AN UNUSUAL and exciting exhibition space has opened in Coventry – but you have to be very observant to find it.
The Meter Room is at 58-64 Corporation Street in the city centre – just round the corner from the bottom of The Burges, with the entrance in a side alley between the pub and a charity shop. It says Meter Room above the door and also the name of the building’s previous occupier – the CVSC.
Go up a couple of flights and the doors open into a corridor which at the moment has various exhibition spaces off it, and also studios for lots of local artists.

Meter Room is a newly established not-for-profit artist-run organisation based in the offices.
It has been set up by enterprising Daniel Pryde-Jarman, who graduated from Coventry University a few years ago and has been running his own gallery called Grey Area in Brighton. He’s now back working as a researcher at Coventry University.
Dan said: “This place had been empty for 10 years. I heard Coventry council had a lot of void premises in the city and I gave them a business plan and got hold of this premises.
“There are seven studios and we have 12 artists working in here. Five are final year BA undergraduates at Coventry University, one’s a Phd student and the other five are practicing artists in Coventry.
“There’s a lot of potential for artists in Coventry – the studios went very quickly and I didn’t even advertise.”
As well as the seven studios, along with the old office kitchen and toilet facilities to service them, there’s a large project space. The corridor areas look a bit dated but apart from that perfectly serviceable for studios and a gallery.
The inaugural exhibition is Diving into the Wreck, named after an Adrienne Rich poem, and created after an eight-week residency by Paige Perkins. While Dan was renovating the office space to make it fit for use, she was using the leftovers to create several site-specific pieces of work which show good imagination and senses of humour.
A review will follow soon in the Coventry Telegraph, but in the meantime you can visit the exhibition yourself from Fridays-Sundays, 1-5pm until June 26.