A Slice of Bread and Butter
The voice of The Bread and Butter Thing - with stories from the frontline of the cost of living crisis from one of the UK's leading food charities.
A Slice of Bread and Butter
Rural Food, Real Community
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A hidden social club down a narrow alley in Loftus isn’t just a building; it’s a beating heart where food turns into friendship and scattered villages become a community. We sit with Julie from Tees Valley Rural Action to unpack how a Covid‑era response grew into a lively hub that blends surplus groceries, warm brews, and on‑the‑spot advice. What looks like a queue for affordable food is really a doorway to rural wellbeing: people swap recipes, meet an adviser, and find out about money help, public health services, and more—all in one room.
We talk candidly about what “rural” really means. It’s not postcard views and easy living; it’s bus routes that vanish, hospital trips that take all day, and housing costs that push locals out while second homes move in. Julie explains how ACRE’s network lifts the rural voice into policy, and why paper surveys don’t work where conversations do. The Loftus team experiments with community transport so members can come in from surrounding villages, because showing up matters: the brew, the chat, the welcome. Delivering to doorsteps fills a gap, but it can’t replace belonging.
Volunteers power everything. They spotted the need, championed the hub, and now bring neighbours, unload crates, and share cake after the work is done. Drivers become minor legends, lunch club regulars turn into helpers, and newcomers who get lost are fetched and folded into the fold. Along the way, we wrestle with messy trade‑offs—biodiversity and housebuilding, local enforcement and national goals—and keep returning to a simple measure: does this make it easier for people to live well where they are?
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Hello and welcome back to a slice of bread and butter with me, Vic, and Mark, where from the bread and butter thing.
SPEAKER_02:We run a network of mobile food clubs that take surplus food from supermarkets, farms and factories, and we take it straight into communities where families are struggling to get by.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for less than a tenner, our members get bags packed with fruit, veg, fridge food, cupboard staples and a bit of frozen. It's a weekly shop that helps stretch the budget and take some of the pressure off.
SPEAKER_02:And our members are at the heart of everything we do. They turn food into friendship and neighbours into community, and that's what makes us tick.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and today it's Julie.
SPEAKER_02:Julie, yes, on our lovely Whitby coast.
SPEAKER_00:I'm Julie Thornton. I work for Tees Valley Rural Action. We're based up here in the North East in Tees Valley. So Acre is the Action for Communities in Rural England. It's an umbrella body that looks after 38 different regional members, and we're all our own charities supporting other charities raising the rural voice.
SPEAKER_02:Rural tours always means a bit tricky for charity to support. Is that what Acre's about?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, from Tees Valley Rural Actions point of view, it's around ensuring that the rural voice is heard through regional structures, through local policy, through development and advocacy and research. Our main day job is to look after our rural communities and ensure things like village halls have great support. We can understand their local needs, their infrastructure needs, be it transport, be it development of the village hall. Quite often it's it's around community groups being able to look after themselves and be independent. So it's supporting community groups in rural areas that probably don't get a look in in other areas in urban and bigger cities. So it's ensuring that our rural communities have a voice and also at the same time making sure local plans have rural needs and rural interests at the heart of it.
SPEAKER_02:What's so different about rural?
SPEAKER_00:It's accessing services that people take for granted. So transport is a massive big issue for rural communities in our area. Not having those links and being able to access things like hospital or be able to get to the local shop or be able to access things like doctors easily, dentists easily. So it's access and connecting to those infrastructures that we all take for granted in urban areas. And also the needs and the affluence within rural areas is often a misconception. They always look affluent, they're leafy and greeny. Why would rural areas need support? And it's often not the case. You know, people can't stay where they've been born, they can't afford to be able to live in those environments.
SPEAKER_02:Let's talk about Loftus, because the uh the centre that we're in at Loftus, that's got a story to tell in its own right, really, hasn't it? Where we are, I wouldn't call it a village hall.
