• Swindon & Wiltshire Culture
• Thursday November 30 2023
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Bristol Beacon reopens today as one of UK’s most significant cultural venues

Music venue Bristol Beacon is reopening today (Thursday) after a makeover that took five years and cost £132 million.

Described by Arts Council England as “one of the great cultural icons of modern-day Britain”, the largest concert venue in the South West of England also represents the second largest investment in the arts in England by the Arts Council in the last 10 years.

The flagship venue now boasts four new world-class performance spaces, allowing it to deliver over 800 events a year and generate an estimated £13 million annually to the economy.

Its music education centre in the transformed and previously inaccessible cellars, called Bristol Water Sound Studios, meanwhile will enable it to reach 30,000 children a year in its state-of-the-art practice and rehearsal spaces.

As well as having some of the best acoustics of any concert hall in Europe, it will also have some of the highest levels of physical accessibility throughout making it truly accessible to everyone, both artists and audiences. Sustainability has also been built in – the environmentally conscious design of the transformed venue will contribute to its net zero goal by 2030 and adapt Bristol Beacon for a lifetime of sustainable use.

Bristol Beacon by Elliott Hingston, Soul Media

To herald its rebirth, the opening night performance will see a ground-breaking new commission from the pioneering Bristol-based Paraorchestra, who has collaborated with celebrated electronic composer Surgeons Girl and AV experts Limbic Cinema to create a dynamic audio-visual collision of sound and light, ‘Trip the Light Fantastic’.

This will be followed by The Housewarming event on Saturday 2 December, which invites everyone to celebrate the revitalised venue with a free entry, day-to-night festival bursting with a colourful spectrum of Bristol creativity. It will feature over 60 acts, from grassroots groups to well-known faces.

The Beacon then launches straight into its diverse music programme, featuring international artists from across the musical spectrum, including Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and Penguin Café.

The transformation of the 156-year-old iconic building has thrown up a myriad of challenges along the way and is considered to be one of the most complex construction projects the team at construction company Willmott Dixon have ever worked on.

Some of the project team’s unexpected discoveries included three Elizabethan wells ten feet deep in the cellars, sinking below the level of the floating harbour, a Victorian heating system, and hollow pillars that they had thought were solid supporting columns.

When the building roof was removed, the 120-tonne birdcage scaffolding put in place to hold the original walls in place was believed to be the largest of its kind on any building project in Europe. Thousands of tonnes of concrete – enough to fill 1,280 baths – have been poured in to shore up the foundations.

Bristol mayor Marvin Rees said the transformation provided a 100-year legacy for the city, and that it has the potential to contribute £253.7 million to Bristol’s economy.

Main image by Giulia Spadafora, Soul Media

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