Gather-ing in Dudley High Street

All over the country, High Streets are getting a little bit brighter and more human because people are getting together to take on formerly empty spaces and make something useful from them.

Lorna Prescott is helping some people do this in Dudley in the West Midlands and had hired me to come by and spend the afternoon sharing my experience of such things. So I headed north-west last Wednesday.

It was a clear sunny day in London when I left, but by the time the train had got as far as Coventry, there was thick fog everywhere. I had to change at Birmingham for a local train to Dudley Port and then a bus to the bus station. I walked up the hill, through the market and down the other side. When I had to climb another hill, I started to think I might have missed it and gone too far, but I persevered and suddenly found myself at the Gather CIC coffee shop.

I had a peek around - the Inspiration Lab is a work in progress, but it's coming on very well, it's been painted and the ceiling tiles have been replaced very smartly with pallet wood. There's also a workshop out back that Guy (the woodworker) is happy to share with others. The back yard was full of pallets but it looks like a promising outdoor space for summertime.

I met Stu and Lorraine who's baby the shop is. They were part of a charity for carers and decided that they needed a physical space to get people together. They also loved coffee and coffee culture, so Gather CIC was born as a coffee shop in former Halifax Building Society premises. They've completely stripped it back and refurbished and it's now becoming a busy community hub. There was a steady flow of people while I was there and I heard that a meetup of local Active Citizens in the morning had been even busier.

I got to talk to people from the local NHS, CVS, and Big Local area as well as local musicians, social entrepreneurs and other people associated with Lorna's work on an Inspiration lab. It was great. I mostly sat there and listened and then said "That's great, do more of that, well done!" and then shared my experience of what they were finding challenging. Mostly this was around "other people who don't get it". What do you do? You just plough on with what you're doing and keep telling them what you're doing and why it's better than what you were doing before. And you say yes to people lots. And you find the other people who are doing similar things and encourage each other. That's all, a little bit of being human. I also got to talk to Jo Orchard-Webb who is an ethnographer trying to find ways to record the progress they're making.

I was glad to see how much craft was a feature of what was happening. People connecting through doing. While I was there, Jane Clarke brought in some podging that had been done the other day and spent the afternoon sewing it together with some carpet samples to make a mat. A big collaborative piece with lots of love and conversation built in.

Becky P and I had a bit of a music geek out over the ukuleles and piano in the shop and I gave them a little song before I went.

If you read the piece from Lorna above you'll see that she brought me in with her own learning budget, meaning to create a shared learning experience that would benefit others as well as herself. It's just that generosity of spirit that makes places like this beautiful and worthwhile. I'm really grateful to have been part of it even for a single afternoon.

Photo: Jo Orchard-Webb