STANDING proudly at the heart of the far-from-sleepy Cotswold town of Stroud in Gloucestershire is a very beautiful building with an auspicious history reaching right back to the 1830s, a building in which people have collectively danced, sung, laughed and cried, where concerts have moved people to tears, where actors have come alive to their skills, where some of the nations’s most iconic bands have performed, where Stroudies have met the love of their lives and where others have nursed a broken heart. It’s a building which very much belongs (both literally and emotionally) to the people of Stroud — our Subscription Rooms, or Subs Rooms. 

Sadly in this age of austere suffering, it was deemed “too expensive” to keep in community hands earlier this year.

In an age of the new Dickensian poverty for so many in our society, it is apparently unnecessary for a council to fund a centre of merriment, entertainment and education.