Social enterprise - Roundabout Homeless Hostel

The Roundabout hostel for young people is directly opposite an older person’s care home.

I was interested in the fact that both groups were living in supported accommodation at the opposite ends of their lives, and wondered what would happen if we got them talking.

I ran a ‘slow-dating’ event, where we put microphone’s on each table and gave each pair a set of cards with the Guardian magazine questions on (why waste a good idea?!)

The conversations were recorded. I have a transcript of them which would be fabulous for anyone who loves listening to local dialogue. And again, a wonderful piece of social history. 

One of the young people in the hostel, Ricky Malik, had an interest in music and so I booked him in at a recording studio to make a soundtrack using the dialogue we’d collected during the slow dating event. 

I then brought them all back together at our Silent Cities offices a week later to play them the soundtrack. They then split off to make a music video to go with the soundtrack. Ricky then pulled the clips and the soundtrack together to make this video. 

One of the things I loved most was watching them all pile back onto the minibus afterwards, all the young people helping the older people on the bus, and the way they naturally sat next to each other on the way home.