Reimagining a Canterbury landmark for the arts

Welcome to the campaign to reopen the Sidney Cooper Gallery on St Peter’s Street as an arts centre for the people of Canterbury.

Local businesses, educators and artists are all coming together to imagine a new life for the building. We hope you will support us too.

Canterbury is a city with huge strength in the arts – in its arts education, in its commercial galleries and in its art societies.

Much of that strength is due to the local Victorian artist Thomas Sidney Cooper, who founded an art gallery and school in 1868 on St Peter’s Street. The school was so successful it outgrew the building and moved off site where it became incoprated into what is now the University for the Creative Arts .

But today the Sidney Cooper building is empty, and an eyesore on Canterbury’s high street, past which millions of visitors a year walk to the city centre and the UNESCO world heritage site of the Cathedral.

It need not be like this. The city’s residents and its artistic community deserve better.

Imagine an arts centre where we can once again celebrate the city’s creativity in one place: where artists can exhibit, where workshops run all day and evening, where the art students from our three local universities can exhibit, where artists can create and collaborate, where we can see national or locally curated touring exhibitions and where we can all debate, discuss and enjoy our newly refurbished community building.

We are the the Sidney Cooper Arts Trust (charity number ). We first came together in 2023 with one clear idea: building on the community arts legacy built by Sidney Cooper to encourage the Council, which owns the building, to hand it over as a community asset and let us breathe new life into the arts in Canterbury.