Warm hub, warm welcome at Christ the Redeemer Church in Cambridge
This is the first week of warm hubs becoming operational in Cambridge.
There’s one at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Arbury on Tuesdays from 10am-12 noon, and there’s three a week at Christ the Redeemer Church – every Tuesday, 6-9pm; Thursday, 5-9pm; and Sunday, 4-6pm.
On Thursday at 5pm a squad of volunteers is ready at the Christ the Redeemer Church off Newmarket Road for the four-hour open invite to Abbey residents to drop by.
They’re chatting and playing games – Quirkle Rummy, Jenga, dominos, Connect 4 – as I sit down and say hello. On my left is Andrew Wisbey, an Abbey resident for 14 years.
“It’s a good community,” he says. “It’s made by the people who live here, it doesn’t come to you, you have to live it and make it.”
Andrew’s a cook and baker “as a hobby”.
“I give some to the people I know who appreciate it,” he says. “I made Scotch broth this week and froze some of it for the Abbey People hub at Barnwell shops with some loaves of bread I baked.”
Andrew quickly identifies as an internet-free zone, his phone is just for calls and texts. Andrew prefers cards and letters.
“I’ve got stamps,” he explains. “That’s my main expenditure. Did you know that from February 1st all stamps have to have a bar code on them?”
On my right is Eamonn Kelly who is a Big Issue seller, originally from Northern Ireland, who now lives on one of the New Meaning homes whose residents are approved by Jimmy’s the homeless shelter. Eamonn is up at 5am every day to sell the Big Issue on Trinity Street “and the top of Rose Crescent, I go anywhere I want”. He loves his single-person dwelling, and shows me a video of him on TikTok meeting Prince William and Princess Kate where he welcomes them to his home.
Eamonn grew up on the Antrim Road. “It’s a different way of thinking over there,” he says. But he isn’t up to speed with what’s going on nowadays. “Mate I don’t even listen to the news,” he says.
Andrew agrees, saying: “I don’t understand it. It just goes right over my head.”
Meanwhile Miriam Ferrer is playing Rachel Driver at Quirkle Rummy. It looks intense, how does it work? “We’ve only been playing ten minutes, it took half an hour to read the rules!” she says. Miriam is from Barcelona. Is she pro-independence?
“For me, yes,” she replies. “But if you look at Brexit probably it wouldn’t be successful.”
Rachel grew up near Bristol and came to Cambridge to study to be a vet, and now she works at a vet in St Neots and is married to Danny Driver, who’s sitting nearby playing Connect with Eamonn.
Danny is the vicar at Christ the Redeemer Church and I say hello and mention I met his predecessor. Danny is originally from Liverpool, and has been in Cambridge for eight years, first at Ridley Hall, the theological college near Newnham, and then as a curate as Barnabus Church on Mill Road.
“This is my first church as a vicar,” he says, adding he’s been in the role for 16 months. How’s it going, Abbey can be a tough place sometimes?
“There’s challenges everywhere,” Danny replies. “Where I grew up in Liverpool, that was really tough.”
The warm hub has benefitted from a £1,000 grant from Cambridge City Council, and some support – gratefully received – from Heffers and Cambridge Community Kitchen. The plan is to have the warm hub here open from November 8 to March 5 – 135 hours in total. But the grant won’t heat the building for 135 hours, I ask?
“Earlier this year, before this crisis started, we got a new fixed-price three year contract with Scottish Power,” Danny explains. “We did it in January, not anticipating what was going to happen.”
Danny’s just about to go and get some hot food for the community.
“Cambridge Community Kitchen is donating 20 portions of cooked food on Thursday,” he says. “We have soup on Sunday, cooked food on Thursdays, and cakes on Tuesdays.”
The thing is, by this point it’s well past 6pm, and actually it’s still only volunteers in the hall. The fact is, it’s 14 degrees in Cambridge this evening, and no one is freezing at this point.
“It’s all right,” says Danny. “If there’s food left over it can be frozen for the next time.”
As Danny leaves church warden Sarah Grove comes in with her husband Martin, and then there’s another local, Tracey, and her adult daughter Abbey. Emma Banyard joins the team: Emma runs the Trailblazers after-school clubs
“Everyone just helps each other,” is how she puts it.
Andrew spots me using my phone (my daughter had messaged me about dinner arrangements). He says when he grew up they had a phone box down the road which took 2p and 10p coins. There’s then a big old natter where everyone who’s not using their phones share their early, pre-internet, experiences of what life was like, and at the end of that Andrew seems much happier.
“That’s what it is about the church,” he says. “It’s nice to have a building but you don’t need a building, you need people. People is where the church is.”