City of Subculture

A free directory and events platform for Portsmouth's grassroots venues, artists and promoters, built by We Are Jungle ahead of the 2029 City of Culture bid.

Web Design Web Development Hosting
Visit Website
cityofsubculture.co.uk
city-of-subculture-hero-1785325979.jpg
Overview

A community platform for Portsmouth's independent scene.

City of Subculture is a free platform we've built for the grassroots side of Portsmouth. Venues, artists, food spots, festivals, promoters, community projects. Anyone putting on something worth putting on. No chains. No brands that don't belong to the community. No corporates.

The city is bidding to be UK City of Culture 2029, and the culture that will make or break that bid is scattered across Instagram accounts, Facebook events, printed flyers and word of mouth. City of Subculture pulls it all into one home. It's free for venues to list, free for visitors to browse, and there is no plan to change that.

This one is on us. It sits alongside the emotional case for the city we wrote up in Made in Pompey.

  • Searchable Venue Directory: Every independent venue in the city gets a profile page with photos, hours, categories, map and postcode search.
  • City-Wide Events Feed: One unified events listing with postcode filtering, event detail pages and a direct link back to the host venue.
  • Owner Dashboards: Free accounts for venue owners with self-serve listing management and owner-created events.
  • Tenant Claim Flow: Claim an existing listing in a couple of clicks, with throttling to protect the queue from abuse.
  • Moderation and Bot Protection: Cloudflare Turnstile plus rate limiting on every signup, submission and claim, with an internal content-report queue.
  • Phase 2: Native Ticketing: Stripe Connect Express ticketing coming as phase 2, with zero platform fee from We Are Jungle.
cityofsubculture.co.uk
city-of-subculture-stats.jpg
What We Did

A custom directory and events platform, purpose-built for the city.

The site is built on Statamic for the content-managed side (home, blog, site chrome) and Laravel with Filament 4 for the domain layer (venues, events, tenant claims, moderation reports). Two tools, each doing what they're best at, on one codebase.

Every venue gets a profile page with photos, opening hours, categories and a map. The main directory has search by name, filter by category and a postcode field that returns what's near you. Events live in a single citywide feed with the same postcode filtering. Owners create a free account, submit a listing that goes through moderation once, then edit their own profile and add events whenever they want.

Bot protection is Cloudflare Turnstile on every signup, listing submission and tenant claim. Reports of dodgy content route to an internal moderation queue. Images are on DigitalOcean Spaces, email through Postmark, MySQL on DigitalOcean, Cloudflare in front of the whole thing.

Key Features:

  • Searchable Venue Directory: Every independent venue and business gets a profile page with photos, opening hours, categories, map and postcode-based search.
  • City-Wide Events Feed: A single events listing with postcode filtering, per-event detail pages and a direct link back to the venue running it.
  • Owner Dashboards: Venue owners register, submit a listing for one-off moderation, then self-serve their profile, hours, photos and events from a dashboard.
  • Tenant Claim Flow: Owners can claim a listing that already exists on the platform in a couple of clicks, with rate limiting to keep the claim queue clean.
  • Moderation and Bot Protection: Content reports drop into a Filament moderation queue. Cloudflare Turnstile plus rate limiting guards every signup, submission and claim.
cityofsubculture.co.uk
city-of-sub-culture-directory.jpg
The Result

A city-scale platform, ready to launch and free to use.

Phase 1 is a directory and events platform that puts Portsmouth's independent scene in one place. Any venue in the city can register, claim or list themselves inside a couple of minutes. Every event runs through a single feed, unmoderated by an algorithm.

Phase 2 is native ticketing via Stripe Connect Express with zero platform fee from us. The venue pays Stripe's standard card processing fee and keeps every other penny. The independents we spoke to were handing meaningful chunks of gross ticket revenue to third-party platforms, and that model doesn't work for small rooms. Ticketing ships as a follow-up to launch.

A free directory of every grassroots venue in the city, searchable and filterable by postcode.

A citywide events feed with no algorithm deciding what people get to see.

Owner dashboards so venues self-serve their listing, hours, photos and events.

Native ticketing on Stripe Connect coming in phase 2 with zero platform fee.

Building something for your community?

Got a Platform Idea That Needs a Proper Build?

If you have a community, directory or events platform in mind and want it built to scale, run cleanly and belong to the people who use it, we would love to talk.

Start your project Book a meeting

This site uses cookies

By using this site, you agree to our use of cookies. They help improve your browsing experience and provide personalised content.

You can always change your preferences later.