The Living Womb, formerly Algha’s Plantroom, was founded in response to something we felt was increasingly absent from London’s cultural landscape: spaces where experimentation, care and community are valued as highly as the cultural programme itself.

As a FLINTA-owned, queer-led venue in Hackney Wick, we’ve always wanted to create more than somewhere people come to see a show or dance until the early hours. We wanted to build an environment where culture could become a practice of gathering, questioning and imagining different ways of living together.

That vision is deeply connected to my own experience. As a nonbinary cultural organiser, I’ve spent years making work around bodily liberation, self-expression and the politics of who is afforded space to exist freely. Like many queer people, I’ve experienced the transformative power of spaces where you don’t have to explain yourself or shrink parts of your identity to belong.

Those spaces changed how I understood myself, and eventually I realised I didn’t just want to make work inside them - I wanted to help build one. Living Womb grew from that impulse: to create a cultural home where people could arrive as they are, encounter ideas that challenge them and leave feeling more connected than when they arrived.

We see every event as an opportunity to rehearse different ways of being together, where care, curiosity and collective experience become part of the artistic practice itself. The venue isn’t simply somewhere to consume culture; it’s somewhere to participate in it.

We see every event as an opportunity to rehearse different ways of being together, where care, curiosity and collective experience become part of the artistic practice itself. That philosophy shapes our curatorial approach.

We’re interested in artists who are expanding the language of music, movement, design and performance, but also in the communities they cultivate around them. Rather than programme people because trending, we look to work with artists whose practices challenge convention, ask difficult questions and invite audiences into new ways of thinking and feeling.

The programme is intentionally multidisciplinary because we don’t believe creativity exists in silos. Music speaks to movement, movement speaks to conversation, conversation becomes community.

That philosophy is reflected in the rhythm of our weekly programme. Rather than treating the venue purely as somewhere that comes alive after dark, in September we’re launching a five-day in-house programme that responds to different needs throughout the week.

Tuesdays are dedicated to restoration, with sound baths, yoga, breathwork, self-defence and strength-building sessions that recognise care and wellbeing as collective practices rather than individual luxuries. Wednesdays focus on participation and exchange through intimate cinema screenings, workshops, talks and poetry nights that invite people to gather, reflect and create together.

As the week unfolds, the programme naturally builds in energy. Thursdays and Fridays are dedicated to live music, multidisciplinary performances and experimental artistic practice, while Saturdays become a space for carefully curated club events.

We see each day as part of the same ecosystem. The dance floor doesn’t exist in isolation but is strengthened by the conversations, movement, learning and relationships that happen before the music begins. We want the venue to become somewhere people return to throughout the week, where culture isn’t something you consume on a Saturday night but something that supports how you live.

That intention feels especially important right now. Across the UK we’re witnessing increasing attacks on trans rights, growing hostility towards queer communities and a broader attempt to police whose identities are seen as legitimate. In moments like these, spaces where people can gather freely aren’t simply nice to have - they’re essential.

Queer venues have always been more than nightlife. They’ve been places of refuge, resistance, celebration, organising and survival. They have allowed people to imagine futures before wider society was ready to accept them. I think we often underestimate how political joy can be.

Simply creating environments where people can exist fully, experience pleasure, build relationships and feel safe in their own bodies is, in itself, an act of resistance. Especially at a time when queer and trans lives are increasingly politicised, making space for collective joy feels quietly radical.

For us, being queer-led isn’t about branding. It’s about perspective. It shapes how we think about power, accessibility, collaboration and care. Representation matters, but it has to extend beyond line-ups. It shapes who gets to make decisions, whose voices shape the programme, how artists are supported and how audiences are invited to care for one another.

We’re interested in building an infrastructure where people don’t simply feel included in someone else’s vision but genuinely feel a sense of ownership over the culture they’re helping to create. Building that vision has also exposed how precarious grassroots culture has become.

Over the past two years we’ve been navigating temporary licences and short-term leases while trying to create something with long term impact. It’s difficult to invest everything into a space while never being certain how long you’ll be allowed to keep it.

Independent venues are constantly celebrated as the places where culture begins, where artists develop and communities gather, yet they’re often expected to survive on unstable leases, rising operating costs and enormous administrative barriers. That precarity doesn’t only threaten venues; it threatens the wider cultural ecology.

Without grassroots spaces there are fewer places to experiment, fewer opportunities for emerging artists and fewer environments where people can encounter work that isn’t driven by commercial expectations. If we want London to remain one of the world’s great cultural cities, then these spaces have to be recognised as essential.