Celebrating the role played by corner shops at the heart of our communities

Stephanie Allen

I am Executive Director of Arts&Heritage (A&H), a national agency that forges collaborations between artists, heritage sites, spaces, places and communities to create projects that tell stories from new perspectives.

I was recruited by Southampton Forward to help deliver the Corner Shop and Portal into Other Worlds project alongside artist Darrell Vydelingum. My role included approaching shops to get them involved, co-ordinating logistics and liaising with the Winchester School of Art and Southampton Solent University and their students.

I also managed the photoshoots and worked with the Southampton Forward team on marketing, communications and evaluation. It was a real pleasure and fantastically exciting to meet Darrell and work with him to realise his vision in partnership with the students and shopkeepers.

My involvement with Southampton dates back to the days when I used to work for Arts Council England over ten years ago – at that time working closely with A Space Arts and John Hansard Gallery. More recently A&H have jointly commissioned a further project with A Space at God’s House Tower.

Southampton is an amazing, inspirational city that has so much culture and art on offer. The enthusiasm for getting involved with creative projects from the people that live and work here, and the multitude of stories and backgrounds to explore, makes the city an amazing place for artists. And Southampton Forward’s support, expertise and knowledge really helps people find a way to innovate and create opportunities.

The Corner Shops project had already been developed by Darrell and piloted at one of the participating shops when Southampton was pitching to be the City of Culture a few years ago. I then expanded it with Darrell and the team.

The thinking behind the project is to demonstrate how central corner shops are to communities and spotlight the people and stories that pass through their doors daily. From milk and bread right through to specialist ingredients for different global recipes, they provide it all – with a chat along the way. They really are a portal to other worlds.

At the heart of the project was bespoke signage: words, selected by communities and designed by Darrell, displayed across the shops as a declaration of their importance; a fashion collection designed and made by students at Winchester School of Art and a photoshoot in each shop by students from Southampton Solent University.

These were then shown at Southampton Solent in an exhibition, accompanied by film and audio interviews collected by the students. We also commissioned a beautiful poem by Susmita Bhattacharya to accompany the exhibition.

The key aims of this project were to make people stop and think about the role played in their lives by these spaces at the heart of their communities, as well as engaging students from across the two universities in a dedicated and in-depth project. 

I think the students found such a hybrid and multi-partner project really fulfilling, as well as gaining real-world experience for their CVs and future careers. The shop owners were intrigued by what we were doing and understood the project’s ambitions, and the public were definitely fascinated by what was happening in their streets. It was great to see all the media coverage and such an enthusiastic review on the BBC.

The project really generated its own energy once it got underway. The final exhibition totally exceeded all our expectations and this collaborative developmental approach showed everyone’s skills off to a tee. 

The film that resulted from this work was quite an emotional testament to the impact of the project on those participating: we heard stories and experiences we never would have witnessed. It was also a great way of creating new relationships between the two universities, as the planning and delivery of the final exhibition was logistically complicated and required all of us pulling together to deliver. Finally, the poem we commissioned was an unexpected joy as it summed up the project’s sentiments perfectly.

Looking ahead, it would be great to build on the connections we made during this collaboration. We are currently finishing the evaluation of the project, looking at what worked, where the learning points were and where the surprising outcomes were. Hopefully we can use these findings both to inform further projects and forge stronger partnerships over the coming year.