The £45 million music plan arrives a year too late for the Deptford venue it might have saved
In November 2023, the venue then known as Matchstick Piehouse, tucked into a railway arch in Deptford, was given a week to find £35,000 or lose its lease. It couldn’t. Within weeks the space had been stripped of its lighting rig, its sound system, and its furniture by debt collectors, and one of south east London’s few wheelchair-accessible grassroots venues, a place that had hosted Ezra Collective and Nubya Garcia early in their careers, went dark. It took a workers’ co-operative, a public crowdfund, a Music Venue Trust intervention and a £15,000 grant from Lewisham Council before the venue, renamed simply The Piehouse, reopened in 2025.
That is the kind of story the government’s new national music strategy, Turn It Up: Our Plan for Music, is explicitly trying to make rarer. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy launched the plan in July at the UK Music Summer Party, framing it as an answer to a music industry she says has become socially narrow. “Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not,” Nandy said, adding that “pop is getting posher, and that must change.” The question worth asking about any strategy pitched in those terms is a mechanical one: would this money, distributed the way it’s designed to be distributed, actually have reached a venue like the Piehouse before its landlord’s deadline, or after?
The centrepiece is the Music Growth Package, delivered by Arts Council England, which existed already as a £30 million fund before this announcement and now stands at £45 million after a further £15 million injection. It is set to support more than 2,000 projects and at least 40,000 artists over three years, and for the first time will extend beyond grassroots infrastructure to mid-career artists, band managers, labels and publishers. That widening matters for how the money will actually land: a venue in acute financial distress is competing for the same pot as a label looking to fund a mid-career artist’s next release, and the fund’s own three-year runway means it was never built to move at the speed of a landlord’s seven-day ultimatum.
Two further schemes are funded through dormant assets and delivered by the National Lottery Community Fund rather than Arts Council England. A Music in Libraries initiative, worth at least £12.5 million and co-designed with the Ed Sheeran Foundation, will put free studio spaces and recording equipment into library services across England. A separate £10 million Creative Mentoring scheme will give care-experienced children and young people one-to-one mentoring from creative practitioners across music, art, film and drama. Both extend the existing £132.5 million Every Child Can programme, which brings enrichment activities including music to every child regardless of where they live. These are long-horizon investments in who gets to make music in the first place, not emergency funding for venues already in trouble, and the distinction is worth being precise about rather than letting the headline figure blur the two.
On live music specifically, the voluntary £1 ticket contribution added to shows at stadiums and arenas above 5,000 capacity, administered by the LIVE Trust, has distributed £1.5 million so far to initiatives run by the Featured Artists Coalition, Music Venue Trust and the Association of Independent Festivals. Set against the scale of the problem it’s meant to address, that figure is worth holding in mind: the Music Venue Trust’s own annual report found that 30 grassroots venues closed permanently in the year to July 2025, that 53.8 per cent of those still trading made no profit at all, and that the sector lost more than 6,000 jobs, a fifth of its workforce, in a single year. Mark Davyd, the Trust’s chief executive, told the report’s launch that “we have reached the absolute limit of what goodwill can possibly absorb.” A south London music school held its ground last year as community support stepped in where public funding hadn’t, the kind of rescue Turn It Up is now trying to make less necessary.
Elsewhere, the plan loosens some of the licensing rules venues and festivals have long complained about. Festival licences will move to a minimum of three years for new events and five for existing ones, addressing a genuine structural complaint from promoters who’ve had to reapply annually for events that run every year regardless. Temporary Event Notices, the light-touch licences smaller venues use to put on one-off gigs, rise from 15 to 20 a year. Michael Dugher, formerly chief executive of UK Music, has been appointed the government’s first Music Champion, an unpaid, year-long advocacy role. UK Music, LIVE, Arts Council England, Libraries Connected, the Ed Sheeran Foundation and the Council of Music Makers have all issued statements welcoming the strategy.
None of this changes what actually happened to the Piehouse in November 2023, and none of it is designed to. The Music Growth Package didn’t exist at £45 million then, the LIVE Trust’s levy hadn’t launched, and even now, its £1.5 million distributed so far works out to a fraction of what a single venue can face in a rent-arrears deadline. What Turn It Up mostly offers is a slower, structural kind of support, more studio space, more mentoring, longer licences, a modest new grant pool, aimed at the conditions that produce closures rather than the closures themselves once they’re already underway. Whether that’s the right place to spend £45 million, or whether some of it should sit closer to the kind of emergency intervention that actually reached Deptford in time to matter, is the argument this plan will be judged against over the next three years, not at its launch party.
Watch what the Music Growth Package’s first London grants actually fund, EyeOnLondon will be following whether any of that £45 million reaches a venue before it needs saving, not after.
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