The Hot Tin: Hot Buzz
The Hot Tin in Faversham is bringing untold creativity to the county with its international acts and dedication to fresh performance
“We want Kent to be an area known for great things”
Far more learned people than we have been known to profess that the ‘church is where creativity goes to die’. But they obviously haven’t been to Faversham recently.
OK, so The Hot Tin is no longer a church, but it has quickly created its own congregation.
With corrugated iron walls, its almost eerie exterior means that anyone who lives in, or indeed visits, the town will surely remember it. But the venue has now become the focus of a very different euphoric devotion.
“We want it to be an arts centre cafe,” says Mike Eden, one half of the brains behind ‘The Tin’, as it’s known. “We want to champion the arts.”
The other half of the team, Romana Bellinger, adds: “The idea was always to have a place of our own, to do what we love doing, to bring people together and to connect.”
Moving from their previous home in Leigh, Essex, Romana, who has a background in architecture, and Mike, who has a background in film and audio, saw The Tin for sale online in 2017 and didn’t hesitate to snap it up.
“It was everything we were looking for, almost too good to be true,” says Romana.
“The Faversham Society had lobbied for it to be listed in the 1980s and it was protected, so no one could touch it.
© Credit Kate-Garcia
“It was originally a temporary building, flat-pack, made on the Old Kent Road and brought down the river by a Thames barge. They were sent all over the world and could be bought from a kind of catalogue. You could choose the windows, whether you wanted a spire and how ornate it was. Originally it was a sister church to St Mary’s in Faversham.”
After it was deconsecrated in 1950, The Tin’s history has seen it used as a residential space, a gym, a camping shop, a marquee warehouse and even a joiner’s workshop (the Page 3 images that were found on the beams point to a very different time).
“The different glass in the windows tell several stories of its history,” says Mike. “The great thing about it is that it has lasted all this time, and it turned out not to be just a temporary building. We’re very lucky to have it. There aren’t many left in the country, many have just rotted and fallen apart. It’s completely unique.”
But, just as The Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz discovers, it’s what’s inside that truly counts.
Day to day The Hot Tin – so named because it gets hot, and it’s made of tin, obvs – is a cafe offering banging coffee from Micro Roastery in Canterbury, with a simple and locally sourced menu that has garnered impressive notoriety for its vegetarian and vegan options, despite neither of its owners falling into either category.
“We opened the cafe side of things originally because we wanted people to understand the space and feel it,” explains Romana. “We had so many people telling us they had been in Faversham their whole life and never been in the building because it had been closed up for so long.”
But while the cafe is an integral element to the business, it is the live events side of things – known as RouteStock – that is growing.
© Simon Shaw.jpg
“The Hot Tin is the building and venue, and RouteStock is our CIC (Community Interest Company) for events and projects in and outside The Tin,” explains Mike.
This encompasses regular DJ evenings, live music and films at the venue, while RouteStock has also been known to tour around the UK with shows, providing audio-visual accompaniments as well as organising their own gigs.
“Music is central to what we do,” says Mike. “We don’t have a preference, we just want original music. We’re trying to promote the artist and to get venues back in again, because they have been shunned away for too long.”
From folk rock to northern soul to hip-hop, The Tin doesn’t discriminate; in fact it illuminates. RouteStock is regularly bringing new names to the Fav crowd, but invariably these acts are monstrously successful in their own right.
Take Switzerland’s urban folk outfit Black Sea Dahu, who played The Tin in late 2019. Never heard of them? Well, they have 135,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and 4.2 million listens on their track In Case I Fall For You and they played in your backyard… as did Samana, Marianne Dissard and Margate’s own Liotia. Seriously, look them up.
Following the likes of Ramsgate Music Hall and the TW Forum, The Tin is the next Kent venue offering bands a way into the county.
“We want Kent to be an area known for great things,” says Mike. “We want to connect in with other venues and cross-collaborate with transport companies to get bands down here from London when perhaps they can’t afford it, and even work with places that could put people up for the night.
“If we can get that, we can really create something. There are so many great bands over in Europe, too. So if there was a cross-collaboration here, it would be such an easy connection to get them over, as well as send Kent bands into Europe also.”
The dedication to giving new music airtime is supported by Radio RouteStock, an online radio station that features the live broadcast of events at The Tin as well as shows and playlists curated by the team.
“It runs 24/7 with our playlist,” says Mike. “But we’re going to have regular slots for DJs and people talking about the music and arts. We’re gradually building it up.”
The Tin and RouteStock are looking to create something different and are tapping into a changing, more creative, mindset in the county.
Art workshops, community events, album launches, cocktail evenings and their artisan food offering helps to keep things ticking over, but there are always the same challenges that confront every start-up business.
“Like most grass-roots venues we do struggle at times,” explains Mike. “You have to pay artists because we don’t want them doing things for nothing as it would just stifle their creativity.
“The arts in this country are heavily underfunded. We have had bands from other countries who have played here and gone on tour supported by their governments... because that creativity is precious to them.”
Romana adds: “We’re part of the Music Venue Trust [a UK registered charity that acts to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues] and at the AGM someone asked ‘How do you have a venue without having to rely on the bar?’.
“I thought it was a stupid question at the time, but there should be a way. Younger people aren’t drinking as much these days and things are changing, so you have got to find other avenues, and that’s what we’re interested in.
“But we want to keep the integrity of what we’ve started doing.”