Alistair Hardaker | Image: Giles Round, The Northampton Rooms © Arts Collective Photographed by Melanie Issaka
1930s offices converted through co-design with artists and architects. Opens May with 17 studios, gallery, archive space and community areas.
A 1930s municipal office building and Town Hall annexe in Northampton has been converted into an arts centre through a £5.2m retrofit involving artists and architects in a co-design process.
Arts Collective will open at 24 Guildhall Road on 1 May 2026, bringing together 17 artist studios, a gallery, learning spaces, community areas and a permanent open-studio archive for the Northamptonshire Black History Association under one roof.
Between 2021 and 2025, the organisation initiated a co-design process involving Sean Griffiths, co-founder of FAT, Studio Morison, Giles Round and pHp Architects to restore the building to public use. The transformation prioritised creating adaptable spaces supporting artistic practice and civic events.
Artist Giles Round created The Northampton Rooms as a spatial intervention conceived as both a living artwork and functional public spaces for community gatherings. Designer Foday Dumbuya has created furniture for The Northampton Rooms and the archive space, drawing on Sierra Leonean heritage and West African hosting rituals.
The building includes a flexible project space, learning and workshop areas, a community kitchen, social spaces, a café kiosk and zine shop, public meeting and event spaces, and offices supporting Arts Collective’s year-round programme.
Arts Collective is an evolution of NN Contemporary, an artist-led organisation operating in Northampton’s cultural quarter since 2008. The archive space for Northamptonshire Black History Association will present the Matta Fancanta Movement, a Black youth-led cultural and political movement in Northampton from the late 1970s to early 1990s.
The gallery programme will launch with an exhibition of Northamptonshire-born conceptual artist Rose Finn-Kelcey running from 1 May to 1 August 2026. The exhibition, curated by Emer Grant, marks the first presentation of the artist’s work in her hometown and features photographic, installation and video works loaned from national collections and archives.
Works include Bar Doors (1991), exhibited publicly for the first time since its original installation, which captures architectural thresholds and entrances. The exhibition also features It Pays to Pray (1990), God Kennel – A Tabernacle (1992), Jolly God (1997), documentation of Power for the People (1972), and ANGEL (2004), a film documenting a large-scale architectural artwork based on a smiley face with a halo realised across St Paul’s, Bow Common using reflective discs.
Emer Grant, artistic director of Arts Collective, said the opening “marks a major new chapter for Arts Collective and for Northampton.
Artists are essential. At a time when more sustainable cultural ecosystems must be developedacross the board, Arts Collective is creating new models — hybrid institutions shaped by and for the people who will use, care for and build them into the future.”
Further programming includes Climate Kitchen with The Food Library, a two-year artist-led food and art programme, a sound work by Sam Barker, and performances by Grubby Miitts, a project led by artist and musician Andy Holden.
