St Andrews Hall
The Halls is a multi-use cultural venue owned and run by Norwich City Council, and a Grade I listed ancient monument. The building passed into public ownership during the Reformation in 1538 and is the most intact medieval friary in England in secular use. Today it is a successful receiving house and the largest concert venue in the city.
Norwich City Council successfully bid for £3.6m of Town Deal funding to upgrade The Halls. The renovations will transform the Halls, a unique city centre heritage asset, into a multi-use performance venue and enable Norwich to capitalise on the rapidly growing cultural economy in the city.
Upgrades to the venue will be achieved by investing in the facilities, including audio visual equipment and lighting, a major redesign to improve flow and accessibility, a revamp of the outside space, and an enhanced café and bar offer.
Creating a high quality, multi-use venue at The Halls is part of the city council’s ongoing work and collaboration with cultural partners to open up more spaces, attract a greater variety of arts and culture, and increase the overall number of events - appealing to wider audiences and broadening the cultural activities on offer in Norwich.
Norwich has a strong existing cultural landscape and this project to develop The Halls will support the wider cultural provision in the city, as well as contributing to the Norwich 2040 Vision aims to be a creative, fair, liveable, connected, and dynamic city. It will also enable the city council to act as a responsible steward of the building and ensure its future sustainability.
Essential structural work will also be completed alongside the refurbishment project. These include work to the roof, stained glass windows and secondary glazing in St Andrew’s Hall.
To carry out these improvements, The Halls will need to close for about 12 months. This means unfortunately we won’t be able to host events from 1 January 2024, however all bookings up to 31 December 2023 will go ahead as normal.