Our Story

Invigorate Settle is a new project from Settle Victoria Hall, the world’s oldest Music Hall, to support environmental sustainability, enterprise, employment, and community connection.

The Beginnings of Invigorate

Settle Victoria Hall has been open since 1853 at the heart of Settle’s cultural and community life. Over 170 years, our little Music Hall has hung on through all the ups and downs of a small, rural community, and one of our biggest challenges came in the form of 2020’s lockdown, when live events and all our other normal activities were suspended. But Victoria Hall has always been there for its community, and, in the true Variety spirit of Music Hall, we adapted and transformed our hall into Settle’s Community Response centre, delivering over 2000 prescriptions and 600 bags of shopping all around Settle and surrounding villages.

Alongside the deliveries, our volunteers were called to help with house clearances, and, as shops reopened, we moved from Community Response services to a pop-up charity shop, raising funds to keep our hall open until the music was back on our stage. As the decluttering donations poured in for our new charity shop, we realised the scale of just how many clothes, household items, and more are discarded every day. Some items were saleable, some could be good as new with just a bit of repairing, and some could be repurposed or recycled.

Did you know? In the UK, only 30% of charity shop donations ever see the shop floor. Of the remaining 70%, most goes straight to Textile merchants, to be sold or recycled overseas.

Reuse, repair or recycle?

We started to think about upcycling and recycling. We transformed the former council yard behind Victoria Hall into an outdoor cafe and performance space using recycled and upcycled furniture from our donations, and we were amazed by the skills of our volunteers in reusing and repurposing to create our lovely outside space at minimal cost. The idea of Invigorate was born - a project to reuse furniture, household goods and clothes, and to look into methods of recycling and reprocessing what couldn’t be reused or repaired.

As the music returned to our stage, our charity shop took on permanent premises as Miss Victoria’s Emporium in Settle town centre. Miss Victoria’s Emporium is a vital lifeline for our small, independent charity, providing much-needed funds to keep our historic venue alive and thriving, but this is a tough time for any small venue, and we needed to create new income streams to keep our doors open and the music on our stage.

A three-pronged plan

As we came out of lockdown and into the new world, we could see three real and urgent needs, which drove the development of the Invigorate idea into a fully-fledged project.

Victoria Hall needs income streams to continue its work and keep our historic venue going.

Our world needs sustainable use and re-use of precious resources, and we all need to play a part, however small, in making this happen here and now.

Our community needs skills, jobs, and the opportunities to connect with each other.

These three needs developed into a three-pronged plan, which, as of 2024, is just beginning. Watch this space to see what comes next!

Repair Cafes (or ‘The Settle Fettlers’). The Repair Cafe model is well-established and successful throughout the world, where skilled volunteers share their time and expertise to keep household items in use and out of landfill. Settle is brimming over with skills and community spirit, and all we needed was somewhere to bring the fettlers and the broken items together. Find out more

Settle Shed. In 2024, the last piece of the jigsaw arrived, in the form of a building adjacent to Settle Victoria Hall. This building will be renovated and leased to us to house ‘Settle Shed’ where we will have space for our repair cafe, and the addition of a ‘Maker Space’; a fully-equipped community workshop and craft studio, where anyone can come to learn and share new skills, and local artisans can develop their skill or hobby into a small business. Find out more

Invigorate Plastics. We are in the process of researching some very exciting new techniques for reprocessing waste plastic into new, commercial products that could keep plastics from landfill and provide much-needed employment in our community. Find out more