Picnics have never been allowed on the Snape Maltings site: whilst they may have been tolerated, for many years there has been a sign at the entrance to the complex saying ‘Picnics not allowed’. This was also in our brochures. The decision is not in our hands. Aldeburgh Music leases only part of the site. We work closely with our landlord and the owner of the whole complex, Mr J Gooderham, and have agreed to help him to enforce the ‘no picnic’ policy. Whilst 60,000 people attend concerts here, the site attracts 500,000 visitors a year. Picnics during the day were becoming a problem and it became necessary to enforce more systematically the policy that had been in place for a long time.

We try to operate a booking system that is as fair as possible. Because tickets only cover 30% of the costs of running the concerts, we have to find other ways of raising funds. One way is to have a membership scheme, which has levels ranging from £10 to £500, and for which the main benefit is priority booking. The Concert Hall has 830 seats and there are over 5000 Friends and Advance Booking List members, which sometimes means that for the 3 or 4 most popular concerts every year, the tickets sell out before all of the Friends and Advance Booking List booking forms have been processed and the general public is not able to get tickets. This does not actually happen all that often and we cannot find a fairer way of allocating the tickets.

The only way of being sure of getting our brochures early is to be on the Advance Booking List which costs £10 a year. We also send brochures to people who are not on the Advance Booking List but who have booked before because we know they are liable to book again. However, these brochures are only sent out once booking has opened for the General Public. To learn more about the Advance Booking List click here.

With the refurbishment work in 1999, we installed an air-cooling system in the Concert Hall which, on warm days, lowers the temperature by 3º. Obviously, on a very few days each year this means it is still very warm.

Why can't I look round the Concert Hall when I come to Snape?

While we would like to be able to open up the Concert Hall to visitors, we do not at present have the staff available for security purposes. We do, however, plan to take steps to make the Hall more accessible in the future.

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