SPEAKER_00:No, it's definitely not a village hall. Yes, we're in Loftus, and the story in the journey, how we got to um the old Loftus Social Club was definitely born through Covid. Um so the great East Cleveland community all rallied together through Covid and provided an emergency response to support with food parcel craft bags. I everybody did. We we all rallied. One of our projects is East Cleveland Villages Big Local, as it was then, and that big local supported the community. We came in as Tease Valley Rural Action to be that support network to be able to coordinate a little bit of that. We were lucky enough to be donated from a local church, a presbytery, a house to be able to operate from during that time. A food bank was established coming through with COVID. That food bank needed a home, so there was an old social club that nobody would take over, and it became a community hub. And the food bank is still operational. It it delivers now twice a week, operating through a helpline that's open five days a week. And the helpline does all sorts of holistic support, um, signposting, networking, um, referrals come in through social subscribers, um, local doctors. And we realized as Big Local was coming to an end, that transition period about how we would be able to keep sustainable support, but also creating a dependency on the food bank supply as an emergency offer. We needed to give people a different offer so it wasn't just for an emergency, but also support for more of the community. Um, so we we got in touch with you guys, and the bread and butter thing in Loftus Club was born, and that was amazing. It's taking us a by surprise, really.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean it was it was it was lovely coming over actually, Julie, and just feeling the buzz of the place anyway, before bread and butter got there, because it definitely feels like that beating heart, and that's what we're always looking for when we look for somewhere to plant in a community.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it is, and I think the way uh the the building is structured, it has its own restaurant, it has the the the very standard old-fashioned men's bar in it at one end, but for accessing the services from the bread and butter thing, you've got a 300-seat function room with a separate door, and people are all chatting in the queue and you know, swapping the recipes as the stud about. We've got some people baking and feeding each other as we're coming in through the queue. And it's also been super for our own advice and support worker who's been able to be more accessible and gets to know some more clients' needs and say, Well, if you need extra support, we've got Carol in the corner. Do you want a cup of tea? Let's have a chat. Last week we had public health came along, they were looking at doing a survey for public health services for the over 50s.
SPEAKER_02:Historically, I've seen it where word just gets out that all these people kind of turn up to a community space on bread and butter days, and then the service providers kind of go, Oh, I know how we can actually reach a lot of people. Was it planned?
SPEAKER_00:It it was kind of planned. There was a lot of learning curves, you know, the way that they tried to deliver the surveys, put pieces of paper in people's hands and expected them to fill it in rather than a conversation and a chat. So I think we'll put some definite guidelines down for anybody else that would like to do any of that networking in the future. We learnt a lot from that one experience.
SPEAKER_02:It's like we've almost lost the knack of conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it needed a conversation. People don't understand why you want to know all of these details about them. And through a conversation, and maybe as a smaller focus group, they would have got some quality information instead of a couple of people saying, Oh yes, we'll do that, ticking the first three boxes, got bored and walked off.
SPEAKER_02:So tell us about your members then.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we've got quite a core group of members that are accessing every week. We've also got a lunch club that happens on the same day. So we've got a Wednesday lunch club that happens within the restaurant, and it's an affordable three-course meal.
SPEAKER_02:What do you call affordable?
SPEAKER_00:Um, like five pounds.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Six pounds. Five pounds for three courses. That's brilliant.
SPEAKER_00:That was another thing that started on the back of COVID. We had new members again this week, so we're still reaching out new members. They're not just members from the Loftus area. We've got members coming from Redcar and Gisborough and Skelton and the surrounding areas.
SPEAKER_02:I guess this goes back to your rural point, does it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And but to come from central Redcar across to Loftus is quite a journey for somebody to come the other way. So this week we had people that were a little bit lost in Loftus and said, Where are you? And we had to go and find them and bring them in.
SPEAKER_02:It is a bit tucked away.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is. It is.
SPEAKER_02:I don't normally expect a social club to be tucked away.
SPEAKER_00:Tucked away in an alley.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It is one of our needs with through Big Local, is we were serving the 13 villages that surround Loftus. We also run a community transport service with three wheelchair accessible minibuses. And what we were looking at for those was probably doing a route that we could go and collect and bring people in. We're used to taking our food parcels to people within the rural areas of the local villages. So, how can we get the local villagers to be more independent and come and collect their own? So that's potentially on the cards.
SPEAKER_02:Is there anybody in the volunteers, etc., that is like a shiny light for you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we've got we've got loads of volunteers. Um, and I think it's the volunteers that need the light shining on them the most because uh you know, empathy, understanding, um, commitment, time. And I wouldn't like to single one out because if I did, I would upset someone, and they're all valuable in their own very good way.
SPEAKER_02:And they're all gonna have a listen and they're all gonna check.
SPEAKER_00:Totally. Um, we've got volunteers that um use the bread and butter thing in a different venue, they would travel all the way over to um is it States? Yes, seat and primary to see what it was all about, and it was information from other volunteers going, well, this is happening in another area. How do we get it over here? So the idea came from volunteers. The volunteers are the ones that make it work, they're the ones that understand the community needs, they have relationships, they've spread the words, the networking from our volunteers is awesome. We've started to grow more volunteers from those that are coming to the sessions. So we find that those regular users that'll say, Oh, well, I can come an hour earlier, I don't mind giving you a hand. And stopping for the cake and the cup of tea after we've done the unpacking, we have so many conversations and it's so welcoming that they're all very supportive of each other. Our regular driver, our lovely Gary, always gets a 10. Um, and he's awesome. And that cup of tea and cake halfway through often results in lots of recipe discussions, and how can we get, I don't know, aubergines, for example. How can we make sure that people know what to do with them? So it's a productive conversation as well as supportive.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I think it's a bit of magic, that bro.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is.
