Celebrating Our Community Space

As many of our regular customers know, we have an amazing community space at the back of our shop. We have a kitchen and a disabled access toilet and also have the ability to split up the space with a sound proof partition. We have many events in this space, some of them hosted by us, such at the recent Toes in the Water book event, and some that are hosted by others such as Saturdays Retrofit drop in session hosted by Retrofit Southampton, where anyone can learn about insulating their home. And then we have our regular hires which include yoga, choirs, games evenings and comedy nights.

We have also hosted our own workshops and contributed to others held in our space, such as the Coproduction workshop organised by Southampton Voluntary Services (SVS) before Christmas. This workshop was a wonderful demonstration of coproduction in practise, October Books team members working with SVS and the Centre for the South, a policy institute working within the University of Southampton. For more on this event see the Centre for the South blog here.

This last workshop really helped us to recognise the power of the space we have; a versatile, affordable community space and a welcoming ethos with no agendas or affiliations. We are also a High street location which means we are a great non-institutional space for conversations on subjects such as policy making, which often happen in universities or council facilities. We feel this is something unique in our offering and we are very proud of our accessible, real-world meeting place for diverse people and ideas.

Want to know more about hiring our space then visit our webpage here.