Creative Crawley

Creative Crawley supports creative people and makes surprising art works happen in Crawley, West Sussex.

Creative Crawley is an arts charity working to support, produce and present high quality arts and cultural activity in Crawley, West Sussex. Working in partnership with local, national and international artists, local businesses and other key stakeholders in the town and beyond, we produce a year round programme of creative activities across all artforms that happen in many different spaces and places across the town. Our aim is to develop Crawley as a creative place beyond its boundaries for the benefit of those that live, study, work and play there.

Following a public consultation by Crawley Borough Council in 2019 led by Arts Producer and Crawley local, Louise Blackwell, a group of local arts, community and business leaders mobilised and raised some money to build new partnerships and produce the Right Here festival which happened in January 2021.

As a result of that work, we proved the need for a new organisation to exist in the town to connect creative people, develop audiences and enable creative activities to take place in the town on a regular basis and in July 2021 we became a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO).

‘The Team’ listed in our ‘About’ section as Trustees are the group of people that will lead the charity and represent a range of different sectors, skills and knowledge. They are high quality leaders in their fields of business, education, community, youth, arts and culture (both professional and voluntary sectors) and will ensure the highest quality creative work is able to exist and connect with people in Crawley.

Those listed as Trustees volunteer their time support the work of Creative Crawley. Louise was paid on a project basis to produce the Right Here Festival thanks to funding from Arts Council England. Louise is now the Creative Director of Creative Crawley and from summer 2021 – March 2023, was paid to deliver deliver a programme of work in the town centre in partnership with Crawley Town Centre BID and an Arts Council England funded project called Crawley Creatives to develop a support network for local, professional creatives. From autumn ’23 to spring we produced the Give it a Go season.

We manage Crawley’s Creative Playground, the Creative People and Places project for Crawley, and The Creative Village a place partnership project with AudioActive and Theatre Centre, funded by Arts Council England (ACE). We employ Project Co-Directors for Creative Playground (of which Louise is one) and a team of people to deliver our projects but we do not receive any funding from the ACE grant towards our core costs or programme currently. Our team are a mixture of part-time, full-time and freelance.

We are on the Town Deal Board sub-group who are responsible for developing a blue print for a cultural quarter in the town and are part of the Cultural Strategy Reference Group.