The Heritage Guild Clubs are for families who want to be part of building something – not as audience, but as participants.
Members take part in eight seasonal festivals a year, contribute to craft and heritage projects including the restoration of Wayfarers Arcade, and get priority access to everything the Arcade Project does.
The fee is £180 a year, or £15 a month.
The real ask is your time.
Heritage Guild Clubs are based on a simple idea: children and families learn most deeply when they are helping to do something real.
Schools matter, but schools cannot be the only places where children learn responsibility, judgement, craft, care, public life and belonging. Historically, towns had many institutions between the household and the state: workshops, clubs, markets, churches, festivals, apprenticeships and guilds. Children learned by being around adults doing useful work, and by gradually being trusted to help.
The Heritage Guild Club is a modern version of that older civic institution. It is not a school, museum, youth club or childcare service, exactly. It is a place where families learn together by helping to care for a real building, a real town and a real programme of festivals, markets, gardens, repairs, performances and seasonal celebrations.
The aim is not to give children more activities. It is to help them inherit a place by taking part in it.
A town is not passed on through information alone.
It is passed on through shared work.
hospitality, food, welcome and care
logistics, movement, staging and circulation
ecology, growing, planting and stewardship
repair, making, conservation and maintenance
memory, symbols, maps, archives and local stories
music, theatre, procession, performance and public joy
markets, exchange, enterprise and trust
textiles, costume, banners and material culture
planning, coordination, judgement and stewardship of the whole
The idea behind the Heritage Guild Clubs is developed in three short essays on Civic Reconstruction:
The Window Box Club is a practical community gardening and propagation group based at Wayfarers Arcade. Members work together to build and maintain seasonal window boxes, share cuttings and seeds, and help bring more life and colour into the arcade.
Sessions are designed around simple hands-on learning and multigenerational skills sharing — from planting and propagation to basic care, maintenance, and seasonal rotation. No previous experience is needed.
The club is intended to grow gradually across the arcade, creating visible civic improvement through small but consistent acts of care and participation.
Membership & Sessions
Free for Guild Members · £10 per person for one-off sessions
Fees cover materials, plants, and facilitator costs.
