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In 1976, a group of artists set up affordable studios on Bristol’s harbourside to establish a viable community for the city’s creatives. Their vision lives on at Spike Island art centre which invites the public behind the scenes this month.
‘Artist? Don’t leave’ reads a 1975 poster showing a man sitting on a railway station platform surrounded by cumbersomely large easel, paint pot, brush and palette. A further advert from the time shows an artist perched atop a WC attempting to paint on his lap with the dry observation ‘cramped studio?’. The first figure appears resigned to his fate, eyes closed as if consumed with fatigue. The second soul stares up at the viewer, exasperated, it appears, to the point of combativeness. Both posters invite the reader to contact Artspace Bristol, a pioneering group of painters, sculptors and printmakers who used the campaign as an open call to artists with the aim of keeping them in the city and forging a working collective.
It succeeded. In 1976, the group took up residence in the McArthur Steel & Metal LTD warehouse on Gas Ferry Road near the SS Great Britain to offer each other a supportive and practical space in which to imagine, experiment and realise.
The plan not only worked, it endured. Half a century on, Artspace Bristol lives on as Spike Island, a renowned contemporary art centre fashioned iteratively in the former Brooke Bond tea-packing warehouse just a street away on Cumberland Road. As well as offering subsidised studios to over 70 artists, it boasts a gallery of international calibre, an associate artist programme and exhibition production and installation services. It is also home to Spike Print Studio, the largest open-access print studio in the Southwest, founded by Artspace Bristol instigator Peter Reddick.
The list doesn’t stop there. Drawing back to the collaboration with fellow arts enterprises in the original Artspace Bristol premises, Spike Island hosts small creative businesses and individuals, visual arts advocates Visual Arts South West and visiting community groups in a variety of workspaces. It also dedicates a significant portion of its 80,000 square feet to UWE Fine Art students. It’s a complex yet vibrant ecosystem under one roof to rival a thriving artisan quarter.
It’s no wonder director Nicole Yip refers to the art centre’s many ‘fingers and toes’, which intertwine intramurally as well as reaching out.
Joining Spike Island from Nottingham Contemporary in June 2024, Nicole’s arrival coincided with changes in leadership at Arnolfini, Bristol Beacon, Royal West of England Academy (RWA) and neighbouring SS Great Britain. ‘As much as we can we coordinate efforts,’ explains Nicole. ‘We can make our voices heard more strongly if we work together.’
‘The founding principle of Spike Island was about making Bristol a viable place for artists. I want to use this moment to do advocacy and thought leadership for affordable studios as essential cultural infrastructure,’ she adds, indicating that while Spike Island is celebrating 50 years of artist-led activity, it is looking to the future as much as honouring the past. Key to this forward motion is the scale of the studio complex and its orchestra of occupants, an intergenerational mix composed of those from Artspace Bristol’s earlier days to new arrivals bringing fresh energy.
Notable among Spike Island’s studio artists is Carol Jackman, a founder member of Spike Print Studio who resides, she wryly points out, in room 101. As well as being a prolific printmaker, concerned with the poetry and politics of geography and maps, Carol is custodian of photo albums depicting the 1998 reopening, officiated by the eccentric late Marquess of Bath. She has also observed first hand Spike Island’s evolution over nearly 30 years.
‘I’ve sat on every sub-committee,’ Carol jokes, including helping steer the Spike Green Futures campaign recognising and acting on its environmental responsibilities (over 200 solar panels were installed on the roof in April 2025). While pursuing her own practice, Carol has seen studio changeovers and a shift from an era when the artists and volunteers did everything from building maintenance, communal cooking and admin to seeing experts welcomed in to fulfil these roles.
Carol is assertive about the professionalism of those who make up the Spike Island fabric. ‘We’re here to make serious work,’ she states. ‘Our reputation attracts people.’ She namechecks studio neighbour Angela Lizon (whose painterly brush strokes are audible) and Emma Stibbon, academicians of the RWA and Royal Academy respectively. Valda Jackson, awarded an MBE for her design of the silver commemorative Windrush coin, is also a studio holder. ‘You’ve got these massive hidden talents all over the building,’ Carol marvels.
Every May the inspiration, tools and skills of these artists are showcased in Spike Island’s flagship Open Studios, a cornerstone of the organisation since its inception, which invites the public through doors if not usually closed, then sensitively ajar. ‘It’s a privilege to have a studio here,’ discloses Carol, whose top-lit space accommodates her large-scale works and myriad reference books. ‘Open Studios is a way to give back.’
This year’s event is particularly significant and part of a year-long programme marking Spike Island’s half centenary which also includes the Spike Print Fair in July, Summer Party Fundraiser in September and Made at Spike Winter Fair in December, alongside the exhibition schedule in the main gallery space. ‘Open Studios 50 is an opportunity to reconnect with alumni,’ states Nicole, for whom the branching networks, emergent pathways and virtuous circles of Spike Island are core to its being.
‘Students become studio assistants, studio artists teach, you’re not graduating out into a vacuum,’ she affirms. Mentorship opportunities range from the formal Graduate Fellowship programme to ‘lunchtime crits’ between studio holders. ‘One of my aspirations was to get everything working in sync, where everyone feels seen and heard and part of something bigger,’ reflects Nicole, whose desire to become part of the Spike Island constellation saw her secure the role while juggling a growing young family of her own, relocating to Bristol.
‘It’s a lively and dynamic scene,’ she says of the city. ‘It creates its own international connections but it’s small enough to be accessible.’ She is rightly proud that Spike Island, along with the RWA, Arnolfini and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, will be hosting the 10th edition of the prestigious touring British Art Show in 2027, three decades after Artspace Bristol brought its ‘spirit of possibility’ to a second industrial setting.
‘I see that spirit being alive and enacted every day in this building,’ declares Nicole.
Open Studios 50 will serve up the performances, creative workshops and locally made food and drink for which it has become a much-loved part of Bristol’s entertainment calendar. These accessible touchpoints complement the rich interactions between artists and art appreciators in the studio spaces as well as opportunities to see the anatomy of the building such as installations in the loading bay or a pop-up beer garden next to the former dispatch office. ‘It’s in the DNA of Spike Island, it’s happened from the very beginning,’ says Nicole of the event, while alluding also to the buzz of rolling private views
Spike Island, it would seem, has all the right ingredients (quite literally in Emmeline, its popular café) and yet it has plans to further improve its family offering and existing community spaces. The art centre’s open heart, open arms and open doors are best summarised by Carol Jackman, who was thrown an 80th birthday party on site last year. ‘There were so many bouquets it was like a florist shop,’ she remarks wittily, followed by a ready smile..
spikeisland.org.uk; @spikeisland spikeprintstudio.org; @spikeprintstudio
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