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Nick Williams sits down with Hadley Stewart to explain how the multi-disciplinary cultural hub is becoming London’s must-visit venue this summer.
It’s one of the hottest days of the year so far and Nick Williams, the director of the Woolwich Works, has just finished showing me around the multi-disciplinary cultural hub. Our tour of the south east London venue, located on the River Thames, is made up of five listed buildings: from its largest space, the Fireworks Factory, that has the capacity to accommodate almost two thousand people standing, to the more intimate studio spaces that are used for rehearsals as well as private functions. We conclude our tour in the air-conditioned café, which on a weekday morning is already a buzz with locals.
“People here are not shy in telling us about things that they don’t like, and we haven’t had a single negative response back,” says Williams of previous LGBTQ+ themed events at the Woolwich Works, as we perch at a vacant table between someone tapping away at a laptop and couple of neighbours catching up over coffee. “In fact the feedback has always been: if you do more, we will come.”
Clearly spurred on by this encouragement, this month audiences and visitors can expect a varied roster of shows and events to mark Pride month: circus, film, cabaret, comedy and drag are all on offer. What is Williams most looking forward to this month? “Oh, that’s really difficult for me to pick,” he says, genuinely torn by the choices. The programme opens with a circus cabaret, followed by a screening of the coming-of-age film Beautiful Film (set and filmed in nearby Thamesmead), and an evening of laughter with lesbian comedian Clare Summerskill, to name but a few.
Alongside wanting to celebrate creativity and individuality within the LGBTQ+ community, Williams tells me that this programme also matters for the local community. “Statistically, the Borough of Greenwich has one of the largest LGBTQ+ populations in London, so that’s interesting in itself,” he explains, adding that he wants the Woolwich Works to be a space that is inclusive to everyone. “I also think that organisations like ours tend to be refuges for people who might struggle to fit in other parts of society.”
Whilst the Woolwich Works has been described as a ‘swanky new creative hub’ by Time Out, its opening in September 2021 was a challenging time for the organisation and the arts sector more broadly. The £45.6m cultural hub opened its doors against a backdrop of the Covid pandemic, delays with the opening of the Elizabeth line meant that many did not wish to travel to this corner of London, and the organisation arguably struggled to position itself within the London arts and culture scene.
There was, according to Wiliams, an untapped potential that he recognised when he visited the venue for the first time. “I came down to a couple of events and I just recognised it straight away,” he recalls. “It struck me that this venue is a great thing for Woolwich, and that actually what we needed to do is start local and work outwards.”
Having joined the Woolwich Works in 2023, Williams says that people’s first impressions of the organisation still ring true to his own some three years on. “I like it when you take creative people around, like artists and producers and promoters, and they start to have ideas the minute they walk into spaces,” he says. “I had that tingle as well when I first came here. It’s quite a special place.”
Walking into the Woolwich Works today, it seems clear that there is still that tingle in the air. Not only are the buildings that make up the venue beautiful, there is a sense of positive change. In the past decade, the surrounding area of Royal Arsenal has gone through some significant changes too, which has seen listed buildings converted into flats and shops, as well as neighbouring streets becoming pedestrianised. It’s this positivity that Williams is keen to showcase. “There is that perceptual piece about Woolwich that all of us that are down this way have to continue to work on,” he says. “This is a pleasant place to come to.”
For audiences, they are almost spoilt for choice when coming to visit the Woolwich Works; the Elizabeth line, the DLR, national rail and riverboat services down the Thames, are all available to them. Plus, City Airport is located just over the river (I’m told they quite literally have to plan some rehearsal room bookings around the airport’s peak times for takeoffs and landings). Williams argues that the Woolwich Works is one of the most connected cultural and arts venues in London.
Having a venue that is easily accessible is a start, yet getting people to walk through the doors is another. For Williams, he strikes me as being cognisant of the need to carefully consider the local community to get them to visit the space. “We do have to make sure that we are deeply engaged with our local community,” says Williams. “The notion of a venue being lively and busy in one thing… Most importantly it being owned by its local community, seems to me to be the proposition we want to deliver.”
