With 1 in 7 high street shops across the country falling into disuse, thinking creatively about new and energising ways of sustaining and breathing new life into our retail spaces has never been more crucial, and experience tells us that the community, arts and enterprise have a key role to play.
We work with a range of community led initiatives, small businesses and artists to bring pop up shops with a difference to high streets and other unused venues.
Our most recent pop ups include working with young actors from the pioneering MaD Theatre Company in Sale Town Centre, who used their pop up shop to inspire young and old to try out their dramatic writing, acting, dancing and singing skills, culminating in a truly unforgettable one off flash mob group performance which started in the shop itself before weaving through the town centre. Amongst other visual arts outings, we have also been producing and managing regular pop up shops with Young Visions, a group of London based artists, who bring temporary contemporary visual arts gallery pop ups to unusual locations, including The Burlington Arcade, the most celebrated of three 19th century arcades along Piccadilly.
We were one of the pioneers of pop up shops way back in 2003, when we co-created the world’s first ever ‘pop up’ orchestral symphony with the full BBC Philharmonic orchestra in the potato aisle of the local ASDA, where they ‘popped up’ to play a specially commissioned ‘Supermarket Symphony’ in 2003. This was part of The Pop Up Project, a collaboration between BBC Philharmonic, North City Arts/Live and ASDA.
‘The pop up shop brought us straight to an audience and participants we wouldn’t normally be able to reach and challenged us to think of how our work could bring something special to a completely different space. We specialise in working with local communities, and where better place to start than on the high street.’
Rob Lees, Director, MaD Theatre Company
‘Profile, profile, profile – it was only when we started doing pop ups with Dovetail that people in our area really engaged with what we are doing, and joined in. It’s high impact and fun, and brings people together – we generated over 100 new volunteers during one month in our pop up shop’.
Mish Mash Community Comedy Club
What the people say:
'I thought it was fantastic. Should be here more often, we need more things like this around this area'
Shaun Whitehead, Altrincham
'I think it's a wonderful idea, having young people promoting their theatre company in an empty shop'
Sue, Stretford
'Wonderific'
Megan (15) Northenden
