Help Hippos

Aim

Hippos needs help to raise funds to keep the doors open, expand capacity and extend our opening hours

Keep Hippos Alive

If you've ever been to Hippos, you're part of this. You're part of what we've built together in a small venue in the middle of Swansea, and we need your help to keep it going.

We're Stuart and Frankie. We started Hippos because Swansea had a gap where a place like this should be. Somewhere underground music could breathe. Somewhere expression of any kind was welcomed. Somewhere people could find their people. We've both spent our lives at festivals and gigs, and we believed we could build something that carried that same spirit into a permanent home.

What that's become is down to all of us. In a few years we've built something we're genuinely proud of:

• 300+ events
• 100+ bands
• 200+ artists and DJs
• 100+ open deck sessions for DJs just starting out
• 50+ comedians given a stage
• Craft fairs, society meets, poetry nights, circus workshops, DJ lessons, comedy
• nights
• One big community

The honest bit

Grassroots music venues in this country are closing at a rate of one a week. We're fighting the same battles as every venue we know and love: rising energy costs, crippling VAT, rates and rent, and a cost of living crisis that hit us hard in 2024. To survive, we took out a loan and put costs on a credit card. We're still here. But the weight of paying those back is the thing that's stopping us from growing, from investing, from becoming everything we know Hippos can be.

We're not embarrassed to say it. We just need a hand.

What we can do together.

Our target is £35,000. Here's exactly where it goes:

• £20,000 to clear the credit card
• £8,000 to clear the loan
• 5,000 to pay VAT backlog
• £1,400 to add a second fire escape and expand our capacity
• £600 to apply for a licence extension

Getting clear of this means we can book bigger shows, support more emerging artists,grow our community programme and invest properly in the place we all love. We'll also be converting Hippos to a CIC, so it's written into the structure that every penny of profit goes back into the venue and the community. It's always been run that way. We just want to make it official.

This is your venue as much as ours. If it's ever given you a night you remember, an artist you discovered, or just somewhere to be yourself, now's the time to help us keep it going.

Stuart and Frankie

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 17th June 2026 at 5:59pm