Red Shed flies the flag for creativity and a special night out

In the second part of his look at some of Yorkshire’s music and entertainment venues, Chris Bond went down to the Red Shed in Wakefield.

THE Red Shed is the colour of a sore thumb and, located next to a gleaming shopping centre in the centre of Wakefield, you could say it sticks out like one too.

But while the shed, otherwise known as Wakefield Labour Club, may look like a glorified Scout hut, it is bound up in the city’s social and cultural history and an important meeting place for a lot of people.

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The building itself is an old RAF hut which was bought by the Labour Party and opened in September, 1966. It has a bar serving quality real ale and has an adjoining meeting room and performance area, which has seen everyone from John Prescott to Vanessa Redgrave give speeches over the years. Writer and broadcaster Ian Clayton is one of the regulars and comedian Mark Thomas, a former student at Bretton Hall College, has done stand-up gigs there in the past.

Although it only has a capacity of around 70, since the mid-80s the Red Shed has become a popular venue on the local music scene. Nick Howarth runs an acoustic night there once a month which attracts some popular folk musicians.

“We’ve had people like Martin Simpson, Steve Tilston and Emily Smith and they all like playing here, everyone who plays wants to come back,” he says. “We’ve always been a venue for live music. Mike Harding started his career down here, he trod the boards in this place very early in his career.”

Steve Cowan is a club member and runs the Shed’s open mic nights.

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“We started doing them in the early 90s and they’re still going strong today. You get some people who’ve been playing for 30 years and others who are out and out beginners, but the crowds here are totally accepting, there are no big egos. Believe it or not, we’ve had people come down from Scotland just for the night and we get people from the Midlands and Lincolnshire,” he says.

“In the last five years or so we’ve had a German band come over to play and their first reaction when they pulled up outside was, ‘ah, a Wild West saloon.’ But they love the place because it’s so informal and it’s intimate. We get a lot of young local bands coming down here and it’s rare that a week goes by without something happening and we like it that way, we want it to be a vibrant place.”

So what’s special about the place? “It is small, but the drinks are cheap here, there’s real ale and there’s no bother,” says Steve. “We call it the little gem in Wakefield. There are other music venues in Wakefield but we find that people who used to go into the centre of town come down here, it’s a place where you can bring the family.”

The building is home of the local Labour Party and Wakefield TUC and the walls are adorned with a collection of the Shed’s marching banners and miners’ strike commemorative plates. The club has around 420 members but you don’t have to be one to pop in for a pint, or to watch a gig and you’re not expected to stand up and sing The Red Flag.

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Richard Council, the club’s membership secretary, says the Shed is also used by numerous non-political groups. “We have a poetry group that meet here, we have a VIP, visually impaired persons, group that come here every second Monday and we provide the premises free of charge for them. We also have bicycle enthusiasts who bring bits of bikes in and talk about them, so we’ll provide a home for anyone as long as they’re sympathetic to the trade union movement.”

Its political connections mean it has been able to attract some big-name speakers. “We’ve had people like Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner. I never got to hear Dennis Skinner because we had to patrol the car park, we’d been tipped off that some hooligans might turn up and cause trouble, but they never did. It was packed inside and we had speakers on so people outside could hear it in the car park.”

The Shed was also something of a refuge during the Miners Strike in 1984 and 85. “We ran a soup kitchen and food parcels from here and it was pivotal in the district during the strike to help rally round the mining community,” Richard says.

More recently it has been included on Wakefield’s tourism site as a music venue and real ale pub. “We’ve had people from Belgium and France come to try the place out because we’re in the Good Beer Guide and we always make them welcome.

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“It’s a unique place and it provides a home for lots of different organisations, free of charge, that would otherwise probably struggle. It’s a coalition of people who get on really well with each other and do their best to help each other out.”