If These Walls Could Talk…

“An arts and heritage venue inside a 700 year-old building” is how Dan Crow describes God’s House Tower, which opens its doors this month

- Duncan Hall

There’s a smile on Dan Crow’s face when Hampshire Life meets him in the recently created café at the entrance of God’s House Tower.

The previous weekend the refurbished monument close to Southampton’s port hosted a Music in the City gig – and that night its bar took the first money A Space Arts has made in seven years. As director of the arts and heritage charity which has been working to transform the venue, Dan has been used to paying money out to contractors. “It feels like we’re on the brink,” he says, as his team makes its final preparations before fully opening its doors to the public this month. “We’ve held four test events – a series of talks about the history of the building, Music in the City, a private party for a trustee’s 60th birthday and a secret open day when we just opened the doors to see what happened. We have learned so much – from which toilets wouldn’t flush to the questions the public wants to ask.”

A Space Arts began in 1999 as a way of recent Solent University fine art graduate Dan and his friends finding a space to show their work. They took over a Victorian shop in Old Northam Road in 2002, which is now the HAHA Gallery.

Dan says the real lightbulb moment for the organization came in 2004 when they launched their first ArtVaults project – displaying contemporary artworks in the medieval vaults of Southampton’s old town. “We realized we were getting two types of audience. There were people coming to see the heritage, but we could talk to them about the artwork. And there were people who came to see the art, and learned about the history of the city.”