Three years ago as the world began to shut down for the first pandemic lockdown, Orchestras Live’s HQ relocated from London to Leeds.

Our plans to celebrate our new home and city with our stakeholders had to be put on hold. Sadly, due to the length of the pandemic, by the time we were able to celebrate, we’d been in our new home two years, so it felt like the moment had well and truly passed!

Why did we move to Leeds?

Looking back our move feels like a no-brainer. We’ve always been a largely dispersed team with staff based in Durham all the way down to Winchester and everywhere in between. However, like many national organisations, we had ended up with a headquarters in London.

There have never been more than three Orchestras Live members of staff working full time in London. In spite of that, in 2016 we had sufficient office space to accommodate the full team of eight people, who only met together on a weekly basis.

In addition, there was a contradiction between our positioning and external communications, and the outward facing profile of our premises.

Although our office base was in London, we never delivered any work there. In 2017 we took the first steps towards what turned out to be a strategic move and relocation, by adopting and articulating a regional structure.

In 2018, after a thorough cost benefit analysis, consideration of stakeholder impact and due consideration of staffing factors, the Board approved a move out of the capital. We moved to our new HQ at Duke Studios, a fantastic creative and collaborative workspace in the middle of Leeds, in March 2020.

Three years on how do we feel about the move?

As an organisation that works in culturally under-represented areas across England, shifting our centre of gravity outside London has helped reinforce our reputation as a national organisation working through regional partnerships.

Moving to Leeds has also enabled us to be located within an area of strategic importance for our work as reflected in our business plan. Our team has grown to eleven and we will soon add three new members who will work in community-based roles in the North, Midlands and East. This expansion is a visible consequence of the benefits of a regional base, allowing us to deepen our understanding and involvement in local activity.

We’re better able to demonstrate a fit with regional systems, such as the new NHS integrated Care Systems or the Combined authorities.

The City’s commitment to culture is evidenced in Leeds 2023, a year of culture initially developed as a bid to become European City of Culture, then adopted by the Council when it became clear that such a bid was no longer feasible post-Brexit.

We’ve been warmly welcomed by the City Council who need no persuading that Orchestras Live’s national profile brings a new dimension to the city’s cultural infrastructure. This is very different from fighting for attention among the big beasts in the London orchestral sector and classical music world.

We also notice the energy in conversations with potential partners and neighbours, determined to make things happen in spite, or perhaps because of the historical imbalances between north and south. Not only does this all provide a better fit for our ambitions, we’re also finding that it feeds into the development of new partnerships, whether in the North or elsewhere.