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Loughborough is finally getting the arts venue it has been promised — and deserved — for years. The Generator, a new community-led multidisciplinary arts centre, is set to open its doors on Packe Street on 24 April 2026, following a years-long restoration of a derelict 1930s building in the heart of the town centre.
What The Generator Is and Where It Came From
The Generator occupies the old Generator Hall on Packe Street — a 1930s building that originally housed the diesel generators supplying electricity to Loughborough College’s town centre departments. It sat derelict for years before the Loughborough Generator Community Interest Company (CIC) took on the project of returning it to community use.
The restoration has been backed by a £1.6 million grant from the Loughborough Town Deal — one of 11 projects the Town Deal Board chose to support after securing £16.9 million of Government funding for the town. Total investment across all 11 Town Deal projects amounts to more than £40 million for Loughborough. Readers who want to understand more about the town’s cultural identity should explore our earlier feature on Loughborough’s Bell Foundry, which tells a similar story about an extraordinary piece of the town’s industrial and creative heritage.
Jess Vollar Bell was appointed as The Generator’s first chief executive in January 2025, taking on the task of steering the venue from building site to opening night. The road has not been entirely smooth — the original target of autumn 2025 slipped, with Jess posting a candid update last September acknowledging the restoration had faced challenges. But the 24 April date now appears firm, with a public opening event confirmed and an access review by All-In Leicester taking place on 21 April ahead of the doors opening to everyone.
The address is The Generator, Packe Street, Loughborough, LE11 3BJ. It sits next door to an already-opened creative industries building — the former art and design college — which is now home to businesses including Ohh Deer, Cotton Clara and Our Neighbourhood, with the popular Public coffee shop and bakery on the ground floor.
What Loughborough Has Been Waiting For
Let’s be honest: Loughborough has punched below its weight on arts and culture for a long time. It is a town of 60,000 people with a major university, a rich industrial heritage, and a population that — if you actually talk to them — has a serious appetite for creative and cultural life. And yet for years, the honest answer to “where do you go for live music, exhibitions, or creative workshops in Loughborough?” has largely been: Leicester, Nottingham, or nowhere.
The Generator changes that. And it matters more than many people in the town have yet realised.
The venue is designed to be genuinely multidisciplinary — not a single-use gallery or a pub with a stage, but a flexible creative space capable of hosting exhibitions, live music, theatre, workshops, lectures, debates, festivals, heritage events, school visits, and community engagement. That breadth of ambition is exactly what a town like Loughborough needs. It means The Generator can serve the student from the university who wants to see a touring band, the retired teacher who wants to attend a local history lecture, the school group coming for an arts workshop, and the local craftsperson looking for space to exhibit their work — all in the same building, sometimes on the same day.
The building itself is part of the story. There is something genuinely powerful about taking a structure that once powered Loughborough College — literally generated the electricity that kept the lights on — and turning it into a space that generates something different: creativity, community, connection. The exposed brick and original steel beams are not just aesthetic choices. They are a reminder that this town has always made things, always had the ingenuity and the infrastructure to do something bigger than it gets credit for.
David Pagett-Wright, Chair of the Generator CIC, put it well when the Town Deal funding was confirmed: “The Generator Hall will become the multimedia arts venue that the community of Loughborough and the wider area needs.” That is not marketing language. It is a statement of genuine need. Charnwood is a borough of over 180,000 people. It has produced world-class athletes, engineers, designers and musicians. It has Loughborough University, one of the most decorated academic institutions in the country for sport, design and engineering. And until 24 April, it has not had a single dedicated multidisciplinary arts venue worthy of that ambition.
The accessibility dimension of this opening also deserves recognition. The decision to run a dedicated access review — in partnership with All-In Leicester, bringing in disabled and neurodivergent visitors ahead of the public launch to shape how the venue operates from day one — is not a box-ticking exercise. It is a signal about the kind of institution The Generator intends to be: one that considers who feels welcome before the first paying customer walks through the door, rather than retrofitting inclusion as an afterthought. That approach should be the norm for every new public venue. The fact that it is still notable says something uncomfortable about how cultural institutions usually do things.
There are, of course, questions to be answered over the coming months. Running an independent, community-led arts venue in a mid-sized East Midlands town is genuinely hard. The funding landscape for the arts has not improved. Local authority budgets are squeezed. The model that works for a well-heeled city centre arts quarter does not automatically translate to Packe Street, Loughborough. The Generator CIC will need to build audiences, generate income, keep the building in good repair, and deliver on that ambitious programme — all at once, all the time.
But those are problems for another day. On 24 April, the doors open. After years of planning, fundraising, delays and determination, Loughborough gets its arts venue. The town should show up, fill the place, and make it clear that there is an audience here ready to support what comes next. The Generator has done the hard work of getting the building ready. The rest of us need to do our part too.
We will be covering events, exhibitions and news from The Generator throughout 2026. Watch this space.
Have Your Say
Are you planning to go to The Generator’s opening event on 24 April? What would you like to see the venue put on? Let us know in the comments below — and if you want to stay across arts, culture and events across Loughborough and Charnwood, sign up for our free local news updates.
