Reflecting on cultural vulnerability in Glasgow
Emma Balkind documents the state of arts and leisure closures in Glasgow in the first half of this year
Emma Balkind is a data analyst and arts researcher from Glasgow. Her recent projects can be found at eblknd.leaflet.pub
Network graphs by Emma Balkind, using Python.
Key: Black = closed. Red = at risk. Yellow = looking for new premises.
Green = moved/ moving toward opening.
In the first few months of 2026, Glasgow has experienced a high number of closures, threats of closure and updates (some noisier than others) about continued closure of its culture and leisure venues. At the beginning of the year, I had intended to work on some data covering the change in directors in my local arts organisations. The idea I had in mind was to show the tenure of outgoing directors at venues including CCA, GFT, Common Guild, and those of the current chairs of their respective boards. It seemed to me at the time that there was a generational shift underway in management of these spaces.
The changes I saw in progress seemed to be relatively normal end of tenure scenarios. The Centre for Contemporary Arts appeared the most troubled having fumbled an attempt to bring in a new director during a crisis around the recognition and support of Palestine from arts institutions. In December 2025 Muse Greenwood was appointed the new chair of the CCA board of trustees, but by mid January 2026 had suddenly vacated her post. The centre’s two remaining board members subsequently decided, with – its funder and landlord – Creative Scotland’s approval, to liquidate the organisation giving its staff just one day’s notice of closure and the end of their contracts on the 29th of January.
Over the years the CCA has been a significant place to me. Throughout my PhD at Glasgow School of Art in the 2010s I had programmed events there, both for my own projects and with MAP magazine. My husband Joe had also been working there for seven years as a Duty Manager at the time of closure, leaving him without a reliable source of income when it suddenly shut down in January 2026. It was a keenly felt loss, not just for its employees and tenants, but its vast set of audiences.
As a multi-arts venue the CCA hosted many tenants within its organisation including festivals, magazines, film makers, and writers. It had a theatre space, a cinema, and hosted the independent gallery space Intermedia. There was a sliding-scale pricing system where tenants didn’t always have to pay event costs, and free-to-attend events could be cheap or free to both attend and put on. The groups organising regular projects there were diverse and included a black movement collective Body Remedy, Ando Glaso’s Roma music programming, SQIFF queer film festival, and multiple disability led groups.
Since its closure a couple of affiliated organisations from within the CCA have found new homes. The Glasgow Seed Library is now known as Glasgow Community Seed Cooperative, housing seeds at Mitchell Library, and Aye-Aye Books is now based in Broadside on Allison Street. Many of the tenants have found new offices elsewhere. The design shop Welcome Home closed down, as did tea cafe The Slow Chai, while print shop The Woom Room set up a crowdfunder to try to keep their business afloat elsewhere. The CCA itself is boarded up, much of its contents reportedly skipped by the liquidators, and leaving its partner organisations, Intermedia gallery, the Third Eye Archive and the refugee support and arts organisation Common Ground with no known future plans.
A few weeks on from the closure, some news stories began appearing in The Herald, once Scotland’s paper of record but now paywalled to the extent that news only spreads from it in dribs and drabs through archive.is links on social media, about the potential closure of Trongate 103. This space is similar to CCA in the sense that it hosts many different arts organisations: GMAC Film, Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, Glasgow Print Studio, Street Level Photoworks, Project Ability, Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow Independent Studios and Transmission Gallery. It differs from CCA in that its landlord was not Creative Scotland, but City Property, an arms-length organisation of Glasgow City Council created to seek rent from business tenants. ALEOs are commonly used by councils in Scotland to hold leisure and culture facilities, and for property development, but they also make it easier to close and dispose of unwanted assets.
Under Instagram posts by The Bell on their own reporting on the ripped-up 25-year leases at T103, I noticed a few comments about another space affected by City Property rent increases and lease alterations, The Wing Hong Chinese Elderly Centre who had previously been on a peppercorn rent agreement. In following this up, a friend sent me a post by local paper The Glasgow Splash which detailed the 130 leases which were affected across the City Property Portfolio.
The decision made by City Property was to propose sharp rent increases to its tenants, at T103 this also came with uncapped service charges. In order to then proceed with rent increases, long term leases were terminated and replaced with monthly rolling leases at higher levels of rent or the option to vacate the premises. For T103, this directly caused the closure of Glasgow Project Room, a key exhibition space for graduates, established artists seeking a home for experimental and extra-institutional work, collectives, early career curators and re-emerging artists which was run by resident Glasgow Independent Studios. In addition to this Glasgow Media Access Centre have also left Trongate 103 to operate in Anderston social enterprise The Pyramid.
It is not only City Property tenants who had to deal with sudden lease changes. In February, Outer Spaces tenants 16 Collective were given such short notice to vacate their space at Granite House that they had to close a show early to pack up. In time they thankfully found a new spot at Florence Street. Listen Gallery were not as fortunate, and there were crowdfunding and event fundraisers by the community to pay for storage costs and try to financially support the much loved organisation to continue after being moved on from its York Street space in early March.
