The particular history of Convention House, built as a convent or nunnery, repurposed for many years as the office of a firm of accountants before its current incarnation as a ‘creative space’, suggests a curious entanglement of the contemplative and the commercial; of communitarian values and capital value; of mystical imagination and rational measurement. Such a complex of interactions between psychic, emotional, political and economic aspects of everyday activity in the building’s earlier life ought perhaps to hint at (or haunt) the potential for its creative future.

Although ‘space’ in the context of a ‘creative space’ might refer to the space of discourse and ideas, it is still most commonly understood in the material sense of the word. But material space contains the residual trace of encounters that have taken place within it. Spatial relationships that are at once physical, social, cultural and historical are created where there is activity, transformation, unpredictability and energy generated through a continual negotiation with and re-negotiation of the site. Any space genuinely deserving of the description ‘creative’ would depend on just this.