Roots. Rhythm. Rise: Lakota’s Next Chapter

By Hywel Gregory, Head of Commercial

Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a deceptively simple question: what should Lakota become next? Not just what DJs we should book, how many tickets we should sell, or what our next marketing campaign should look like. Those things matter, of course. They’re part of running a venue. But they’re not really the question. The bigger question is what role Lakota should play in Bristol over the next five, ten, or even twenty years.

Lakota has been part of Bristol’s cultural landscape for more than three decades. During that time, it’s been many things to many people: a nightclub, a music venue, a cultural landmark, a meeting place, and a launchpad for artists, promoters and ideas. Like any independent business that’s been around that long, it’s also had to evolve.

The world that Lakota was born into doesn’t exist anymore. Audiences consume music differently. Technology has changed almost every aspect of how events are promoted and experienced. Independent venues face pressures that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. At the same time, Bristol remains one of the most creative cities in the country. Every week I meet artists, promoters, collectives and cultural organisations doing incredible things. The talent is here. The ideas are here. The appetite is here.

So the challenge isn’t whether Lakota should change. The challenge is how we evolve without losing the things that made people care about the venue in the first place. Over the last year, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing that internally. What emerged wasn’t a list of projects or a collection of targets. It was something much simpler: a framework.

That framework became Roots. Rhythm. Rise. Three words that seemed to capture both Lakota’s history and its future, and which have since become the foundation of our strategy. Not because they’re clever words, but because they help us ask a simple question whenever we make decisions: does this make Lakota stronger?

Roots

Everything starts with community. When people talk about Lakota, they’re rarely just talking about a building. They’re talking about memories, friendships, scenes, movements and moments. That’s because Lakota has always been defined by the people around it: artists, promoters, staff, audiences and communities.

The venue has survived for over thirty years because generation after generation of people have chosen to make it part of their story. For me, Roots is about protecting and strengthening that ecosystem. It’s about supporting grassroots talent, creating opportunities for new artists and promoters, championing diversity and inclusion, investing in our team, and building meaningful partnerships across the city.

Most importantly, it’s about remembering that culture comes first. Commercial success matters. Any independent venue needs to be commercially sustainable. But if culture becomes secondary, we’ve missed the point entirely.

Rhythm

If Roots is who we are, Rhythm is how we express it. This pillar is about experience: the feeling people get when they walk through the doors, the atmosphere in the room, and the difference between attending an event and remembering it years later.

One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me is that independent venues can’t compete by simply being bigger. There will always be someone with a larger budget, a bigger headline act or a newer building. What makes venues special isn’t scale. It’s character, personality, atmosphere, and the moments that feel unique to that space and that community.

For Lakota, Rhythm means investing in those moments. It means improving our venues, strengthening creative direction, supporting ambitious programming, and paying attention to the details that shape a guest’s experience. The goal isn’t to become the biggest venue in Bristol. The goal is to become the most distinctive version of ourselves.

Rise

The final pillar is about the future. One thing I’ve learned during this process is that creativity needs infrastructure. Great ideas are important. Passionate people are important. But sustainable organisations don’t happen by accident. They require systems, processes and long-term thinking.

That’s particularly true in independent culture, where there can sometimes be a tendency to see structure and creativity as opposing forces. I don’t believe they are. In fact, I think the opposite is true. The better the foundations, the more freedom people have to be creative.

For Lakota, Rise means embracing technology where it genuinely helps, using data to make better decisions, improving how we communicate, building stronger systems behind the scenes, investing in our people, and taking sustainability seriously. It means creating an organisation that’s resilient enough to support ambitious ideas for years to come. Growth isn’t really the goal. Longevity is.

What Happens Next?

One of the biggest lessons from this process is that strategy isn’t really about writing documents. It’s about creating clarity. Most organisations already know, broadly speaking, what they want to achieve. The difficult part is ensuring everyone is moving in the same direction.

For us, Roots. Rhythm. Rise. provides that shared language. A community project strengthens our Roots. A venue improvement strengthens our Rhythm. A new system strengthens our Rise. Different actions, same direction.

The strategy itself isn’t the finish line. In many ways, it’s the starting point. Over the coming months we’ll continue embedding this thinking into how we operate, the projects we prioritise and the decisions we make. Not every initiative will work. Not every idea will succeed. We’ll learn, adapt and improve as we go.

What matters is that we have a clearer sense of who we are and where we’re heading. We’re not reinventing Lakota. We’re reconnecting with what has made it iconic while building the foundations for its next chapter.

For Bristol. For independent culture. For the people who make the dancefloor matter.

Roots. Rhythm. Rise.

The next chapter starts now.

Hywel Gregory
Head of Commercial, Lakota Bristol