SPEAKER_02:It's almost like there's chat about the food, but it's almost like a really lovely unintended consequence. It's brilliant.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it honestly, it really is brilliant, and being able to grow and network with new volunteers as well, and having that opportunity where people understand the benefit of what they're doing on the day, and then saying, Oh well, I'll come and give back. Quite a lot of our users come maybe once a month at the end of their monthly salary when they know things are a little bit tight. Um, they'll say, Well, if I've got time, I'm I'm gonna come and help. And we found that people do, which is awesome.
SPEAKER_02:I've got to start with the uh story of finding Loftus, the community centre, because it was in the village of Loftus, but it's behind a row of shops and down like a driveway. I wouldn't even call it a road. And it's a huge social club. It's still got a bar in it and still got a restaurant in it, but it's it's got this stage area as well, and they put on a panto every year, and they can fit 200 in the audience. This is not a small building, but what Julie and the team do out of it is bloody incredible.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Julie is an absolute, like a proper community hero, isn't she? Just she's taken on loads and she just spins all the plates constantly to make it work.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and and she's not just spinning plates for loftas, is she? She, you know, the number of villages that she supports hats off to her because rural's hard.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, the connectivity just isn't there, is it? But it's amazing how the grapevine kind of travels. So, you know, people are travelling miles away to get a bread and butter, and then we're like, come on, Julie, bring it here. Why can't we?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and she rose to the challenge.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's um yeah, it's the first hub that I think the volunteers have kind of been the starter for 10 on the, you know, brought the idea and said, no, no, no, we need one, we need one round here.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I let's just track back because it we talk a lot about working closely with the local authority to find the right places, don't we? Yeah. But actually, I think that's quite hard in rural communities because they don't have the concentration of community projects, and dare I say, even the uh community people within the team of local authorities. So I I think we have to think wider about how we actually engage as we go more rural.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I think it's one of the unique kind of points of how bread and butter operates. We've got our little vans, we can tootle wherever. To be honest, the team really like a tootle out, especially, you know, Gary's not complaining about a nice drive to Whitby. No, he's not, because whilst he's doing that, shoveling studs in a warehouse, or he's like Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But hats off to him, he Gary gets a 10 every week. It's a mutual feeling, isn't it? Because clearly he he's having a good time and they can see it and he's looking after them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you can't go wrong.
SPEAKER_02:Can't go wrong. So, Vic, have you got any ideas about how many we would call rural of our hubs? Because we we've got some in Lincolnshire, haven't we, as well as North Yorkshire. Yeah. Some up in the northeast.
SPEAKER_01:So rural gets quite deep when you start to try and define.
SPEAKER_02:I was gonna say, because you know, most of our hubs, if you're living in London, would be considered rural.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but we've got some like in Yorkshire, in Kirklys that you would think would be quite rural. Have you been to any of our Kirklys hubs?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I was there when the day opened, thank you very much. Which one? Kirklys. The community centre. Oh, is it Chickenley?
SPEAKER_01:Chickenley, okay. I mean, there's ten hubs in Kirklys, so um, but you went to Chickenle.
SPEAKER_02:This is me virtually slapping my wrist.
SPEAKER_01:And some of those you would think would be quite rural, they're like uphills, cobbledy roads, all of this kind of stuff. But they're not strictly by like a planning definition clusters rural, whereas certainly some of the Lincolnshire ones and the Whitby ones would be.
SPEAKER_02:But would the Kirkles ones have better public transport, or would it still be sporadic? Because that's one of the definers of rural life, isn't it? The public transport is rubbish.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think Kirkles could be mixed. For some places, you'd be better off going to Leeds than you would be going, you know, to your local town. So that's a bit but yeah, I mean that's why we moved into Thorny, wasn't it? Because they'd changed the bus route and people couldn't get to the shop anymore. What an unintended consequence of saving some cash from like whatever bus company. So that's why we moved there. So I think increasingly we're looking at doing more rural. I think if you look at County Durham, so we've got 20 hubs in Durham, we're in all lots of little towns, you know, those hubs are thriving because there's literally nothing else, and it's so hard to get from one village to the other. So in some of the Durham places, you look on the map and you think, ooh, they're really close.
