Jon Morgan - Director Of The Theatres Trust: Why The Government Should Support Theatres In These Challenging Times | London Real

BUILD YOUR DREAM BUSINESS IN 8 WEEKS: https://londonreal.tv/biz/ 2021 SUMMIT TICKETS: https://londonreal.tv/summit/ NEW MASTERCLASS EACH WEEK: http://londonreal.tv/masterclass-yt LATEST EPISODE: https://londonreal.link/latest Jon Morgan is the current Director of the Theatres Trust in Britain since 2017, a national advisory public body for theatres and is a former director of both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Federation for Scottish Theatre. The organisation’s mission is to protect and promote Britain’s theatre buildings, ensuring their survival and ongoing use as performance spaces, which has been made nearly impossible, due to restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. The Theatre Trust also successfully lobbied for changes to planning law which will provide extra protections to prevent vacant theatres from being demolished or irreversibly changed into other uses before the sector has had time to recover. The organisation is also fundraising to increase our grant-giving capacity and will be targeting grants to help theatres with reopening costs in due course. He called for “urgent support” from the government, and has been at the forefront of discussions around ways to protect British culture and this crucial industry that brings in £2.7 billion pounds annually to the UK economy. Jon also highlighted that “Our grants programme is relatively modest and given the historic under-investment in our nation’s theatres over the last 30 years, the shortfall is huge. Theatres are going to need a real injection of cash post-COVID to ensure our theatres remain fit for purpose…. We must ensure that the UK’s wonderful network of over 1,100 theatres large and small, old and new, can be saved and serve their communities once again.”