Making our community  the best it can be

In late 2020 two intrepid arts workers cycled from Swansea Station up many hills to reach Bonymaen, a peri-urban settlement on the north-east of the city. There, to meet for the first time, Reverend Chris Lewis, the then minister of Mount Zion Baptist Chapel.

In the previous few months many conversations resulted in a partnership between Artstation, one of Wales’ leading socially-engaged art practices and the Baptist chapel, with Chris Lewis as our community anchor in Bonymaen. This partnership became formalised into the Natural Law Project, a major arts-driven community development initiative funded through the Arts Council of Wales’ Connect & Flourish program for a period of 2.5 years, from May 2022 - October 2024.

Over this period, the partnership - which included Tai Tarian Housing Association, Swansea University Law School and Eastside Food Bank, operating out of Zion chapel - began a creative journey that wove together the rigour of legal practice, the insight of social housing expertise, innovative artistic thinking, and a measure of spiritual grounding. The aim was to channel contemporary art pragmatically into a social context - underpinned by bona fide legal knowledge, housing advocacy, and the principles of Liberation Theology - in the creative service of community.

Following the chapel’s closure as a place of worship, the Natural Law Team set about rejuvenating its garden and transforming the cold, dilapidated chapel by building ArtHub - a warm, welcoming space with media facilities and intimate meeting area within. Here, locals could gather to discuss Bonymaen’s future needs around food, energy, housing, and the creation of a new cultural space for collective dialogue, particularly in the face of climate change.

This multi-faceted and disruptive creative journey - challenging conventional ideas of what counts as art - is documented through time-lapse videos, smartphone photography, audio recordings, films, and written reflections on the Artstation website: https://www.artstation.org.uk/natural-law.

When Arts Council funding inevitably ran out - as so often happens in the public sector cycle of short-term grants, where new projects are favoured to satisfy institutional demands for constant ‘innovation’ - the arts team resolved to continue their intervention over the long term. They had seen too often how parachuting animateurs into so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ communities, only to withdraw when funding ends, leaves behind not just unfinished capacity-building work but also demoralisation and a deep cynicism within the community about the sincerity and efficacy of government ‘hand-outs’.

Yma o Hyd.

Five years on from first contact with the chapel, things are now moving at a pace. A new social enterprise, better Bonymaen Community Interest Company formed as a trading arm for a new charity Bonymaen Futures that we aim to register in late 2025.

Our partners, Eastside Foodbank, are in the process of purchasing the chapel to ensure we continue to have a working space in which to engage greater numbers of residents in thinking about a shared future.

We have also set up the Cefn Road Project Team, made up of a group of local residents, to explore the possibility of building a new social housing and linked cultural ecocentre in the former grounds of the Swansea Industrial Truant School for Boys. This innovative proposal scoping is supported by the site’s owners, Pobl Housing Association, Cwmpas the community-led housing specialists and Down To Earth, Swansea’s very own design and build agency where hands-on community involvement in the building process is central to their work.

The future could be very bright.