Most artists in Peterborough work the same way. A kitchen table that has to be cleared before dinner. A spare room that’s also the place the laundry lives. An hour rented at a community centre on a Tuesday evening. The work happens around everything else, never in front of it.
That’s the gap the new Peterborough Art Studio at Native Space is built to fill. A permanent, dedicated, shared communal art studio - one fixed monthly fee, 24/7 access, and a small group of people who take their practice seriously enough to commit a room to it.
If you’ve been searching for an art studio in Peterborough that’s actually set up to be drawn in, painted in and made in, this is what we’ve put together.
The studio is a bright, dedicated room inside Native Space on Bourges View, Peterborough. It’s set up and ready when you arrive - tables, light, space to spread out - and stays that way. You don’t pack down at the end of a session unless you want to.
A few things are deliberate about how it’s been designed:
It’s a shared communal art studio, not a hot-desk for artists. Up to five members can be in the studio at any one time, which is enough to make the room feel alive without anyone being on top of anyone else. The cap is what keeps it calm.
Access is 24/7. Drop in whenever the work calls. Early-morning painters, evening sketchers, weekend quilters - the door is open. If your practice runs on the hour you can find rather than the hour the building tells you to, that matters.
It’s inside a wider workspace. Native Space is a co-warehousing site - lounge, kitchen, free tea and coffee, a community of small businesses, makers and creators. The art studio is its own room, but you also get the wider building. Most members spend half their time in the studio and half in the lounge meeting other members.
You can host classes and events from month two. The same room can be booked for exclusive use - life-drawing classes, paint-and-sip evenings, quilting workshops, small private events. Members get a member rate; non-members can also book without joining.
That last point is the one that surprises people. A studio that’s a quiet drawing room on a Tuesday afternoon and a teaching space on a Tuesday evening is unusual at this price. It’s the part that lets the studio pay for itself for anyone who teaches.
We’ve designed the Peterborough art studio membership around three kinds of artist, and the model works equally well for all three.
Hobbyists who want their practice to grow up. You’ve been painting at home for years. The work is getting better and the kitchen table is getting smaller. You want a real studio without renting a unit alone, and you want other artists around you. This is the most common starting point.
Self-employed artists who teach. You run life-drawing classes, watercolour evenings, or workshops, and you’ve been hiring church halls and community rooms by the hour. A membership plus member-rate exclusive use lets you bring it all into one room - your own room, where the easels are already up and the kettle is already on.
Professional artists who need a permanent base. Full-time practice, commission work, or building toward a show. The 24/7 access, the consistency of the room, and the small ceiling on concurrent users make it possible to actually work here, not just visit.
If any of those sound like you, the rest of this is the practical detail.
Memberships start at £59/month including VAT, with an annual option at £590/year (the equivalent of £49/month and two months free).
Both tiers include:
The annual plan adds two months free, the option to pay in instalments through Klarna (which works out at around £49/month), and referral rewards paid as cash rather than account credit.
The podcast and video studio credits are worth saying more about. Native Space’s content room is a fully equipped pro studio - 6K cinema cameras, broadcast microphones, lighting, backdrops. Every art studio member gets monthly credits to use it. The use cases land naturally: process videos of your work, a podcast about your practice, product photography for commissions and prints. It’s the kind of thing most artists want but never justify renting separately. Bundling it in is the point.
The exclusive-use side is where the studio earns its keep for anyone who teaches.
Members can book the whole studio from month two of membership at £15/hour. That covers the full room - tables cleared, set up the way you need it, however many students you can comfortably fit. Run a six-week life-drawing course, a one-off paint-and-sip evening, or a private workshop for an existing client list.
Non-members can also book the studio without joining at £50/hour. This is the same room and the same setup; it’s the price for using it as a one-off rather than as part of an ongoing membership.
Either way, you can choose to ticket your event through Native Space at 7%. We handle the booking page, the payment, the email confirmations. You handle the teaching.
For most teachers running a regular class, the maths works out clearly: the membership pays for itself in two or three teaching sessions a month, and the studio is yours to practise in for the rest of the time.
The studio gets better with every artist who joins, so we’ve made the referral scheme deliberately generous.
Refer a friend and:
Referred members need to stay a minimum of three months for the reward to stick. Beyond that it’s deliberately simple - the kind of scheme that pays you back for an introduction you’d have made anyway.
Most of what’s currently available in Peterborough for artists falls into one of three categories: ad-hoc room hire by the hour at community venues, renting a full unit alone (expensive, isolating), or working from home. The shared communal art studio model sits between them.
A few things to weigh up if you’re comparing options:
Cost. £59/month is less than most one-day workshops and a fraction of renting a unit alone. The break-even point against hourly room hire is roughly six hours of session time per month.
Access hours. Anywhere with restricted hours - 9-to-5, weekdays only, evenings booked out - costs you the sessions you’d actually do at 7am or 11pm. 24/7 access is the part that turns a rented room into a working studio.
Community. Working alone is the default for most artists. A communal art studio with a small group of regulars - especially one inside a wider community of makers and small businesses - is a different experience from a single rented room.
Whether you can teach in it. Most rented studio spaces don’t let you sub-let or run classes. The Native Space model is built around the assumption that some members will want to.
If you’ve been searching for a shared art studio in Peterborough and the options have looked like either a row of identical hot-desks or a unit you can’t afford alone, the founding-member offer is worth a look while it’s open.
The Peterborough Art Studio is at Native Space, 12 Bourges View, Maskew Avenue, Peterborough, PE1 2FG. Free parking on site. Easy access from the A1 and the city centre.
The best way to see whether the room fits your practice is to come and look at it. We run free studio tours; you can book one online and walk through the studio, the lounge, the content production room and the rest of the building in about half an hour.
Or if you’ve seen enough and you want to claim a founding-member spot, you can join straight from the studio page.
A permanent place to work, taught classes to host, and a community of artists building alongside you. That’s what the Peterborough art studio is for.
