After the Get-Out: Brighton Needs a Scrap Store, Not Another Skip

There is a particular sound to the end of a Brighton show: the crack of a flat being unscrewed, the rustle of bin bags, the thud of timber into a skip. It is the get-out, and it is happening all over the city this month. In church halls, community centres, pub back rooms and seafront arches, small arts groups are dismantling worlds they spent months building — and then paying to throw them away.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in Brighton & Hove, another group is opening a browser tab to order plywood. They are buying fabric by the metre. They are hunting for a cheap chest of drawers to paint into a puppet theatre. The same materials, the same city, the same week. One group’s waste is another group’s budget line, and almost nobody has a way to connect the two.

That is not a failure of imagination. It is a failure of infrastructure. And it is exactly the kind of thing a cultural materials exchange could fix — if Brighton treats reuse as a funded service rather than a heroic volunteer effort.

The skip is a supply chain

Walk past any venue in the days after a show and you can read the production budget in the rubbish. Sheets of MDF, half-used tins of paint, lengths of timber, blackout fabric, fake flowers, a perfectly good door frame. Some of it is knackered. Much of it is not. But storage is the enemy: a damp garage in Hollingdean, a borrowed corner of a friend’s studio, a landlord who wants the unit back on Monday. When you have nowhere to put it, everything becomes disposable.

So the cycle repeats. A grant pays for materials. The materials become a set. The set becomes a skip. The next grant pays for materials again. For small groups, that is not just wasteful — it is a quiet tax on every project. For the city, it is a pile of embodied carbon and a missed chance to build a shared asset.

Brighton already has making in its bones. We have a wood recycling project, a repair culture, a Fringe that turns the city into a stage every May. What we do not have is a dedicated place where cultural materials can be passed on, borrowed and returned. Not a random WhatsApp group. Not a pile of pallets behind a pub. A proper, insured, accessible exchange.

More than a shed with good intentions

The phrase “scrap store” can sound like a charity shop for offcuts. The useful model is more ambitious: three functions under one roof, or one coordinated network.

First, a materials store: donated timber, fabric, paint, props, costume pieces and set dressing, sorted and priced to move. Free for some, cheap for others, with a membership scheme for regular users. Second, a borrowing library: tools, lighting, flats, staging, sewing machines, perhaps even a van. Things that are expensive to buy, used once or twice a year, and then sit idle. Third, a logistics fund: the unglamorous bit. Storage, transport, insurance, PAT testing, fireproofing, a paid coordinator who can open the door on a Tuesday morning.

The third part is where most well-meaning schemes fall over. Reuse is labour. Someone has to sort the timber, check the fabric, catalogue the tools, maintain the insurance, turn away the sofa full of woodworm. That is not a spare-time job for whoever happens to be finishing their show. It is a job.

The money is already being spent — just badly

Here is the funding argument in one line: Brighton’s cultural sector is already paying for materials over and over again, and getting nothing back at the end. A materials exchange does not invent a new cost. It redirects an existing one.

A small grants programme could fund a pilot without inventing a new bureaucracy. Think of it as a reuse line inside the culture budget: a modest annual pot for storage, a coordinator’s hours, insurance and a van. The return is measured in avoided purchases, reduced waste, and groups who can put more of their grant into artist fees instead of timber. If the exchange also sells donated materials, hires out tools and charges a small membership, it can build a mixed income model rather than living grant to grant.

The Commission could go further. It could make a materials plan a condition of larger cultural grants: where will your set go afterwards? Have you checked the exchange? Could you borrow rather than buy? That is not red tape for its own sake. It is procurement with a memory.

Make reuse the default

Volunteer-run reuse is fragile. It depends on a few people with vans, patience and a lock-up. It collapses when they move away. To make reuse normal, Brighton needs a few structural nudges.

First, a pilot space: a council depot, a disused unit, a partnership with an existing wood recycling project or a venue with a dead storage bay. Second, anchor tenants: the Fringe, the Festival, local theatre companies and community groups who can commit to donating and borrowing. Third, paid coordination: at least one person whose job is to make the exchange work, not to fit it around their own practice. Fourth, simple standards: what can be accepted, how it is tested, how it is stored, how it is returned.

None of that is glamorous. All of it is cheaper than another skip.

A pilot Brighton could actually run

The city does not need a grand building before it can start. It needs a six-month pilot with a clear home and a clear owner. Pair a materials store with an existing maker space. Use a corner of a council yard for timber and flats. Borrow a van two days a week. Pay a coordinator for fifteen hours a week. Track every donation, every loan, every avoided purchase. Publish the numbers.

If the pilot works, it becomes a line in the culture budget rather than a one-off project. If it does not, we will have learned something useful about storage, access and demand. Either way, we will have stopped pretending that the skip is inevitable.

Brighton’s sets deserve a second life. So do the budgets that built them. The Commission should convene the makers, the venues, the recyclers and the funders — and then fund the unglamorous bits: the lock-up, the insurance, the coordinator, the van. Reuse should not depend on who happens to have a garage. It should be part of how the city makes culture.