“This is a really kind of simple idea and a really relaxed way of trying to give people the opportunity to just make connections and have somewhere to go.”
A campaign to encourage people to sit and talk to each other in pubs and cafes has started a new weekly meet-up in Cwmbran. Empty Chairs was started last December in Essex by Dean Perryman, who had lost a friend to suicide, as he felt ‘no one has to sit alone’.
Within months of setting up his website, hundreds of people across the UK and the rest of the world signed up to start a session and be a host.
I met the host of the new Cwmbran meet-up, Paula Taylor, and her daughter Sophie Howells, in Cwmbran’s Carro Lounge at 4.30pm last Sunday to find out more about why she got involved and why it’s so important.
Paula said: “I think by April this year, they’d done 500 separate Empty Chairs around the country, so it was sort of intriguing me. I thought, ‘right, where would be a good place to do one’ and I thought well, Carro Lounge is a brilliant place because, I mean, they talk about going to pubs, but I thought this is accessible to everybody else. It’s a bit pub-like, but it’s also like a café bar, and it’s so central as well. This would be great.
“So I contacted them, and of course, they are really into community events and things, so they were like ‘we’d love to be involved’. They’ve been great.”
5pm every Sunday
Today was the third session in Cwmbran. It starts at 5pm every Sunday, and all hosts wear orange to make them easy to spot.
Paula said: “You could sit for 10 minutes. You can stay for an hour or whatever. There’s kind of no pressure to it.
“So the idea is that you look for the person wearing orange and that’s the host. It makes it much easier, so if you’re walking into a place that’s a bit new to you, it’s not so daunting then, because you know who you’re looking for.
“We put some posters up in the library to make it accessible to people who might not access social media in the same way.
‘Just rock up’
“Anybody who’s out there that thinks they don’t want to join a particular group or a club or they haven’t got money to do that maybe, and they don’t want anything that feels too pressured, there’s this, you can just rock up.
“We know that loneliness is really insidious. There’s a lot of it going on and even people who you would think, ‘they can’t be lonely because they’ve got lots of friends or they’ve got a job’ or whatever, you know, they can still be lonely.
“This is a really simple idea and a really relaxed way of trying to give people the opportunity to just make connections and have somewhere to go.
“I think many people are unsure of joining a club or group or maybe can’t afford to do that.
“This is free. This is such a simple idea and a way to connect lots of people.”
Empty Chairs- Carro Louge Cwmbran
The Cwmbran Empty Chairs meet-up is every Sunday at 5pm in the Carro Lounge in Gwent Square.