In a park keeper’s lodge in Barrow-in-Furness, Full of Noises has hosted the likes of Julia Holter and Lonnie Holley – and is a model for why arts funding matters

Barrow-in-Furness sits on a windswept hook of Cumbrian coastline. It’s an industrial town surrounded by the Irish sea on three sides, known for its 140-year history of submarine building. The corrugated peaks of BAE Systems’ Dock Hall dominate the skyline over Barrow’s red-brick terraces, and roughly a third of working-age locals are employed in its sprawling complex. This militarised landscape is the unlikely home of Full of Noises, an experimental music and arts venue with a capacity of 40 whose first event featured krautrock legends Faust destroying an electric guitar with a pneumatic drill.

Having secured funding to launch a two-day festival in 2009, artistic director Glenn Boulter and four other local artists took on temporary custodianship of the crumbling canteen building on wind-lashed Barrow Island, “a building that’s part of this big military-industrial complex,” Boulter says. “It’s heavily security-controlled.” He recalls a game they would play on a nearby bridge, where they would pull their phones out as if to take photos and count the seconds until they were accosted by security. “For us, that was an interesting context to be working in.”