28 January 2025
The Roundhouse has today announced the next three young people who have joined the organisation as Young Trustees. Asher Cottrell, Emmeline Armitage and Taniyah Dennett have all joined the Board of Trustees as the Roundhouse continues to place young people at the heart of its decision making.
The Roundhouse works with over 10,000 young people each year and has welcomed young creatives as Young Trustees onto its Board ever since reopening and providing creative youth spaces in 2006.
Over the past 19 years, there have been over 40 Young Trustees on the Board. They have played a crucial role in the growth of the Roundhouse – from the opening of Roundhouse Works, an award-winning dedicated creative centre for freelancers and entrepreneurs, to the announcement of the brand new Three Sixty Festival in November.
Asher, Emmeline and Taniya follow on from Roshan, Monique and Antonia and will help steer the direction of the Roundhouse over the next 12 months. They are also part of the Roundhouse Youth Advisory Board, which is the voice of the Roundhouse’s creative works members, studio users and project participants.
Asher’s portfolio spans the arts, youth work, and bringing about lasting systemic change. They have led movements to reimagine national housing and homelessness systems, and linked young people’s knowledge with council leaders to create innovative youth work funding bids.
In the music world, Asher is a DJ pushing the scene with pioneering techniques and genre-apathetic style. They have led DJ youthwork sessions, and were recently part of building a soundsystem. Dabbling in visual design too, Asher’s projects so far include mural painting, streetwear and magazine design. Running through all of Asher’s work is the drive to make sure people who are currently disregarded in policy decision making are valued and listened to in it.
Emmeline Armitage is a 25-year-old writer and musician, originally from West Yorkshire, now living in London. She is in the current cohort of Roundhouse Resident Artists and is working on the production of a podcast with Transmission Roundhouse. As a writer, she has an Honors degree in Literary Non-Fiction from Royal Holloway, and has had work published in The Bedford Review, The London Magazine, and Wonderland, as well as experience in presenting at Hay-On-Wye Literature Festival, and performing at Out-Spoken. With a strong lyrical as well as literary ability, Emmeline is also a working musician, having most recently signed to indie hip-hop label Lewis Recordings, opened-up for The Streets on tour, and played the global emerging music festival SXW in Austin, Texas. She is the host and founder of the all-female and non-binary music collective ESS SESSIONS, and most recently released her debut mixtape Shapes, Shadows, DVDs on vinyl. She is a music writer for The Line of Best Fit, and is being represented by United Agents for a book proposal.
Taniya Dennett Brown is a poet and playwright. Her poetry has previously featured in The Dial, Westerly Review and Heroica, amongst other publications. She is an alumni of the New Earth Theatre Writers’ Academy led by playwright Mia Chung (You for Me for You, Netflix’s The Sinner) and she is a member of the Barbican Youth Poetry Collective 2025/26. Dennett Brown’s newest play, murmurs, is being performed as a rehearsed reading at the Omnibus Theatre in January 2026 as part of their Next Page season that supports emerging writers with developing new work. She currently sits on the Roundhouse Youth Advisory Board and she is looking forward to becoming a Young Trustee and having a voice in the future of a venue that has been instrumental in her creative and personal development.