The Great Big Empty Shop Experiment

The Great Big Empty Shop Experiment has been created by the Centre for Policy & Enterprise in Creative Industries (PECi) to investigate how the increasing number of empty shops in our City Centres could be put to better use by start-up creative enterprises.

To do this we have taken over a disused shop in Cardiff’s Capitol Shopping Centre with the help of charity 3-Space and transformed it into an interactive exhibition space.

Our Big Empty Shop will host a variety of interactive workshops and creative exchanges between Monday 11th and Friday 22nd July.

See our programme of events for more details on what’s happening at the shop. Want to know more about the shop and our exhibits? Download the Curatorial Notes – PDF, 228kb.

Our researchers will present their findings to an expert panel of politicians, planners and creative workers at a symposium event on Wednesday 20th July called Talking Shop.

Read more about what influenced The Big Empty Shop Experiment and the rationale behind it at our blog.

View our Flickr album of the shop

How you can help

We’ve already got plenty of exhibitions and events lined up, but we’re looking for more people to exhibit, perform, blog, lead workshops, give us stuff to swap and generally help out in our shop. If you’d like to get involved or just find out more, contact the project administrator Sophie Paterson at spatters@glam.ac.uk.

Where is the Great Big Empty Shop?

View The Great Empty Shop Experiment in a larger map

View a slideshow of images of the shop and listen to Talk About Local’s Nicky Getgood chatting to the Great Big Empty Shop Experiment team: