We have named the day and it is an exclusive for the blog.

The Bluecoat will re-open on March 15 2008.

This is a week before Easter so inside our goal of early ’08 (or by the end of March). It won’t be easy getting it ready by then but the discussions here were that we if we missed Easter we couldn’t open until into April and we needed to be open for the sake of ’08, its visitors and audience as well as for funders, our tenants and ourselves.

We had our auction on Tuesday night at Leaf. It was an excellent night, with Simon O’Brien playing auctioneer. The artists had been hugely generous and we had about 50 art works and the bidding was at times fierce. I’m still quietly annoyed at not getting the two works I’d set my heart on but was too tight fisted to buy.

'My god, this is good'. These are the opening words of the first review of the redevelopment of the Bluecoat. They were published at the end of last week in the RIBA journal and written by the editor.

I was off early this morning to another Phil Redmond show as he launched ‘open culture’. It was the same super slick ‘self-depreciation and scouse pride, I’m bumbling here while fully in control’ show which he turns on with such ease. The product looked good too.  Open Culture is a web site that is a Liverpool cultural space that everyone can use and shape with their content. We are working on a project that we could well tie in with this.