2025 at the Bluecoat

Exhibitions and Projects

We began 2025 with our season But Does It Speak?, which focused on spoken and written word. The season featured three film screenings by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Farah Al Qasimi and Abi Palmer and concluded with two exhibition: The Moveable Scene of the Page by Joanne Masding and Long-Covid and the Culture of Disbelief by Rowena Harris.

In the summer, we welcomed Liverpool Biennial back to our Gallery for BEDROCK, which was inspired by Liverpool’s distinctive geography and the beliefs which underpin the city. The programme was curated by former Bluecoat Head of Programme Marie-Annie McQuay, and featured work by Amy Claire Mills, Alice Rekab, Amber Akaunu, ChihChung Chang 張致中, Odur Ronald, and Petros Moris at the Bluecoat.

Our Upstairs Gallery hosted a variety of different exhibitions and archive displays throughout the year, including Birds, Bugs, Botanicals of the Bluecoat: A Blue Room Exhibition, Tomorrow’s Music Yesterday, Tracing the Independents Biennial, and All Together Now: Portraits by Veronica Watson.

We’re concluding 2025 with two fantastic, interactive exhibitions. Just Browsing is inspired by the retail area around the building, and features artworks that you can touch, hold, use, and buy. Lou Miller’s We Dream of Our Freedom was made in collaboration with children from St Vincent de Paul School, and transforms the Gallery into a community studio to explore their visions of freedom.

Our project, A Cultural Heritage for Liverpool, drew to a close this year. This project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, gave us the chance to explore our building’s rich heritage and the ‘resilience’ of the Bluecoat. The resulting programme featured a series of exhibitions, events, and archive drop-in sessions. We’re excited to explore our history more in 2026 with a new archive project. More information to come soon!

Awards and Achievements

2025 saw some amazing achievements for us, including award wins, new funding opportunities and more.

We were over the moon to win the Liverpool Chamber Innovation in Business Award for Innovation in Social Value! A real testament to the continued work of our incredible staff team, and our commitment to innovation and entrepreneurialism which allows us to continue to make a social impact across the city and beyond. We're excited to continue making art accessible for everyone through our exhibitions, projects and our outreach and inclusive art programmes.

Earlier in the year, we we're delighted to be selected as part of the Bloomberg Digital Philanthropies Programme, which helps cultural organisations to strengthen their technology and management practices. Read our blog to find out more. We also received funding from The Health Lottery Foundation to support Young Blue Room, our new inclusive arts programme with learning disabled young people aged 14-25, which will help us explore new ways of engaging with young people and their families. Read our blog to find out more.

Thanks to a capital investment from Arts Council England, this year we began an exciting project to refurbish and reconfigure our upstairs ‘bistro’ space into a large, publicly-accessible events and performance area, with new sound and lighting systems. This redevelopment will bring the space back to its former glory as a multi-purpose space for a variety of events. The space has been through many transformations over the 300 years, from school Chapel to artist studio and performance space. Read about the evolution of the Bistro space here.

This year, we launched Bluecoat for Business, a new initiative to showcase our incredible offer for corporate partnerships and event hire. At the heart of it was Events With Impact, a simple message to really demonstrate just how much of a difference hosting an event, meeting or away day with the Bluecoat can make, with every booking helping to sustain our beautiful building, our participation and outreach programmes, and keep our galleries free and open to all. Find out more about you can support us and hire a space at the Bluecoat here.

Changes to our Board

We said goodbye to Peter Mearns as he stepped down from the Bluecoat’s Board of Trustees as Chair of the board after nine years of service, and we were pleased to welcome Dr. Maureen Royce and Eddie Berg as our new Co-Chairs of the board. We also welcomed former Director of Marketing Liverpool Chris Brown to our Trading Board. Each new member brings with them a wealth of experience and new ideas to help take Bluecoat into the next phase of our development.

Children & Families

There is always something for families to enjoy at the Bluecoat, and 2025 has been no exception. Our popular Baby Book Club celebrated its 10th anniversary, and the course continued throughout the year, with additional outreach courses in Leamington Community Primary School. We launched Mini Wonders, our free course to support the growth and development of children aged 2-4, and hosted several Family Weekends, offering free creative activities for the whole family to enjoy.

