At Neighbourly Lab, we love exploring the science of connection. Every day, every place at any time, there is an opportunity to connect. To become just a little closer to our fellow humans.
The reality is, in a lot of ways, we have forgotten how important connection is. We are so busy living, we forget the things that make us feel alive. Rather than trying to (impractically) encourage people to take time out of their day to connect with others, Neighbourly Lab have been exploring how to inject a little more connection into the places people already going in their already busy lives.
There is no one universal place; some people go to parks, others libraries, others pubs, or bookies, or gyms or gigs. But, there is one place, a place that the vast majority of us go, and regularly: shops! But we don’t all go to clothes shops, or hardware stores, or boutiques, or craft shops. So where do we go? Supermarkets.
Building on previous work from Essential Mix , Neighbourly Lab have been exploring the power of connection in disused spaces in supermarkets.
Our hypothesis? That by timetabling opportunities to connect, people will slow down and take the world in, even for a brief moment.
So what did we do?
Iain and Gina, two of the Neighbourly Lab team based in Scotland, have been working with local community champions in Maryhill, north-west Glasgow, to try and fill disused spaces in local stores, to give passers by a reason to stop. In Asda Maryhill, the team took over a disused cafe each week, while in Tesco Maryhill they made the most of an ‘L’ shaped space on the thoroughfare to the main entrance/exit.
For a number of weeks, the Neighbourly Lab team engaged the community to find out what exactly they would like to see in those spaces - the answers becoming the mandate for what that space should become. The communities in those stores wanted to see practical advice for the older community members on money management, they wanted to improve the health of their overall community and they just wanted to sit, take a minute, have a cuppa, and breathe.
So that’s what we did.
Over the course of 12 weeks this summer, Neighbourly Lab - along with the community teams at Asda and Tesco - utilised those disused spaces to benefit the community. At the same times, every week, customers could come along, connect with someone new and have their overall shopping experience enhanced.
We created opportunities for customers to come along and learn about digital safety, and to check their blood pressure and learn about how lifestyle choices could help them live longer. Residents learned how to be more tech-savvy, how to manage their money more effectively in these challenging times, and of the whole host of local activities they could access that they had no idea even existed… and we made them a cuppa!
We hosted weekly ‘Brew, biscuit and blether’ mornings where there was no practical advice, no reference to health inequalities, cost of living crises or the rapidly changing digital landscape, rather, just time to stop, chill, and have a natter. Each week we heard about peoples pasts, their presents and their aspirations for the future. We learned the names of kids, and grandkids, dogs and cats. People spoke to us about loved ones they’d lost, and new little bundles of joy that had just blessed us with their presence.
People asked how we were, and we shared a little bit of ourselves too. We debated the best biscuits, the perfect cuppa and whether or not a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit or a cake, and no matter how the conversation went, we ended with the sense that people left us just a little lighter than when they sat down. That’s connection.
Now, at Neighbourly Lab, we move on to the next stage of the process - understanding what we did, how people felt it went and what we are going to do next.
We don’t know yet, what we will find, but we do know that in Maryhill, in the north-west of Glasgow, we have some new friends that will help us find the answer.
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