News / Warm spaces scheme
Warm spaces scheme welcomes first residents in time for winter
Churches, cafes, community centres and libraries across Bristol are all set to open their doors or expand their services over the next few weeks in preparation for the winter months.
Henbury & Brentry Community Centre is one of them. The centre has been running for five years, and became a local hub for Bristol City Council during lockdown.
The centre opened its community cafe on Thursday evening as part of the council’s warm space scheme in an effort to provide support to residents facing soaring energy bills and a cost of living crisis.
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The scheme encourages residents to visit their community spaces to keep warm, eat and drink and socialise with other people. Residents can also use the space for WiFi and charging their electronic devices.
Wendy Baverstock is volunteer centre manager at Henbury & Brentry Community Centre. She recently won an award from Radio Bristol in the Environment category for her work in reducing food and plastic waste in the community.
The community centre’s cafe will be offering flexible prices so people can come and have a warm drink – photo: Mia Vines Booth
She has been managing the centre since 2017, organising weekly food parcels, and maintaining a community fridge that anyone in the local area can access.
The centre is already open five hours a day for five days a week, and is located on Crow Lane, a road which, in 2019, sat in the 10 per cent most deprived neighbourhoods in the Bristol area.
Wendy hopes the warm spaces initiative will help the centre support more residents over the winter months.
“Now we have some funding, we’re able to open more hours and we don’t have to worry about the gas, electric, all the bills that come with it,” she said.
“We recently took on a self-employed chef. That’s a big one for us. We’ve managed to secure his position for another six months.”
Wendy also hopes the scheme’s publicity will encourage more people to visit: “More people are going to realise we are here. Communication in our area is a massive thing.”
There are over 40 of these warm spaces planned for communities in Bristol over the coming months.
The council has created a map of all the warm spaces across Bristol and what is due to be provided at each venue.
Main photo: Mia Vines Booth
Read more:
- Communal warm places to be set up across Bristol amid cost of living crisis
- 24 hour ‘grapplethon’ to raise funds for defibrillator in community
- Food bank facing empty shelves amid unprecedented demand
- The invisible gap: How the cost of living crisis is affecting people in Bristol
- New shop and community space set to open
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