Bumping into Culture

In September 2023 we were fortunate enough to receive funding from the High Sheriff of Chester Fund, managed by Cheshire Community Foundation, to embark on a ‘pilot’ project that essentially helped visitors to Bee Friends to seamlessly transition from attending a coffee/lunch morning, to becoming part of an audience at a lunchtime concert. We called these sessions, A Bowl of Soup, and a Slice of Music. The idea was for them to ‘bump into a cultural activity’ that they might not otherwise have engaged with for a variety of reasons. We always invited professional musicians from either the Royal Northern College of Music, or local professional ensembles like the Manchester Camerata and the BBC Philharmonic. The repertoire they each performed was always a mixture of accessible classical music, popular contemporary music, and folk and jazz material. We offered three sessions in September, October, and November. We also offered a further three sessions in our local Arts Centre on Sunday afternoons called, Music for an Autumn Afternoon. These concerts were intended to entice some of our regular Bee Friends visitors to a new venue, perhaps for the first time. But they were also for those who were not attending our regular ‘Soup Days’, but with support, companionship, and the encouragement of those who did, might consider venturing out to do so. They attracted a mixture of both these groups, together with new faces who simply wanted access to cultural activities during daylight hours through the autumn months.

Based on the success of this ‘pilot project’, we then applied for further funding from the government’s Shared Prosperity Fund, with the intention of extending this offer through both the autumn, and winter months of 2024, so that our visitors could continue to enjoy a warm, friendly space to sit, relax and enjoy the company of others, whilst eating soup and hearing outstanding musicians performing a wide range of music in a variety of genres.

Part of our funding proposal also included going into partnership with the Cheshire West Library Service. By selecting specific libraries across the borough, we hoped that we might reach even more people who were feeling lonely, isolated, and possibly disconnected from their communities. The notion of entering a warm, safe, place of sanctuary for all, and ‘bumping into’ another activity/event, that they were not expecting to see/hear in that space, had the potential to embrace, transform and enrich their lives.

Our application was successful, and in September 2024, we embarked on a Chamber Music concert tour of libraries in Frodsham, Helsby, Neston, Tarvin and Lache, near Chester. We will deliver twenty-seven concerts in total, including two Christmas Jazz evenings, and the continuation of our Bowl of Soup and a Slice of Music lunchtime concerts until March 2025. Our funding has also allowed us to extend our existing evaluative work, Narratives of Well-Being, to embrace a programme of work that engages our audiences in a creative exploration of their overall experience of the music, meeting the artists, the venue, and their personal ‘journey’ towards attending such an event.

By inviting two poets/writers (Andrew Rudd and Julia McGuinness) to attend a selection of these concerts and asking them to talk to some of the audience members about their particular experience, we hope to capture ‘something‘ that we can share with others. Having first sought all the appropriate permissions from each person and given explanations about what they would be doing with the material collected, the poets would then start work on re-telling and re-imagining their stories through their own prose/verse – creating a ‘portrait’. Once completed, the final ‘portrait’ would be presented back to the audience member to ensure that they still recognised themselves and their stories, and that they would be happy to share the finished piece.

Being able to capture these experiences through the creation of these written ‘portraits’, simply offers us another qualitative tool by which we can evaluate the impact of this creative work, whilst also creating new work that can be shared for others to enjoy and be inspired by.

This project has already attracted people from a variety of age ranges and social/economic backgrounds. We hope it will capture the imaginations of a multi-cultural and inter-generational audience. We also hope that by offering such an eclectic range of musical styles, our audiences will experience new sound worlds they might never have heard before, and in doing so, open-up new possibilities of engagement, connectivity to others through a shared experience, and a sense of belonging.

Bee Friends has recently heard that their application to the Cheshire Community Foundation, to support a further series of our A Bowl of Soup and a Slice of Music concerts during the autumn of 2025, and winter of 2026, has been successful. We are truly delighted that we can continue to offer these informal lunchtime concerts to our many visitors once a month, with the promise of some warming food and more exciting young musicians to perform for them. For details of the new programme, refer to the Events page.