Community Lounge
A warm and welcoming entry to The Proud Place, the Community Lounge on our ground floor is the heart of the building. A place for visitors to have a hot drink after a drop-in session, or young people to meet before heading upstairs for one of our youth groups. The large bright windows let the light shine into a spacious lounge area. The movable wall allows the space to be changed to suit the needs of different groups, creating a more intimate room at the back of the building for anything from meetings to board game afternoons.
Capacity: 40 seated/75 exhibition events
£350 full day - £230 half day
The Community Lounge also contains our LGBT+ library, a cosy nook for reading, reflection and learning more about Manchester’s LGBT+ history.
How to book this space
All bookings must be made at least seven working days in advance of the intended booking date.
To book a room (or to check availability) at The Proud Place, scroll to the calendar at the bottom of the page and find your desired date and time. For extra guidance on how to use the calendar, please view the video below. Once a booking is made you’ll receive an automatic email from our bookings system Skedda, but please wait until you have received a secondary confirmation directly from our team which officially confirms your booking. The Proud Place team is a small team who work part-time across the week so will need to confirm that a staff member can be present to facilitate your booking.
Please ensure that when you book, you are booking in sufficient time before and after your event for you to set up the space as you require, as well as for you to have enough time to clear up and reset the space to how you found it. Make sure that the contact email used for the booking is a person attending the booking and cc them into any emails with this email address.
See the ‘Out Of Hours’ section below if you are unable to book the time you want via our website as explained above.
Please note, The Proud Place is an LGBT+ Centre that also houses The Proud Trust offices, so please be mindful to use gender-neutral language when attending your booking as well as introducing yourself to new people with your pronouns and asking them for theirs! The Making Spaces Inclusive page on our website explains more about using inclusive language. If you have any questions regarding this, please do not hesitate to ask us!
If you have other questions or for any specific booking enquiries email bookings@theproudtrust.org.
Bookings FAQ
For bookings outside of our operational hours of 9.30 to 5.30 on weekdays, there is no guarantee that we will be able to accommodate this booking. We will be able to confirm this with you dependent on staff availability.
When bookings fall outside of our operating hours of 9.30 until 17.30 on weekdays, an additional cost of £20 will incur.
If the booking is accommodated for on a weekend it will incur an additional cost of £100.
Currently, we generally don’t have the staff capacity for weekend bookings, so if you are able to move your booking to a weekday, we will do our best to accommodate you then instead!
Please note, if the booking is accommodated for on a weekend it will incur an additional cost of £100.
If you haven’t already, please let us know whether you would like to pay via card or invoice.
- You can pay by card via our online platform: you can add your card details when you place your booking on Skedda, or via the link that you’ll receive from Skedda when the booking is made.
- For invoices: please send us the invoice contact and address – the invoice will be sent to you after the booking has taken place.
There are extra charges for equipment hire in each of our spaces. These can be added as needed via the calendar and are as follows:
Screen and sound bar- £30
Projector and projector screen- £20
Flipchart and paper- £10
Speaker and microphones- £20
We have tea and coffee available in each bookable space. We advise that you bring your own selection of milks as we are open 7 days a week to community groups, and so we can’t always guarantee that there will be enough for each booking – there is a vegan/vegetarian supermarket called Eighth Day adjacent to our building, as well as a Tesco Express which is 100m away.
Catering services can be booked separately, as we do not offer catering ourselves. However we suggest taking a look at Oak Street, or Eighth Day.
If you book catering, please make sure they also know to ring the relevant space button on the intercom and double check that the caterer will be picking up any trays etc once you are finished with them.
You can download our Accessibility Document at the bottom of this page.
If you have any questions about access which are not answered in this document, please contact access@theproudtrust.org.
We understand that from time to time room bookings need to be cancelled. Please give us as much notice as possible if this does happen by emailing bookings@theproudtrust.org or by cancelling your booking on our booking platform Skedda. If you would like to reschedule the booking you can also do this via Skedda if the rescheduled time is not outside of our operational hours (9.30 – 5.30 on weekdays) – otherwise contact us with the proposed reschedule date and time frame.
Cancellations that take place within 2 business days of the date will incur a 50% fee of the booking to cover administration costs.
None-attendance on the day will incur 100% of the room booking fee. This will trigger 45 minutes after the requested start time. We work part time across 7 days, so if no one attends after 45 minutes, the building may be locked.
Altering your booking
Some changes you can make via Skedda such as attendee numbers, access requirements, equipment hire etc. You can create a password for your Skedda account via the Skedda booking confirmation email. Please notify us of these changes and let us know if you are unable to make the changes yourself.
Some changes you can make via Skedda such as attendee numbers, access requirements, equipment hire etc. You can create a password for your Skedda account via the Skedda booking confirmation email. Please notify us of these changes and let us know if you are unable to make the changes yourself.