Last week I wrote a love letter to this city about the venues, artists, promoters and food spots that make Portsmouth's culture worth celebrating. Writing it clarified something we'd been circling round at We Are Jungle for a while. Almost everything that makes this city interesting is scattered across Instagram accounts, Facebook events, printed flyers and word of mouth. If you don't already know where to look, you won't find it. That's a problem for the city, and it's a problem the 2029 City of Culture bid is going to have to answer.
So we started building something. It lives at cityofsubculture.co.uk, it's called City of Subculture, and it's free.
A home for the independent side of Portsmouth
City of Subculture is a home for the grassroots. Venues, artists, food spots, festivals, promoters, community projects. Anyone who's putting on something worth putting on. No chains. No brands that don't belong to the community. No corporates. If it isn't grassroots, it isn't listed. That rule is baked into the moderation process, not left as a nice sentiment on an about page.
Under the hood it's a proper platform, not a holding page with a mailing list form. Here's what's live so far.
A searchable directory
Every independent venue and business in the city gets its own profile page with photos, opening hours, categories and a map. The main directory has search by name, filter by category and a postcode field so you can pull up what's near you rather than scrolling through the whole city. If a venue already exists on the platform but hasn't been claimed by its owner, they can claim it in a couple of clicks and start managing it themselves.
A city-wide events feed
Every event on the platform sits in one clean listing with the same postcode-based filtering. Individual event pages carry the artwork, description, date, price and a link straight back to the venue running it. No algorithm deciding whether you see it. If it's on, it's on the feed.
Owner dashboards
Venue owners create a free account, verify their email, and submit a listing that goes into our moderation queue. Once it's approved they can edit their own profile, photos and opening hours whenever they want without waiting for a re-approval. Events attached to their listing get added by them and moderated by us before publishing, which keeps the platform clean without slowing genuine venues down.
Bot protection and moderation built in
The whole platform is protected with Cloudflare Turnstile and every signup, listing submission and tenant claim runs through rate limiting. Users can report dodgy content, and reports drop into an internal moderation queue for us to work through. A free community platform only stays a community platform if it doesn't get overrun, so this is in from day one rather than bolted on later.
There is a lot more under the hood, and we've written it up as a full case study over on our work page for City of Subculture if you want the detail.
Why we are doing it
Portsmouth's bid to be UK City of Culture 2029 is a big deal. It's a chance to put the city on a stage that matters. But the culture that will make or break that bid isn't the polished, official version. It's the pubs, the artists, the DJs, the promoters, the food spots, the community organisers. The people already doing it, mostly for love and rarely for profit.
Those people need a home online that isn't algorithm-driven, isn't skimming their ticket revenue and isn't cluttered up with chains muscling in on the word 'independent'. That's the whole point of City of Subculture.
We're a Portsmouth-born and Portsmouth-based studio that has always believed the best work comes from caring about the place you live in. This one's on us. There is no fee for venues to list, no fee for users to browse, and no plan to change that.
Launching very soon
We are days away from opening the doors. If you run a grassroots venue, put on nights, curate a food spot or make things in this city, head to cityofsubculture.co.uk and get your listing ready. It takes a couple of minutes and it is free forever.
Phase 2: ticketing that doesn't rob the venues
Once the directory and events platform is out in the wild, phase 2 is native ticketing. It will run on Stripe Connect Express with zero platform fee from us. The venue pays Stripe's standard card processing fee and that's it. Every other penny goes to the venue.
The independents we spoke to are handing over meaningful chunks of gross ticket revenue to third-party platforms right now, and that model doesn't work for small rooms trying to break even on a Tuesday night. Fixing that is the reason ticketing is on the roadmap at all.
And if this is the first thing you've read from us, go back and read Made in Pompey first. It explains, better than a feature list ever could, exactly what this platform is trying to protect.
Brad Goddard
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Founder, We Are Jungle
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28 July 2026
