Eight years since its creation – and just over three years after it was last relocated – Cardiff’s biggest independent warehouse events venue is investing £500,000 into moving to new premises.
The DEPOT, who have established themselves as one of the best-loved entertainment brands in the city, will relocate to a new 30,000 sq ft venue on Curran Road. They will form part of developer Vastint’s transformative, mixed-use development scheme which aims to strengthen connections between Cardiff City Centre and the bay along the banks of the River Taff.
The move will increase the venue’s total capacity from 1,600 to 2,500, and with refurbishment works starting on the new site this month, the DEPOT team plan to be operating from the new venue by June this year.
Their new Curran Road site will include three permanent street-food kitchens based inside 20 ft shipping containers, as well as a second room for putting on smaller and more intimate shows, and the return of their ‘speakeasy’ style bar.
This is the second time The DEPOT has moved to a bigger site, after first opening in 2014 as a temporary pop-up – in a now demolished warehouse on Dumballs Road.
The original site was long earmarked for demolition as part of the ongoing regeneration plans for Dumballs Road, so in 2019, the venue was relocated to a bigger venue on Williams Way.
This third site will create 10 new jobs, growing the DEPOT’s team of permanent staff to 30 and allowing the venue to put on even more live music and entertainment events in 2023 and beyond.
24 shipping containers which were purchased when the venue moved to Williams Way in 2020 will also be incorporated in the move and repurposed at the new site.
The DEPOT started life as a pop-up street food venue after being granted a temporary three-month licence in late 2014. It was the brainchild of then 23-year-old Nicholas Saunders, who later gained planning permission for the site to stay open for a further four years.
Over time, the DEPOT has established a reputation for a wide variety of events, including food and drink festivals, street food events, vintage fairs, weddings, Christmas parties, immersive theatre productions, sports screenings and corporate conferences – as well as DEPOT’s smash-hit creation, Bingo Lingo.
Nick Saunders, founder and Managing Director of The DEPOT is now looking forward to the move to the biggest-ever site.
He said: “This is our second move in three years – which is a lot to navigate as well as navigating through Covid during that period – our relocation to the new Curran Road site has always been part of our long-term plan.
“We’ve worked closely together with the developers at Vastint over the last four years to ensure the DEPOT story continues, and we couldn’t be happier to move to a new site which allows us to grow to a 2,500 capacity – filling a gap in the market that the city is currently lacking.”
