Sketchy Beats Cafe

Listed in: Eating and Drinking - Cafes and Coffee Shops • Venues - Community Centres • Venues - Live Music Venues

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About Sketchy Beats Cafe

Sketchy Beats Cafe is a not-for-profit arts cafe and event space on Great Junction Street, Leith. The space is an open platform for creatives of any kind to use and share their ideas with the public.

The concept started off as an experimental life drawing event, incorporating a live musician, a dancer, a nude model and a live DJ set. This took place once a month in the basement of Yellow Bench, a Polish Bistro on Leith Walk. As this event gained popularity, we raised the money through crowdfunding to create a community space where creative events like this could happen every night.

Since the cafe opened in October 2015, members of the local community have organized all kind of events in the cafe: live hip-hop nights, art exhibitions, poetry slams, live music jams, climate change discussions, life drawing sessions, craft fairs and charity fundraiser gigs, to name a few.

The space is designed to be affordable and accessible to everyone - people who have never organized events before, musicians who have never played outside their own bedroom, artists who have never exhibited before. The cafe aims to be a space where creativity brings the community together, without money being an obstacle.

The space is available for anyone in the community to organize their own events, parties and workshops, from the early evening into the small hours. If you are interested in using the space, just message the Sketchy Beats Cafe page with your idea and a suggested date and time.