Can life in a former chocolate factory be infused with faith, hope and love?
I NT E R -FAI T H C AR E
Lisa Loveridge Pastoral Care Co-ordinator, The Chocolate Quarter
What do faith, hope and love mean in the context of the spiritual wellbeing of older people? How can we work together to enhance quality of life? These are some of the questions considered here, along with how they pan out for residents of one retirement apartment complex. Who doesn’t long for the comfort of faith, the excitement of hope and the warmth of love? To have all of these, and in later life, may seem like an impossible dream, but read on….
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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A common thread through my time social working, spending 11 years as a full-time mum, dealing with major health issues, being an unpaid carer, and now in pastoral care, is being on the edge. Sometimes it’s a cutting edge, like providing innovative services or working in a multi-faith role, other times it’s much more marginal. The main thing is that I can bring my whole self to work now and have adequate support to thrive and to make the edgy position sustainable.
Fry, Cadbury and St Monica I work in a chocolate factory, and no, it’s not a chocolate paradise! In fact, it doesn’t make chocolate at all any more. It’s no longer even a factory. It has a dance studio, a multi-faith room, a spa, a cinema, an art and pottery studio, a wood-fired pizza oven and (get this!) a nail bar and treatment room which, among other things, provides male waxing and facials! This transformation received the 2019 National Pinder Healthcare Design Award for best regeneration project. I want to tell you about this building because it is central to my story. The building is in the small town of Keynsham between Bath and Bristol in south west England. It was built by the Quaker Fry family in 1925 and later taken over by Cadbury – another Quaker family. Over the years it produced Fry’s Chocolate Cream, the Double Decker, Dairy Milk, Chocolate Buttons, Cream Eggs, Mini Eggs, Cadbury’s Fudge, Chomp and Crunchie. But not any more. Cadbury was bought by Kraft Foods in January 2010 and shortly afterwards chocolate-
Volume 16 Issue 2 Summer 2019
making was moved to Poland and the Keynsham factory was closed with the loss of 700 jobs. Six years passed before the derelict shell of the factory buildings was bought by the St Monica Trust. It’s important for this story to give you some background to the trust. Around 100 years ago, the trust was created and named after Mary Monica Wills, a deeply religious High Anglican who had married into the wealthy Wills tobacco family in Bristol. Her passion as a young woman was to provide a ‘purpose-built haven for the care of chronic and incurable sufferers’. She achieved this with the purchase in 1919 of a 27-acre site a few miles from Keynsham in Cote Lane, Westbury-on-Trym, North Bristol (www.stmonicatrust.org.uk/our-expertise/history). The modern St Monica Trust, still based in Cote Lane, continued with the original vision by converting the Keynsham Chocolate Factory for various purposes including a care home for the very frail, and 136 retirement apartments (housed in the two nearest blocks in the photograph). They converted the third block into offices and a GP surgery 33
