as a whole, because the lessons we learn we will share as widely as we can.”

The 12 venues originally started working together for audience development as part of Arts Council England’s Thrive initiative. As The Stage reported last month, the consortium is in talks with the National Theatre about sharing services.

The members of the London Theatre Consortium are the Almeida Theatre, BAC, Bush Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Greenwich Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Tricycle Theatre and Young Vic.