Celebrating Refugee Week presents a unique opportunity to honor the resilience and contributions of refugees worldwide. This year, the festivities took place on a particularly exciting dimension with the official launch of The Seven Bridges café. More than just a culinary venture, this café aims to be a vibrant community hub where stories are shared and cultures are celebrated all within the realms of art and food. We aim to explore how this initiative not only supports refugee integration but also enriches the local community through the universal language of food and hospitality. This years theme for refugee week was ‘ Our Home’, ‘From the places we gather to share meals to our collective home, planet earth: everyone is invited to celebrate what our Our Home means to them.’.

Clients from The West End Refugee Service were invited to a week of events, held in The Seven Bridges cafe across the week of June 17 – 23 June. Events included a daily evening meal, music classes, gardening activities and dance classes.

Thank you to Scotwood Gardens for allowing us to use their space for gardening and providing some lovely flowers and herbs for outside The Seven Bridges! Thank you to The Seven Bridges for providing delicious food daily for WERS clients, for the Monday BBQ and for lending the space for activities. Special thanks to Skimstone Arts for providing a fun and engaging open space to create and connect through music. Skimstone worked with clients from WERS to come up with a piece of music that represented the theme of ‘Our Home’ which was then performed to a small group in The Seven Bridges Cafe.

The official launch of The Seven Bridges took place on Thursday evening and was very well attended. There were performances by Kanvee and Bushee and his band, both clients from WERS, along with some wonderful food served by The Seven Bridges. The launch of the cafe and cements the cafe’s alongside Newcastle’s fantastic culinary offerings. Food included courgette, roasted tomato and black olive salad, mango and mint slaw, bao buns, cauliflower curry, fresh flatbreads and baklava.

To find out more about WERS and their brilliant work, you can find their website here. https://www.wers.org.uk

The Seven Bridges is now open Tuesday-Saturday 9:30am-4:30pm and the kitchen is closed on Sunday’s but the cafe is open for refreshments 10am-3pm. For more information about The Seven Bridges, please visit the link here.