The Bluecoat was one of 60 UK-based venues to take part in Our Freedom: Then & Now, a programme marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day, led by Future Arts Centres. Participants were asked to create special cultural events, exhibitions and performances inspired by VE Day, freedom, and Simon Armitage’s poem Freedom Road. The Bluecoat worked with artist Lou Miller and children from St Vincent de Paul Catholic Primary School in L1 throughout the summer, resulting in our latest exhibition, We Dream of Our Freedom.

This Christmas, we were excited to bring Father Christmas’ magical storytelling shows to the Bluecoat. This special event, created in collaboration with storyteller and local legend Gav Cross, featured original, festive stories, and gave families the chance to meet Father Christmas after the show.

The Bluecoat Shop

In February, we launched the brand new Bluecoat shop just in time for Valentines Day, made possible with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

We launched with our incredible Bluecoat Collection, with a series of tote bags and t-shirts featuring hand-drawn illustrations of our building, and the Cherubs that adorn the facade. Into the summer, we launched a garden-inspired collection to celebrate the biodiversity of our Garden, highlighting the birds, flora and fauna that lives in our beloved Garden. Find out more here.

We’ve also commissioned several artists to create limited edition products for the shop, including Jade de Montserrat’s reusable cups and postcards featuring watercolours inspired by our Garden, and more recently an exclusive Liverpool-inspired design by Ellie Hoskins, which features Liverpool’s iconic purple bins combined with Hoskin’s illustrated figures.

Just in time for Christmas, we launched a new handmade ceramic ornament featuring a beautiful illustration of our historic Bluecoat building, and comes in a screen-printed gift box. The ornament makes the perfect gift for a Bluecoat visitor, or alumni, and architecture or history lover.

Blue Room

Blue Room have been busier than ever this year!

Earlier in February, some of our Gallery was closed to the public while our Studio Me artists undertook a residency, giving them the space and time to develop their practices.

Blue Room artist Veronica Watson launched a new book, ‘All Together Now’, which featured a collection of portraits of people who spend their time working and volunteering at the Bluecoat. This was accompanied by an exhibition in our Upstairs Gallery that documented Watson’s long history of working with Blue Room.

In September, Blue Room presented a collection of new work inspired by the biodiversity of our Garden. Birds, Bugs, Botanicals of the Bluecoat celebrated the overlooked flora and fauna of urban spaces, and featured work depicting the birds and insects commonly found at the Bluecoat.

This is only a small snippet of some of the incredible work they’ve done throughout the year, as there's been plenty more exhibitions, collaborations, awards, projects, and creative adventures. You can discover more of their fantastic achievements by visiting their instagram profile, or our website.

Event Highlights

We’ve hosted a vast range of events this year, including talks, tours, performances, workshops, and more. Earlier in the year, we hosted The White Pube for an in-conversation with Frances Disley to discuss their debut novel Poor Artists.

Live music was a big part of our programme this year. In March, we hosted an afternoon of performances from young and emerging musicians from Liverpool, led by local artist LeeTz. We were able to continue supporting local talent as the year went on, with live performances from Astles and Novelty Island in partnership with HSP PRSNTS.

In May, we celebrated BBC Radio One’s Big Weekend coming to Liverpool with our own Bluecoat’s Big Music Weekend. We hosted an open-mic session in the Garden for local musicians to come and perform, along with a family-friendly print activity and an Archive Drop-in Session centred around Bluecoat’s musical history.

We were pleased to be able to host a wide range of live events curated and delivered by creative partners in the city, includingLiverpool Arab Arts Festival, Liverpool Irish Arts Festival, Liverpool Biennial, DaDaFest, Homotopia, and more. We also took part in some national festivals, including Heritage Open Days, the British Science Festival and Art History Festival.

2026

To kick off 2026, we’re excited to introduce three new artists to our current exhibition Just Browsing. From Sat 10 Jan, work by Laura Aquilina, Jade de Montserrat and David Shrigley will be on display and also available to take home.

Our upstairs event space is on track to open in early spring, and we can’t wait to host more events, celebrations, weddings, performances and more in the space.

We’re planning an incredible programme of exhibitions for 2026, that will bring inspiring art experiences to you all year round.

Looking further ahead, in 2027 we will celebrate 100 years of the Bluecoat as an arts centre, and you’re not going to want to miss what we’ve got planned!

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