• Swindon & Wiltshire Culture
• Friday October 25 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

State-of-the-art performance venue for Swindon on the cards

A 2,000 seat state-of-the-art performance venue to replace Swindon’s ailing Wyvern Theatre is on the cards.

Drawing on venues like East London’s ABBA Arena for inspiration, plans for a town centre cultural venue will be discussed by Swindon Borough Council‘s cabinet on November 13.

As first mooted in 2020, the site identified for the venue is the bus station site at Kimmerfields, which is “the only suitable site for the venue due to its size, configuration and availability.”

Councillors will be asked to consider working with prospective venue operators to develop a detailed business case that sets out the financial implications, including the build costs, operating costs, revenue surpluses and any funding gap and options for bridging it.

“Initial discussions with prospective operators indicate that there is a financially viable route to build a high specification venue,” says the council.

The meeting will hear that while the Oasis Leisure Centre and Wyvern Theatre have provided the main music and theatre venues for the Borough over the last 50 years, both are now obsolete and do not offer the technical specifications required by touring companies or the user experience expected by customers.

Further, the Wyvern Theatre is only able to operate with a substantial subsidy from the Council. The building is coming to end of life and will require substantial investment if it is to continue to operate as a theatre.

A report says that a venue of around 1,200 – 2,000 seats would create a venue of a similar size to the Bristol Beacon (1,866 seats), Bristol Hippodrome (1,951 seats), and the O2 Academy Bristol (1,650 standing).

This would offer the optimum capacity requirement to host shows like Shrek the Musical and Les Misérables, attracting audiences from a 30-minute drive time around Swindon, says the report.

An alternative would be to keep pumping money into the Wyvern Theatre, a 635-seat venue. This, says the report, would involve investment estimated in 2020 of £20 million. A new balcony could extend capacity to around 900 seats, with a refurbishment bill of around £28 million.

The minimum required to keep the building going for another five to ten years would be £5 million to £10 million – and require the venue to close for between one and two years.