A few months have passed since councillors supported a motion in the City Chambers to financially support Trongate 103 organisations with a £200,000 fund, so that they did not immediately close at the start of April at the termination of their notice period. The public turned out in their hundreds to protest its potential closure on the same day, and then on May Day carried placards and wore patches reading ‘ABOLISH CITY PROPERTY NOW’. The future intention stated by Baillie Christie Mearns of the Scottish Greens was to remove T103 from the City Property portfolio entirely if adequate changes to the new rental agreements could not be agreed.
Most of this is public knowledge and there is a general feeling that the Council have not done enough in recent years to keep culture and leisure ticking over. The People’s Palace, Scotland Street School and Whitehill Pool are still in indefinite closure over varying states of disrepair. The McLellan Galleries and The Lighthouse respectively have been handed over to business ventures, and Langside Halls has so far only found partial funding towards its refurbishment after nine years of closure.
The longstanding and ongoing issue in all of this is sustainability. In some ways the arts scene in Glasgow is thriving and, looking at Glasgow Art Map, there seems to be an unprecedented number of small artist-run galleries across the city, but any of them could easily be cleared out at short notice if their landlord decided to up the rent. There is no specific designation for cultural organisations to protect them, and given that most are non-revenue generating organisations, and many pay no waged staff, they are uniquely vulnerable when caught up in lease increases and terminations.
When the circumstances of T103 were raised by Paul Sweeney at First Ministers questions, the response by John Swinney was that the government had already supported the arts this year by funding The Citizens Theatre to finish its longstanding refurbishment. The Citz holds a special status in Scotland as it is registered Common Good, which compels the government and the council to financially look after it as heritage. It is very rare for any new items or buildings to be added to the Common Good register, but I’d argue we need a similar type of protection for all cultural properties to prevent the further erosion of cultural life in Glasgow. Even disregarding the demonstrated flammability of our public buildings, it is clear that we have a problem with protecting the heritage of this city for future generations.
There is also the issue that not all organisations are equal in their vulnerabilities. T103 tenants Transmission Gallery have recently come to the agreement to move to a two-tier SCIO status. This protects the existing membership organisation of Transmission, while moving it to an incorporated status, allowing them to apply again to Creative Scotland for funding. Members have been keen to see changes in the organisation to try to stabilise their status and legally indemnify committee members but questions have been raised about the involvement of Lindsays solicitors, whose staff also approved the liquidation of CCA.
In response to all of these recent closures, the group Culture Conditions formed with an aim to raise awareness of existing vulnerabilities within the cultural sector and to remedy the difficulties faced by cultural workers by encouraging unionisation across the sector. They hold regular public meetings to discuss current issues. Clearly there are multiple layers of issues to be addressed, and these include not only the business viability of organisations, but the sustainability of working within the cultural industries here as individuals at a time where the cost of living is high and, as has been clearly demonstrated, contracts of all kinds are precarious and easily terminated.
Changes are also afoot within the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council. The former SNP culture secretary and “critical friend” of Israel Angus Robertson has been replaced with Màiri McAllan after losing his Edinburgh constituency to Lorna Slater of the Greens. Meanwhile the head of Glasgow City Council Susan Aitken of the SNP has announced she will step down from her post in September this year. Creative Scotland is also undergoing their first review since its formation in 2010. A key finding that it has unsurprisingly “become too bureaucratic and that there should be a more proportionate approach taken to funding decisions”.
Heading into the second half of 2026, there are a few new grassroots campaigns coming to fruition. The most pressing of which is Listen Gallery’s Make Noise campaign, demanding from Creative Scotland relief and travel funding for BPOC artists and cultural workers, national anti-racism training, community-reflective staff hires, fairer and more accessible funding processes, accountability and community engagement, greater value placed on lived experience, collection and publication of racial identity data relating to awards, and an end to the practice of funding white-led organisations to speak on behalf of racialized communities.
In light of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, a small number of arts organisations in Glasgow chose specifically to support artists of colour to produce work. Over the period of the pandemic as galleries were struggling to remain open POC led committees formed at Rhubaba in Edinburgh and Transmission in Glasgow, Listen Gallery opened with a global majority focus, and Common Ground ran a multi arts and charitable project for migrants of the global diaspora at CCA. Rhubaba and Common Ground are both now closed, Transmission included the possibility of a wrap-up in their most recent AGM and Listen Gallery are still searching for a replacement space. It is in light of these long term failures of support to racialized communities and in response to June’s far right marches in central Glasgow that Make Noise makes its demands.
In June, Glasgow International and Scotland + Venice have both seen calls by Art Workers for Palestine to clarify their support of the cultural boycott of Israel and name the genocide in Gaza and in Lebanon. Since 2023, there has been a great sense of solidarity amongst artists who believe that the genocide in Palestine must be halted and yet it has not been allowed to be reflected within our public institutions due to the intransigence of Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland. This has damaged trust and has detached cultural organisations from political debates, reducing the right to self-expression, and ethical objection, within a public forum.
