The Second Custodian: Brighton’s Halls Need a Named Successor Before the Next Grant

You can tell a lot about a city’s cultural infrastructure by who holds the keys. Not who runs the programme, not who fronts the funding bid — who actually has the fob, the alarm code and the landlord’s mobile number. In Brighton and Hove, that person is often a volunteer who has been doing it for eleven years, knows which window sticks, and is quietly exhausted.

Our city’s cultural life leans hard on rooms that weren’t built as arts venues and aren’t run like institutions. The church hall in Hanover with the good acoustics. The studio block in Portslade where the lift has a personality. The community centre in Moulsecoomb that hosts everything from dance classes to benefit nights. The room above a pub in North Laine. The shopfront on London Road that becomes a gallery for three weeks and a rehearsal space for the rest of the year.

These places are cultural infrastructure. But infrastructure needs a plan for what happens when the person holding it all together steps back. Right now, we fund the refurbishment and hope for the best on the handover. That is not a strategy. It is a countdown.

The founder-shaped hole

Most of these venues have a keyholder — sometimes a founder, sometimes a trustee, sometimes the one paid part-time coordinator who has somehow become the entire back office. They sign the lease. They hold the premises licence. They know the insurer, the fire risk assessment, the boiler engineer and the neighbour who complains about bass. They are the reason the hall is open.

Then life happens. They move to Worthing for cheaper rent. They get ill. They burn out. They retire. They get a job that doesn’t involve chasing a landlord about damp. And the building doesn’t just lose a manager — it loses the only person who knows how the whole thing works.

We talk a lot in Brighton about space. Rehearsal space, studio space, affordable space, space that isn’t a café by day and a comedy venue by night. Fair enough. But space is not just floor area and a rent. It is governance, legal agreements, insurance, safeguarding, and a named human who can open the door on a Tuesday.

Three clocks, all ticking

The lease, the licence and the founder’s energy all expire at different times. Usually nobody notices until two of them have already stopped.

The lease might have three years left, or be a rolling licence the landlord can end with a month’s notice. The premises licence might sit in one person’s name. The founder’s energy is the one nobody measures, because measuring it would mean admitting it is finite.

When one clock stops, the others tend to follow. The hall goes dark for a season. The programme scatters. The volunteers drift. The landlord, who was always a bit lukewarm about the arts crowd, decides a storage tenant is less hassle. And the community loses a room that would cost a fortune to replace.

This is not a failure of passion. It’s a failure of funded planning. And funded planning is exactly what our grant system tends to skip.

Fund the handover, not just the heating

Capital grants love a visible fix. A new boiler, an accessible toilet, blackout blinds, a soundproofed ceiling, a repainted façade. All of that matters. Nobody is arguing against a working heating system in a cold hall in February.

But a building with a new boiler and no successor is just a very warm empty room.

What these venues need is revenue funding for the unglamorous business of continuity: paying an outgoing keyholder for handover hours, legal advice on a lease, fees for negotiating a new licence, trustee recruitment, governance training, a paid coordinator to write the keys file, and the time it takes to bring a second custodian up to speed.

That is not admin. That is the work that keeps the lights on. Funders already accept that buildings need maintenance budgets. They should accept that community organisations need succession budgets too — because the organisation is the bit that actually holds the building.

Put a named successor in the room

Here’s a simple test for any cultural venue in the city: if the keyholder is out of action for six weeks, who opens the door? If the answer is “we’d figure something out”, that’s not resilience. That’s a risk register entry waiting to happen.

Grant applications could ask for a named second custodian. Not a vague commitment to “develop the board”, but a person, with a role, who has already been in the room. Some funders will want to make that a condition. Fine — but conditions without cash are just homework. If you require a succession plan, pay for the time and advice it takes to build one.

A proper handover isn’t a folder of passwords emailed at midnight. It’s an overlap. Three to six months where the outgoing person and the incoming person are both doing the job, both on the lease, both on the bank account, both known to the landlord. It’s boring, it’s slow, and it is the difference between a venue that survives a departure and one that becomes a story about how the council should have done something.

The lease is usually the plot twist

Many of Brighton’s community arts venues sit on leases that were signed in a hurry, renewed by habit, or never properly explained to the board. Some are licences that can be revoked at will. Some have repairing obligations that would make a surveyor weep. When the founder leaves, the lease often turns out to be the thing nobody read.

Funders should treat lease negotiation as an eligible cost, not a luxury. Paying for a solicitor to renegotiate a lease is cheaper than losing the hall. Paying for a surveyor to explain what “internal repairing obligation” actually means is cheaper than a surprise bill that closes the organisation. These are not artistic costs. They are the costs of having a building at all.

Make succession a scored criterion — and fund it

Arts Council England project grants, National Lottery Community Fund awards, Brighton & Hove City Council’s cultural grants and philanthropic trusts all have a role here. Not one of them can solve this alone. But all of them can stop treating succession as an afterthought.

Make it a scored criterion. Ask who the second custodian is. Ask what the handover plan is. Ask what happens to the lease if the current signatory steps down. Then put money in the budget line for governance support, legal advice and paid overlap. A succession plan that nobody has time to write is not a plan. It’s a wish.

The alternative is what we already have: a city full of brilliant rooms that are one departure away from closure. We can keep patching the roof and praising the volunteers. Or we can accept that a building is only cultural infrastructure if the next custodian is already in the room.

The keys are not the building. The people who know what to do with them are.