Moreover, Williams is also conscious of the importance of creating a safe and inclusive space for audiences to enjoy themselves and to be uplifted by local artists. “As a gay chief executive of a venue like this, there is also that recognition that visibility and leadership really matters for queer artists and queer audiences too,” he explains. “We come from a position of inclusion here. We work on removing barriers to inclusion, and putting the queer community front and centre.”
Inclusivity and visibility are two things that Williams seems to live and breathe. On his first day at the Woolwich Works, he stood up in front of his team to introduce himself. “I told them I was gay, that I had a dog called Cleo, and a little bit about my background,” he recalls. “I present myself pretty openly when I take on these sorts of roles. I’ve been in pretty good positions for fifteen to sixteen years now, so I’ve evolved my approach to it in that time.”
Growing up just outside of Swansea in south Wales, Williams played the clarinet as a child and was in the youth theatre, before moving to Bristol to study French and philosophy in 1996. “I think some of that comes from an independent streak and that I had the desire to get out into the world,” he recalls of that time. “Certainly to get away from south Wales, which was not the best in the nineties for a not out gay teen.”
Williams’s career has seen him work for the likes of the Royal Court Theatre, Hampstead Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as for the London office of Arts Council England as an independent consultant and producer. Prior to joining the Woolwich Works, he was Chief Executive of Perth Theatre and Concert Hall in Scotland during the height of the Covid pandemic.
In addition to being an inclusive organisation when it comes to sexuality and gender identity, Williams explains that the Woolwich Works also wants to showcase work that feels in tune with the diverse community of south east London. “In terms of community connections, it’s not that there is a right and a wrong audience, but it’s connecting who this work is actually for and how it will appeal to them, rather than just assuming that people will come along.”
He also wants to ensure that the language used is inclusive for audiences, without forfeiting high quality creativity. “This isn’t about highbrow art versus lowbrow art,” he says. “It’s about being clear about what it is, why it is interesting and why it should appeal to our audiences. And that doesn’t mean that the work is not of high quality, nor that it isn’t artistically interesting or boundary pushing.”
As someone who describes himself as loving a challenge, there has perhaps never been a more challenging time to be a leader of an arts organisation, I venture. How have funding cuts to the arts sectors impacted on the Woolwich Works? “We are not publicly subsidised and that is challenging,” replies Williams. “It’s also fairly liberating, actually, because you’re not jumping through certain hoops. But it does mean we need to think and behave in a fairly commercial way, even though we’re a charity.”
There is a local sentiment, Williams points out, that the Woolwich Works regularly receives money from the local council. “We absolutely don’t,” he says. Woolwich Creative District Trust, which runs the Woolwich Works, previously received a £2m interest-free loan in 2022 from Greenwich Council. “They give us the occasional project grant, but we don’t get any revenue. We seek sponsorship and support elsewhere.”
Such revenue comes in the form of corporate hires, which are balanced alongside the creative programme. “We essentially say the beginning of the week is corporate hires, the weekends are programming, and we’ll squabble over Thursdays,” explains Williams, who adds that a small number of corporate events are also public facing.
The week before our interview, the Woolwich Works hosted the Foreign and Commonwealth’s Global Partnerships Conference. They could not discuss it publicly at the time due to the security risk, Williams explains, but as he speaks to me about it today it seems clear that this was certainly an important moment for the organisation in putting themselves on the map. “We had the foreign secretary, the deputy prime minister, both Miliband brothers, and a whole group of ambassadors and ministers from foreign governments,” he says proudly. “It was really quite a big deal for us.”
Dignitaries aside, I ask Williams why he thinks people should venture to this corner of south east London this summer, rather than going to see a show in Soho. “We have a scale that other venues don’t have,” he replies. “It allows us to do stuff that you can’t see at Soho Theatre or Underbelly Boulevard or those sorts of spaces, because they are much, much smaller than we are. Plus, we’re really well connected, we’re welcoming and friendly and you’ll have a nice night out. So why not come down?”
Woolwich Works is a multi-disciplinary cultural hub on the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. More details about their Pride programme can be found here.
