10.18743/DATA.00007DatasetSwain, RobertRobertSwain0000-0003-0813-3740Mansfield, TomTomMansfieldBirkbeck-Jerwood Space London Rehearsal Room Survey 2016Birkbeck, Universtiy of London2016http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16752Recognising how difficult it is to find cheap and suitable rehearsal spaces in London, and the effect that may have on the viability and finances of many unfunded fringe productions, on behalf of the Centre for Contemporary Theatre I successfully applied to the Higher Education Investment Fund (HEIF) to fund the theatre director Tom Mansfield to undertake the research and to compile the first survey of rehearsal and audition rooms in London in May 2013.
In 2015 the Jerwood Space enquired if this survey would be updated. We then jointly commissioned Tom Mansfield to update the survey in 2016. This survey has been distributed, free, to over 1,000 theatre directors and producers.
The PDF document, in a linked entry, provides a narrative overview of the range and cost of spaces in London and then presents lists of over 300 spaces, ordered by rate per hour, per day, per week, and per square metre. The Excel spreadsheet, attached here, presents this information in a different format and provides the addresses and other contact details for each space.
You may download these documents for free; please feel free to pass on the documents to any theatre-makers you think may benefit from this survey.Data was gathered through a combination of visiting rehearsal rooms' websites, email and telephone contact. The main sources for the data were the Spotlight Contacts 2016 publication and the previous 2013 study. Some venues were added because staff at other venues recommended them.
The data was collected in an Excel spreadsheet, which makes up the other element of this report. Calculations were run on the cost of each rehearsal space listed on an hourly, daily and weekly basis. Additionally, a calculation was run on the cost of each space per square mete, again on an hourly, daily and weekly basis.
Different venues advertise their pricing in different ways. Some offer prices per hour, others per day or per week; other venues offer all three prices. In order to compare all the rehearsal spaces in the data set, I have run calculations to generate daily, hourly, and weekly prices where these were not given. In the Excel spreadsheet, prices provided by the venue are highlighted in green while prices I have calculated are highlighted in yellow. The methodology behind these calculations is outlined below.London, UK