News: London Pleasure Gardens
Co-founder and creative director of the East London venue resigns
THE co-founder and creative director of London Pleasure Gardens has resigned soon after voicing doubts over the venue’s direction.
Last month, the Docklands site played host to the disastrous Bloc festival, which was forced to shut down due to overcrowding. The venue also came under fire for its part in the cancelled event, with accusations levelled that the site was far from complete.
In a statement about her resignation, outgoing director Deborah Armstrong said: “It is with the deepest of regrets that I announce my resignation from London’s Pleasure Gardens. I am enormously proud of the huge transformation that my team and I have achieved so far.”
As the leader of team that won the competition to design the East London dockland venue, Armstrong oversaw the site from its conception. She goes onto mention in her statement that, “In only three months, we remediated what was for decades a blighted, inaccessible and formerly contaminated site. We’ve built the foundations of the Pleasure Gardens vision – a unique public leisure and cultural space in London.”
However, in a blog post on Monday, Armstrong seemed to be concerned about the future of the venue, writing that “I don’t feel now like its [sic] following the vision that we set out to do… Hopefully the road will swing toward it again at some point.”
The venue has faced a number of problems since opening this year. In the aftermath of Bloc festival, both the Last Mile Festival and Africa Stage at BT River of Music events have reduced their capacity, and today Secretsundaze have announced that their mini-festival, Go Bang, will be moving elsewhere.
[via Event]
