Inside the final days of the CCA

When staff at the beleaguered Centre for Contemporary Arts logged onto a scheduled Google Meet video call yesterday lunchtime, they had an inkling of what might be coming. 

For a start, none of them were in the office they shared in the Sauchiehall Street premises the arts hub had occupied, since it was founded in the 1970s as the Third Eye Centre. Instead, they were at home, some gathering together in the same living rooms for support. They couldn’t get into their workplace. They’d been notified of this via a Thursday evening email, arriving in staff inboxes from CCA board member Kirsty Ogg — one of the few longstanding directors left after a turbulent year. 

"Apologies for the group email and very short notice but I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, the CCA will be closed on Friday 30 January 2026,” Ogg wrote. 

“The CCA team, cultural tenants, partners and members of the public will not be able to access the building on this day. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and there will be further updates later on Friday”.

Rumours began flying. One former staff member texted me their intel: “They are going into insolvency”. Some hastily organised meetings with their union reps; they’d heard whispers there “wasn’t money to pay staff redundancy”.

On Friday, staff dutifully joined the meeting and waited for Louise Norris — a commercial property lawyer who was recently re-appointed to the CCA board — to speak. Norris was “calm and professional,” said a staff member. “No emotion”. 

Message notifications on my phone from CCA staffers and people with knowledge of the meeting told the subsequent story. “Heartbreaking news, it’s going into liquidation”; “Yeah, insolvency”; “building closed”. The CCA was shut with immediate effect, premises locks changed and the keys handed back to Creative Scotland, who own the site. After 33 years, the dream of the CCA, one of Glasgow – and Scotland’s — most significant arts hubs, was over. 

But the questions are just beginning. The CCA’s last few years of existence have been troubled to say the least. In the past year and a half, the centre has shut its doors on three separate occasions, lost the majority of its board, appointed a new chair and seen that same chair resign just 35 days later. 

Attention now turns to the CCA’s accounts. How could this major arts institution, in receipt of millions of pounds of public funding, go under with — as one source alleged to The Bell — just several thousand pounds in its bank account at the time of closure? Who — if anyone — should shoulder the blame? What really happened at the CCA?

Show us the money

“Glasgow’s longstanding Centre for Contemporary Arts is out of money and closing its doors.” Sound familiar? That’s how The Bell reported on the CCA’s financial difficulties in October 2024, when the centre announced its first significant closure, scheduled to begin that December. Back then, the CCA said its cashflow was in a “precarious” state, thanks to a Covid-induced drop in footfall, the sudden shutdown of the Saramago cafe in 2023 (amid a bitter labour dispute), and delayed funding from Creative Scotland — by far the centre’s biggest financial backer. 

So the CCA closed its doors for at least four months while it waited to hear if the institution had been awarded funding from Creative Scotland. In January, a reprieve: the CCA secured £3.4 million from the government arts agency, allowing it to reopen in April. But the centre’s 2024 accounts rang clear alarm bells — despite bringing in roughly £1.37 million annually, the CCA was ultimately operating at a loss of around £260,000 a year. The majority of the money was spent on day-to-day operating costs. Income remained fairly flat, while these core outgoings were up.

Welcome to The Bell. I'm Calum, and I wrote today's story with support from everyone at The Bell. When sad news like this comes to Glasgow, it's important that those who tell it are on the ground, know the community, and can react quickly to what has happened. This is what we do at The Bell, and it's the type of reporting you can get by signing up. Our free mailing list gets you two totally free editions of The Bell every week.

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