How a Sussex-based community cinema became one of Europe’s most green-friendly arts venues.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 50.
A stone’s throw from Lewes station, you’ll find a sleekly designed and welcoming building. Morning sun streams in through the floor to ceiling windows. If you were to take a bird’s eye view, you’d see an expanse of dozens of different kinds of wildflowers that make up the building’s ‘living roof’. Bees and butterflies call that rooftop their home. Soon they’ll have new neighbours who’ll move into the recently constructed bug hotels. In amongst the foliage are a couple of rows of solar panels hungrily absorbing the East Sussex sun.
A cinema is an unusual place to find a menagerie of wildlife. But that’s exactly what Depot, a sustainability- focused cinema, had in mind from its earliest blueprints. It’s achieved something quite remarkable. In less than ten years, the Depot team have transformed a disused and unloved warehouse into an arts venue that’s become a beacon of sustainability for the cinema sector.
Natasha Padbury, Depot’s office and sustainability manager, is tasked with leading all of Depot’s green initiatives. For its first few years, Depot’s sustainability work was mainly volunteer run. However, it was Natasha’s passion for the environment, and her pointing out where changes could be made, that led to her role being created; a role that had a key sustainability focus. “We really needed somebody centrally who was flying the sustainability flag all the time,” says Natasha.