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The Living Room at Calne Baptist Church is one of the growing network of Warm Spaces across Wiltshire and is supported by Wiltshire Council.
Usually, the Living Room offers a buffet lunch to up to 25 older people who live in the town, some of whom have known each other for years. Many of them worked for Harris, the huge sausage making factory which dominated the town until it closed in the 1980s.
On the last Friday of February, Wiltshire charity Celebrating Age commissioned an artist to deliver an arts and crafts activity. Tamsin Loveday covered the tables with maps and invited guests to create something, inspired by the maps. Two men immediately started planning a journey, as if by horse and cart, from Calne to somewhere further west. One woman, very artistically gifted, started drawing the Harris factory that had dominated the town. Another group of women took more of a storytelling approach to their craft.
In the corner was another family who are regular visitors and some of whom have learning disabilities, who kept to themselves, enjoying the space and time to meet.
A group of Ukrainian refugees who have made Calne their home arrived to enjoy tea and biscuits, and a natter with some of the volunteers.
The space is run by five or six regular volunteers including Jenny and Ros and Jenny’s husband who had accompanied the Ukrainian guests to a commemorative event for the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine elsewhere in the town earlier that morning.
It’s a thriving space and it was a joy to see it so busy on a blustery Monday morning.
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