Party with a purpose

A fun way of raising funds for arts projects is gripping the capital, says Liz Hoggard
Jemima Khan, Writer and Bella Freud, British designer attends Hoping For Palestine at The Open Theatre Regents Park in London, England.
Getty Images
28 August 2012

In a white stuccoed house in Notting Hill, beauty writer Jessica Jones is holding a pledging party to fund publication of her memoir The Elegant Art of Falling Apart. You can bid for a deluxe edition, meet characters from the book and win prizes.

Welcome to the pledge party: the latest way to raise funds for new book, film or music projects — and a natural extension of crowd-funding websites such as Kickstarter and Unbound.

Cabaret-theatre act The Ruby Dolls held a party at the Embassy in Mayfair to take their show, Rubies in the Attic, to the Edinburgh Fringe. They charged £10 cash and raised £1,242. At the top end of the scale there’s Bella Freud, who throws glittering bashes to fund arts projects for Palestinian children’s charity The Hoping Foundation. Last year she had the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing live at the Café de Paris.

Hosting your own party can be terrifying, Jones admits. “I felt I was standing in front of a firing squad. But soon people were laughing and applauding. I can’t believe we raised over £2,500. But most of all I felt very loved, which for solitary writers is a rare and wonderful thing.”

The motto is: do not bore, says writer and film-maker Kate Spicer. Raising funds for her documentary Mission to Lars, about her brother, who suffers from Fragile X Syndrome, she held a series of fun parties, including one at Westbourne Studios with a yurt and 20ft polystyrene pink horses. “We called in favours everywhere,” she says. “Alex James gave us cheese, Rollo Gabb of Quo Vadis donated the wine. We had a rowdy auction with a beautiful dress from Giles Deacon, prints from Sam Taylor-Wood and a signed guitar from Kasabian.”

Spicer is frank about the need for this new wave of funding. “When I tried to become an executive producer I failed miserably at extracting money from rich people. They said: ‘I don’t want to get involved in a documentary about a learning disability. I want to be involved with a feature film where I can possibly have sex with girls off the back of it.’ So I took matters into my own hands and held a party with five girlfriends. We raised £12,000 for Mencap and used the other half to fund the film.”

Pledging parties have kept the US arts world going for more than 100 years, while back in the 18th century writers such as Samuel Johnson funded books by holding subscription salons to raise the money in advance. To revive this tradition, cartoonist Adrian Teal held a “Georgian subscription salon” at private members’ club Blacks to fund his new book, Gin Lane Gazette, which will bring true stories of the Georgian period to life.

“A pledging party is social, Londoners feel connected and they get to vote with their feet for the arts projects they admire,” says John Mitchinson of Unbound. “It’s more like a live gig than a book reading with cheap white wine.”

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