This month Culture Conditions have brought together testimonies by artists who were due to show work at Intermedia Gallery. Alongside Glasgow Project Room it previously offered some of the only funded time to make and present work for new graduates and those returning to practice. Intermedia was also originally founded on King Street and is therefore a sibling to the Trongate 103 organisations which are under threat, and was previously funded by Glasgow City Council and subsequently Glasgow Life. It is vital that these two spaces are reopened so that graduates and emerging artists can continue to be funded to find a route into the arts and develop their practice.
Another urgent issue for young artists is the access to studio space. Over the past 5 years or so there has been a ballooning of the provision of meanwhile spaces by the council and the charity Outer Spaces. I personally believe that it is not an adequate model to support the needs of artists and that the scale of meanwhile space studio provision undermines the long term stability of the arts in this city. Mount Jupiter has reported on the economics of this model, where businesses receive tax write-offs for empty buildings, in exchange for temporarily holding studio space for artists. In my independent assessment studio provision would benefit from being decoupled from the financial support given to landlords. The Scottish Government should instead tax empty buildings and give grants for grassroots arts organisations to allow them to develop independently and without regular interruption of their activities at the whim of corporate property.
As I attempt to finish this piece, I am constantly tempted to make revisions as a result of the pace of change to the arts landscape. In the past week alone the Cooper Gallery, a mature and vital POC-directed space run by the University of Dundee, has been put at risk due to a funding crisis at the university alongside cuts to Arts and STEM degrees and the city’s historic Botanic Gardens. At the same time, Rumpus Room, a unique artist led initiative working with children and young people in art making, ecological and social action projects has been served notice to leave their premises owned by Bike for Good just off Victoria Road in Glasgow’s Southside. Meanwhile, over the weekend, a number of protestors were evicted from the soon to close Queens Park Glasshouses for attempting to avert the removal of koi carp from the pond, an action which would allow for the indefinite closure of the iconic buildings. The cuts will keep coming and we must continue to find ways to oppose them and to protect our arts, culture and shared heritage.
In the past few years I studied maths, statistics and computing so that I could apply some aspects of data analysis to contemporary issues that matter to me. This led me to initially create the material which I have used for this essay in March, reflecting upon arts closures that have happened in Glasgow in 2026. I also subsequently made a small colour-coded graph of closed and at-risk venues which I have revised and represented here. I intend to continue working independently on this project and hope it provides some useful insights on the current conditions being faced by artists and arts organisations in this city.
References
The Bell (ed.) (2026) The CCA goes bust, entering liquidation, The Glasgow Bell. Available at: https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/cca-liquidation-centre-contemporary-arts-glasgow-creative-scotland/
Ferguson, B. (2026) Fresh turmoil for CCA Glasgow as New Chair quits after a month, Glasgow Times. Available at: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/25778651.fresh-turmoil-cca-glasgow-new-chair-quits-month/
Nänni-pää (2026) The Woom Room needs your help, Crowdfunder. Available at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-woom-room-creative-hub-and-gallery/
The Bell (ed.) (2026) ‘Cultural vandalism’: major arts hub kicked out by council’s property company, The Glasgow Bell. Available at: https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/trongate-103-evicted-sharmanka-print-studios/
Fanning, G. (2026) Wing Hong Centre seeks legal advice over lease offer with March deadline, The Glasgow Splash. Available at: https://theglasgowsplash.substack.com/p/exclusive-wing-hong-centre-seeks/
Paterson, S. (2026) New Cash Fund to help art groups with rent agreed in Glasgow, Glasgow Times. Available at: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/25993119.new-cash-fund-help-art-groups-rent-agreed-glasgow/
Culture Conditions (2026). Available at: https://www.instagram.com/cultureconditions/
Scottish Government (2026) Summary - independent review of Creative Scotland, gov.scot Available at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/independent-review-creative-scotland/pages/2/
Listen Gallery (2026) Make Noise. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZcyJyXiK08/
Art Workers for Palestine Scotland (2026) Statement from Glasgow International Artists, Workers and Venues in Solidarity with Palestine. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZfWX0NCK_V/
Creative Dundee (2026) Exploring Creative Space Models: Temporary Studios on the High Street. Available at: https://creativedundee.com/2026/03/exploring-creative-space-models-temporary/
Mount Jupiter (2026) Mount Jupiter Reports: Dear Mount Jupiter, Outer Spaces? (#5), Glasgow Art Map. Available at: https://www.glasgowartmap.com/mount-jupiter-reports-5/
Save Cooper Gallery (2026) https://www.instagram.com/p/DZvJle3Dqlr/
Rumpus Room (2026) https://www.instagram.com/rumpusroom_/
Save Queens Park Glasshouse (2026) https://www.instagram.com/saveourglasshouse/?hl=en