It recently featured on the podcast ‘Screw This… Let’s Try Something Else’
Arthur Harding from Cooperation Hull(Image: Peter Simison)
A grassroots Hull movement that dishes up free food in the community has proved inspirational far beyond the boundary of the city. Cooperation Hull hosts a popular ‘pay what you can’ night called Waffle every Tuesday at its base in the Lonsdale Community Centre, off Anlaby Road.
Waffle, which was founded in 2024, recently featured on the podcast ‘Screw This… Let’s Try Something Else’. The show’s co-host Matt Golding travelled from Bristol to Hull to see the community group in action and found the event “amazing” and deeply uplifting.
He said: “It’s pay-what-you-can food that brings everybody together to have conversations and it was so fun to be there. I highly recommend going.
“It’s so great as a place to build connections with people and meet people you wouldn’t otherwise come into contact with. It was great fun to be there as an outsider – but I think it must be even more powerful as a resident of Hull because it has such a great energy, and great food.”
On the night Matt visited, he ate a Jamaican curry with rice and a “load of great salad”. He said it was “super tasty” and regular attendees told him there is a different cuisine every week, always top quality.
Matt said the ages of people who came along ranged from toddlers to old age pensioners and the atmosphere was “chill” and not intimidating. He said the service is “not political at all”. He added: “The whole point is it’s just a place to come together, because we have lost so many of those places in society.
“We used to have loads more places where we could meet and chat, but they’ve all gone. But what Waffle offers is just a place to do that – not to have complicated debates about things, but a space to come together, have some food, have some chats.”
Described by musician Brian Eno as a “podcast of hope filled stories that could genuinely change the world”, Screw This… Let’s Try Something Else is an exploration of grassroots community projects trying to solve complex issues such as food, housing, and the cost of living.
Matt added: “As part of the podcast, we’ve toured the UK looking for ordinary people who have come together to create extraordinary change. What’s happening there through Cooperation Hull is amazing to see on the ground, both in terms of energy and passion and the way they are bringing people together to cross divides.
“It’s really important at this moment for us to come together and build bits of the world as we want it to be, because when you read the news, it’s just so overwhelming and depressing – the scale of the problems we are reading about all of the time.”
Matt said Waffle helps bring people together to discuss “what they want the future of Hull to be like”. He said they are starting to take practical steps to see their dreams made into reality, which is “amazing”.
In the same episode, Screw This… Let’s Try Something Else visits East Marsh United in Grimsby. The podcast is available to stream on Apple and Spotify.
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