The Hunter Club, in Bury St Edmunds, announces move to become a CIC to help more young people get creative

A Suffolk venue dedicated to grassroots music is rebranding as a community asset to continue to help young creatives.

The Hunter Club, in St Andrew’s Street South, Bury St Edmunds, is setting up to become a Community Interest Company and changing its name to Hunter Club Arts Centre CIC.

Nick Pooley, who has been with the venue since it opened in 2009, said the move would help the site to carry on its ethos of nurturing creative minds.

“We work closely with the Music Venues Trust, it offers lots of support to grassroots music places like ourselves, and after talking to it we felt this would be a great route to go down,” he said.

“It seemed a natural evolution in the club’s life really and hopefully this will help us to access grant funding to keep doing what we are doing already but grow its use as a community asset.”

The 37-year-old said nothing would change in what the club did now, such as hosting live music, a bar and being open for groups to use, but new additional spaces would be made for those wanting to test new ideas.

“I think there is a bit of a lack of dedicated creative spaces in Bury, where young people can come together and create stuff,” said Nick.

“So we have created four ‘Hunter Club Creative Spaces’ which will give people an affordable and accessible place, on top of our fully set up recording studio, where they can create their ideas whether it is digital art or music and give a creative edge to the place.

“We hope this will give like-minded young people a hub for a creative community.”

With the club run as a CIC, any profits made would be fed back into it for continuing improvement and to fund more events.

Nick, who will become a CIC director with Jack Cutting, said: “It is an exciting time and we are already looking at grants to help build on what we have done here over the last 15 years.

“It has been a real team effort here, with our ethos of helping young creative minds grow. We could not have not got this far without the community behind us.

“I thank them all, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to do that with them and I hope they come with us for the next part of bringing a bigger and better offering to the town.”

If you can help the venue with grant fund writing, email nick.pooley@hunterclub.org.