The Louisiana is an iconic music venue based in Bristol’s centre, on the edge of Southville. We have been putting on local and international bands since 1996! The family run venue has capacity for 140 with around 85% female staff while approximately 60% of customers are male.
Although The Louisiana has always been a safe place, we’ve had several racist comments made to our Italian and Polish members of staff. We promote tolerance and almost none of our staff are British! Needless to say, some customers have been kicked out.
For The Louisiana, it has always been a matter of tolerance in any situation: sexism, racism, gender identity. We want to be a part of a city where it’s safe to go out, enjoy your time, get drunk (if you want to!), and have a good time. There is no space for violence and hate! Bristol has always been a pioneer on many topics. It’s great to see that Bristol is progressing in becoming a tolerant city where people, from everywhere and anywhere, feel safe.
We are signing the Bristol Zero Tolerance pledge because we want to show our audiences that The Louisiana is interested in topics that go beyond music. We want our customers to feel safe and welcome. As we say: everybody’s welcome, as long as they behave! There are still so many problems to fight and overcome, but we’re all in this together, and we can always make the world better by creating safer spaces. It needs to start somewhere and hopefully, this will spread to every venue, event, street…
We’re proud to have our venue as a safe environment. Therefore, we teamed up with Safe Gigs For Women, an association we love and support, to celebrate The Louisiana joining the Bristol Zero Tolerance initiative with a gig on 22nd June 2017. We’ll invite local bands that have the same vision as us and want to spread the word on music venues being open-minded, and safe, friendly places for any ethnicity and gender. We really hope this event on 22nd June will raise awareness on these subjects that matter. We’d love to make regular events that will promote Zero Tolerance. We want to make a statement about Bristol’s music venues being a respectable environment for everybody.
