Following a three-way pitch, New Media Corp has been appointed to create an integrated marketing campaign to establish Glasgow’s Merchant City as one of the UK’s leading centres for visual arts and cultural activity.

Trongate 103, an ambitious regeneration project in the heart of the Merchant City, will support a range of arts, cultural and digital media organisations.

Eight organisations will relocate to a purpose-built building, which will encourage more collaboration and joint exhibitions in the future. The initiative is expected to help forge links with local communities and international visitors to the city.

Arvind Salwan, director at New Media Corp, said: “This is a unique and innovative project for the city and a first for the UK contemporary arts scene. The new Trongate 103 facility, expected to launch by Autumn 2009, is destined to become a ground-breaking cultural hub for local residents and visitors to the city. It will also become a cornerstone for the local community, nurturing new and emerging talent, promoting social inclusion and inter-community links and will consolidate the Merchant City as one of the UK’s most vibrant and thriving visual arts and cultural centres.”

Trongate 103 comprises eight established Merchant City-based visual arts organisations, each of which will make a unique contribution to the development. Trongate 103, a partnership between Glasgow City Council, Culture and Sport Glasgow and eight arts and cultural bodies, is a major visual arts resource for Glasgow and has resonances beyond the local level, both nationally and internationally. The project recognises the importance of the city’s independent visual art sector and aims to provide a secure base for the development of the visual arts in the city, its artists and audiences. 

Trongate 103 sees the development of an existing six-storey Edwardian warehouse into a creative hub for the production and exhibition of contemporary visual art.  It will house galleries, workshops, artists’ studios and production spaces supporting the creation of art in a wide variety of media including printmaking, photography, digital media, film, video, kinetic sculpture, painting and ceramics. There is no other facility like this Trongate 103 the UK, in terms of scale, ambition and the broad range of practice it supports.