For just over 30 years, registered charity Light House – located in the historic Chubb Building in Wolverhampton – has been a creative hub hosting events such as an LGBTQ+ film season in collaboration with Peccadillo Pictures and Bohemia Media, alongside local organisation Wolverhampton LGBT+.
The site has also hosted the heats of the BBC New Comedy Awards in 2021, the Wolverhampton Literature Festival, sculptor Willard Wigan‘s Homecoming exhibition, the bi-annual Deaffest– a longstanding film festival celebrating the deaf community, and much more.
Unfortunately, the venue was forced to close at the beginning of November, due to financial issues, exacerbated by a 16-month Covid shutdown. Great difficulty in securing large-scale funding – to ease such pressures and build their capacity for the future – means the venue has had to close its doors.
Due to their current circumstances, a fundraiser is not possible so, to save Light House, a Change.org petition has been launched, and in it, marketing manager Darryl Griffiths explains: “The arts demonstrated at the peak of Covid how versatile and cathartic they can be. In our darkest days mentally, they could be the single bit of escapism that helped us cling on.
“But this feeling isn’t just confined to a pandemic. We’ve seen and heard consistently how vital Light House Wolverhampton is to so many people.”