Arts Lodge & Park Cafe

The Arts Lodge & Park Cafe
The multi-award winning Arts Lodge and Park Café is Portsmouth’s longest running independent community arts centre all run as a not for profit social enterprise CIC.
The Arts Lodge is set in the stunning woodland park surrounded and over looked by St John’s Cathedral, our Guildhall, University, Navy and the Civic Offices. Bathed in 138 years of history with literary links to Charles Dickens, this beautiful Victorian gatekeepers cottage was saved from certain demolition and underwent a major restoration back in 2001 and now encompasses a stylish yet quirky contemporary interior café, gallery, enchanted garden bar and park seating area.
Open 7 days a week in the summer months (weather and events permitting) the Park Café welcomes everyone to come and relax with a coffee and meal, meet family, friends, colleagues to celebrate that special occasion in one of the most beautiful parks in the UK. Our facilities include disabled access throughout, children’s art and toys, entertainments licence, licenced bar, free Wi-Fi.

Plus the added ease and convenience of all the main train, bus and ferry transport links on our doorstep helping to make your experience a green, clean, stress free art scene!



Venue Hire
The Arts Lodge is a diverse and versatile fully licenced venue which is also available for a limited number of fully exclusive hire events throughout the year including alternative wedding receptions, exhibition previews, special occasions, business orientated events, evening drinks reception and private parties.
The enchanted garden bar offers a PA sound system and DJ booth for the music lovers and allows us to offer a designated smoking area with an natural open log burning fire. Extra entertainment and a late licence will happily be arranged on request.

Not only is the Arts Lodge a fantastic venue to enjoy daily we also offer a range of opportunities from cooperative or corporate events to weddings and even sshhhh the safest and coolest parties in town! This historical space provides our guests with a comfortable, relaxed, almost fairy tale atmosphere creating your perfect unique event that will be remembered forever.

Children’s Parties
The Arts Lodge is a magical location for children’s events with the added value of the gated/fenced park which has a no dog’s policy and includes an animal enclosure, adventure playground, tree walks and squirrels that you can feed.
With our park area we can accommodate a large number of people including our enchanted garden and gallery space. We have toys and games on site for our regular café users but we can also provide bouncy castles, marquees, treasure hunt, clowns and entertainers on request.


Meeting and Training Courses
Our Victorian lodge offers a warm, cosy environment where service providers can hold meetings, training seminars and various types other courses. With the use of free WIFI, projector, training equipment and catering available our venue offers a personal touch that is hard to beat.


Where creativity is a walk in the park
Murals
Murals have always been our bread and butter here funding the majority of the arts lodge overheads over the last 16 years. Mark E.W. Lewis has been a self-employed muralist for 28 years and has initiated and painted the most popular public art murals around Portsmouth whilst working in many other places around the south coast and further afield including France, Egypt, Thailand and Brazil. Mark has built up the reputation of being one of the leading muralists in the country, whilst teaching and training hundreds of new artists the tricks of the trade. He has created in excess of £1 million in the re-development of run down areas in and around the city, initiating community art projects and putting pride and ownership back into the community’s hands.

Creative Hub
An established safe place where people of all ages can meet, use the café and enjoy the creativity the lodge and park brings.
“Art in the Park, the brilliant creative hub at the corner of Victoria Park in the former park keeper’s lodge is the winner of the best restoration prize.Lively all day long seven days a week with children’s activities, community events and artists shows. But much of the tremendous work that has gone into the building has been the thousands of hours of voluntary labour. The Lodge arts centre has animated Victoria Park by adding to it a dynamic new dimension”.

The Portsmouth Society (Testimonial) Best restoration award 2003

Exhibitions
With over 500 local and international artists exhibiting over the last 14 years we have now revamped the gallery space into a classic Victorian look and feel with confirmed bookings for the future with renowned artists and photographers.


Volunteer Opportunities
There are a number of projects based here at The Arts Lodge which would welcome your help as a volunteer.
As a community facility with a small unpaid team running the centre, we do not have enough time to undertake the many projects that need to be done. We would like to develop more public art murals around the city or summer workshops and festivals. So, if you enjoy gardening, maintenance, painting murals or even admin which is always needed most, we have the work, equipment and the beautiful venue, if you have the time. We offer invites to all our events, travel costs, food and drink to all our volunteers