Are you a tenant, frustrated with the housing crisis in the UK?

Take part in creative workshops to channel your frustrations and explore documentary theatre making as a way to reveal the stories behind gentrification and the housing crisis.

This is a creative writing workshop with a difference. Join writers Nathaniel McBride and Debbie Beeks to be creative, share your voice and channel your frustration.
Nathaniel is writing a play about the housing crisis in Manchester and Rochdale. It’s a piece of Documentary Theatre about the landlords, the developers, the politicians, the business deals, the housing campaigners and the problems that have created the situation we are in. The play will be created from the documents that define our housing and our homes.

What will happen in the workshop?

• Bring an example of a document that relates to your housing; a letter, a brochure, a contract, something else...
• Meet Nathaniel and find out how he takes documents like these and rearranges them to tell stories that reveal the stories behind the housing providers…
• In an informal and fun way, try some activities and exercises to turn your documents into the start of a new story.
  Create your own creative piece about the housing crisis. Hear more about the script that Nathaniel is creating about housing campaigns in Manchester and Rochdale.
• Find out more about how you can join in more creative workshops and see the final script come to life in 2025. Have fun, chat, food and drinks will be provided.

The Second Circuit is a documentary play being written about gentrification and housing activism in Greater Manchester. It is well known that Manchester is a rapidly gentrifying city, where rents and house prices are now unaffordable to many of its own residents. What is less well known is that it also has a well-organised and growing tenants’ union, which has emerged in recent years to defend its members’ rights.

The play details two campaigns organised by members of this union. The first, in Hulme, is to prevent the encroachment of purpose-built student accommodation into a residential neighbourhood. The second, in Rochdale, aims to stop a housing association from demolishing four of its own social housing blocks.

There will be staged script readings of Nathaniel’s play, The Second Circuit in Spring 2025.

Sign up to one of the following taster sessions:

Monday 18th November, 5.30 – 8.30pm

OR

Tuesday 19th November, 12noon – 3pm

At Ascension Church, 282 Stretford Rd, Manchester, M15 5TQ

Sign up for a FREE place here.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England