Hire a space at Railway Gardens
The perfect venue for your activity or event
Looking for a unique Cardiff venue to run a class, host an event, or hold a meeting?
Railway Gardens is a unique community venue with several beautiful spaces to hire. By choosing us for your next meeting, gathering, workshop or event you’re helping contribute to a thriving resource for Splott, Adamsdown and Tremorfa.
Read on to find out more about our venue and the different pricing tiers available, including limited discounted and free rates.
Which spaces can I currently use?
Railway Gardens is a unique green oasis and the perfect venue for your meeting, event or social gathering. Our site is secure, has wheelchair and pushchair accessible pathing throughout, accessible toilets, baby changing and a strong sustainable ethos. Not only will you be booking a beautiful space for your event, hiring our venue also supports our community work and keeps the project thriving long term. These are the spaces we currently have available.
Y Nyth
Y Nyth, or The Nest, is our beautiful wooden outdoor learning space. It’s covered and enclosed from the elements, fully accessible, and powered by sun and wind! This space seats 16 adults or 30 children comfortably on inbuilt benches, or can be set up with tables and additional chairs for activities. It’s a great space for meetings, crafts, performance and social gatherings.
The Community Room
The Community Room is a unique space created from reused shipping containers. Warm and cheerful, it seats around 25 people theatre style or includes tables if you want to seat people for a meeting, a meal or a workshop. The room has a small but well equipped kitchen and the option to open up a large side door into the gardens so people can move between inside and outside.
The Gardens
Looking for outside space? Hire the outdoor areas at Railway Gardens for markets, play, fitness, performance or any open air activity you’re planning. There is space for one or two marquees depending on their size, and you and your guests can enjoy the community allotment, wildlife planting, and pond (as well as watching the trains go by!)
What will it cost?
We want to make Railway Gardens available to everyone to use if they need it – that’s why we offer several different hire rates:
Standard rate
If you pay this rate you’ll be helping Railway Gardens to become sustainable and continue to support the local community. We’ve tried to make this rate affordable to most organisations and waged individuals.
Friends Rate
This reduced rate is available to you if you have a Sunflower Membership under the Friends of Railway Gardens scheme, which costs just £6/ month (or £66 if you pay annually)
Free and discounted rates
We are able to offer a limited amount of free and discounted hires for individuals or volunteer run groups that would like to run an event or activity which benefits the local community.
Please get in touch with Becca here if you feel like this might apply to you.
Ready to book? Complete our booking form here and we’ll be in touch to confirm details and availability.
Our hire prices
Weekday daytime hourly hire
| What do you want to hire? | Friends Rate | Standard Rate |
|---|---|---|
|
Y Nyth (outdoor learning space) |
£8 |
£15 |
|
The Community Room |
£15 |
£30 |
|
The Cwtch (available from Autumn 2023) |
£8 |
£15 |
Evening and weekend hourly hire
| What do you want to hire? | Friends Rate | Standard Rate |
|---|---|---|
|
Y Nyth (outdoor learning space) |
£12 |
£20 |
|
The Community Room |
£20 |
£35 |
|
The Cwtch (available from Autumn 2023) |
£12 |
£20 |
If you're interested in hiring a space for a full day or you'd like to hire the outdoors space or whole site then please contact Becca on becca@greensquirrel.co.uk or use our contact form.
What do I need to know?
- With the exception of the Cwtch the site is wheelchair and pushchair accessible with an accessible toilet.
- We do not have outdoors wifi but there is wifi in the Community Room and we have excellent mobile signal on site, so in many cases people use their phone to hot spot successfully.
- We have baby changing facilities.
- The Community Room has basic kitchen facilities available for your use if you are hiring that space. These include hob and oven, kettle, microwave, and it is well stocked with mugs, plates, bowls, glasses and utensils.
- You also have the option to hire the Play Shack, an amazing resource packed with den building equipment and loose parts play resources.
- As you may have guessed from our name, we are directly beside the railway! While most visitors do not find the trains intrusive (in fact lots of people love hearing and seeing them!) please bear this in mind when making your booking, and arrange a visit to the site if you’d like to check it out beforehand.
- If you are hiring the venue for a social event then you are allowed to have alcohol at your event as long as you’re not selling it. However if you are planning to sell alcohol then you will need to arrange a Temporary Event Notice to do this and we’ll need to see proof that you’ve obtained this before your event.
- In line with our sustainability policies, and due to our proximity to the rail line, balloons are not allowed on site. We also encourage everyone using Railway Gardens not to use glitter as it gets into our soil.
- If you’re running any activities on site, or bringing in a third party provider to do so, you are responsible for having appropriate Public Liability Insurance and any entertainment licenses needed.
- Unless otherwise arranged, you will be responsible for setting up the space and leaving it tidy and secure at the end of your booking. We will usually be able to offer set up for an additional cost, please get in touch for a chat.
- If you’re looking for activities to accompany your booking, such as craft, cookery, or growing demos, please do let us know.
How do I make a booking?
Please complete our booking enquiry form using the button and we’ll be in touch to confirm availability and send you a booking agreement.