We have been working with The Bevy pub - the first community owned pub in the UK on a social housing estate.

We have called the project 'Re-publicing the Public House' and we have involved creative interventions and engagement tools that explore encouraging broader publics to the community pub.

Our Staff and students have been involved in developing some tools which helped provoke and collect community stories and hand-drawn images.

'Poor-traits' is a great leveller and gets people do pretty poor drawings of each other building up a really funny library of the characters from the neighbourhood and the pub. This was really great fun!

We hope to raise funds to be used in the next phase of project work to imbed the narratives into the fabric of the building - so watch this space!

A quick video of a great day!

The giant ariel view of the estate we had blown up and installed helped to prompt ten-word-tales from the estate and the pub.

We worked with the Bevy to devise a process to encourage more women to the pub and to help moderate and mediate some of the dominant male behaviour that was becoming prevalent in the pub.

We created a pop-up print workshop to create christmas cards as a rouse to also get women working and making together. We attracted participants by offering the chance to use different printing techniques and to make your own christmas cards - but we also encouraged the women to co-create and co-produce 'messages from the Bevy' that were hand printed onto beer mats to be distributed through the pub with each drink. These encouraged better behaviour towards women but also got women making together for hours at a time and talking with each other about life on the estate.

well-making #respect #community

Re-publicing the public house! We gave a bunch of second year craft students the job to consider how to celebrate and attract a broader public to the community public house.

Here is a short video of some of what they made in just 20 days!

Our pop-up print workshop encouraged women to leave messages on beer mats that help promote respect in the pub.