Who are we investing in?

Salford-based Walk the Plank is known for its site-responsive events, both large and small, in a variety of locations as well as firework displays and community processions that bring diverse groups of people together as spectators, participants or co-creators of its work.

Over the past 25 years, Walk the Plank has won national and international acclaim, responding to bids and creative commissions from across the UK, Europe and beyond for both outdoor arts productions and pyrotechnics, the latter through its commercial subsidiary – Walk the Plank Fireworks.

What are we investing in?

Walk the Plank will use a £170,000 loan from Arts Impact Fund towards the development cost of Cobden Works - a new centre for excellence in outdoor arts in Salford, the only dedicated space of its kind in North West England. The site, due to be completed in summer 2017, will feature production workshops, a learning space and an outdoor yard for making and training, and will breathe creative life into an industrial part of the city.

Cobden Works will generate cost savings by consolidating Walk the Plank’s various premises into a single hub and will create new income streams from the hire of facilities, making better use of the organisation’s excess capacity and adding to its overall financial resilience. The new site will also allow Walk the Plank to continue to grow artistically by giving it a much needed creative home, and to ambitiously expand its learning and community engagement programme, with additional funds the charity hopes to raise from public and philanthropic sources.

Read the full case study on Walk the Plank on the Arts Impact Fund website.