Never Better
In 2019, we delivered a £90,000 Wellcome Trust and Heritage Lottery funded project, Never Better, working with Strike a Light, Gloucestershire Archives, Gloucester History Festival and Gloucestershire Counselling Service. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the NHS, Never Better was a creative response to historic and contemporary sources exploring and reflecting on the experience of mental ill health. The project had an ambitious aim to develop the capacity of local artists and organisations, focussing on mental health, local history and on connecting with some of Gloucestershire’s more vulnerable citizens.
Gloucestershire Archives has one of the most comprehensive collections of both clinical and administrative records from 1823 until the last of the County Asylums in Gloucester (Coney Hill Hospital) closed in 1994. The Gloucestershire Archives holds an almost complete collection of records outlining treatments, case notes, patient histories, epidemiology, admissions and discharges for well over 170 years. Alongside exploration of this invaluable resource, the project team collected individual stories from community members who had suffered with mental ill health. This material was taken by writer and director Finn Beams who worked with Strike a Light to produce a sensitive installation and performance piece highlighting the issues and treatment of mental health. The performance was beautiful and used a mix of professional and volunteer actors to produce a piece of work that brought history to life for a whole new audience.
Over the course of this project, we formed a unique working relationship with partners, supporting, trusting and developing each other. Our evaluation produced by University of Gloucestershire showed it was a highly successful project in getting audiences who would not ordinarily engage with culture to attend a performance event, but also that partnership working had enabled each organisation to produce work and have impact than no one organisation would be able to produce. By sharing ideas between partners we are able to support the development of new projects across the City. The production was a highlight of the 2019 History Festival City Voices programme.
The project was complex involving detailed archival research of patient and treatment records as well as working with residents who were prepared to tell their stories of living with mental health challenges and then bringing all of this together into an immersive theatre performance at Blackfriars. The performance embraced a community choir as well as professional actors, dancers, composer and musicians. The handwritten medical notes of the patients from the asylums were also on display in the marbled, leatherbound books of the day.