SPEAKER_02:But they're not because you try and get a bus from one to the other, just doesn't happen. Yep. Same with Boston, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And even getting through the middle of Boston's, like even if you've got a car, is impossible.
SPEAKER_02:I was gonna say, driving through Boston is like driving through Manchester City Centre. It's crazy to get from one end to the other can take you half an hour.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It's funny, isn't it? Because the access piece that we're talking about is more nuanced than just how close you are to a shop or whether you've got a car or whether it's urban or rural. There's lots that gets in the way for people.
SPEAKER_02:One of the other aspects of it, I guess, though, Vic, that Julie brought up that we've heard from the same area actually, Helen and Graham at Scene Primary were saying the same thing. People being priced out of being able to live where they were born.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That is a consequence of holiday homes, second homes, whatever you want to call it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and also where they're building new houses in those areas, they're building posh fancy family houses and not houses that people can afford. So even, you know, where they're trying to solve the housing issues, if they are using the little bit of land that's there, it's getting a fancy house on rather than something that people could even afford to live in. It's a mess, isn't it? Really?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I don't think we do much to demystify it. It's just a mess.
SPEAKER_02:It's just a mess. Yeah. I I don't think there's anything to demystify. You've summed it up. It's a mess.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I I suppose, like with most local authorities and governments in their defense. Here's me, check it out. I'm defending them. As things grow and become really big, they get complicated. Trying to simplify them and strip back gets really hard.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've got a soapbox that I'm not going to go on because it's too tangential about this. Anyway.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, you see, I can't let you throw a soapbox out there and and not step on it. This is our soapbox moment, Vic.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, I'll do it really quickly. I was listening to Farming Today the other day because I was up that early, and there was some guy that was talking about biodiversity net gain, BNG, which is the nice acronym. And he was saying, Well, they're trying to make it more affordable, like build more houses because they've got a housing crisis, and nature and the biodiversity is going to go massively downhill. And he didn't have a solution to this other than don't build the houses. And it was farming today, so clearly he was coming from that perspective. But I do like my nature, I love a bit of green, but really, like people having a roof over their head.
SPEAKER_02:People have got to live.
SPEAKER_01:Totally.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it's you say that they're trying to, you know, government were trying to simplify it in that respect and say, actually, for an as you know, to build this number of houses, you don't have to worry about it. It's only in the massive estates that I have to worry about. And then there's this guy lobbying to say, no, it needs to be every house. And yeah, there we go.
SPEAKER_02:It is interesting. I'm gonna throw one in as well. And this is not pharma bashing, but I'm just gonna deliver the facts of what happened. Two years ago, I was at the Labour Party conference at the NFU fringe event, so the National Pharma Union Fringe Event. And Steve Reed, who was the minister for DEFRA at the time, came to do a panel. And when it came to questions, the biggest single issue that everybody had was the right to roam and get people off my land because they're tramping down my crops or disturbing my sheep with their dogs. And I get it on a really micro level, but it was it was that clash of Steve Reed looking at a national debate, and actually the farmers were just looking at their boundaries.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And that must be really hard as well, because that demonstrates the complication behind all of it, right?
SPEAKER_01:It's all stakeholder viewpoints.
SPEAKER_02:How do we get down this rat hole?
SPEAKER_01:So I told you it's contental. Told you it's contental. So bringing us back to Julie and the amazing work that she's doing, deliveries. So I think that it's a real new take on do we do deliveries? Do they kind of bring people to us? What does that look like? So we always say that our vans get the food into the heart of community. Absolutely true. But then we really want people to come to us, you know, that last half mile or last mile, so that they can feel part of their community and have the brew and have the conversation and see the support people that are there and find out about the loan sharks or the water people.
SPEAKER_02:That was close.
SPEAKER_01:It was close. Yeah. So I think that doing deliveries to people's houses would actually do away with some of the impact that. Almost like a a a bonus, unintended consequence of how we operate.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And the challenge with it in more rural or spread out areas is getting all those people to come in because convening's really easy in a town or a city. But I guess when everybody's spread out and they struggle with transport or they're elderly and can't get out of the house that easily, etc. You kinda need some of the magic of Julie's volunteers to be able to do that. And maybe as they're going out, they are spreading the word of other services that we're bringing in. Who knows? But you're right, it's a challenge. But I I guess we're facing challenges just like everybody does when it's I I I'm gonna rebrand it a spread out community.
SPEAKER_01:It makes it sound like Marjorie. Yeah, but then you'd almost kind of think if the um population, if the community is really spread out, then are they more isolated? And does bringing them together and having a brew and a cake and creating that community vibe on whatever day for a few hours, how much extra value does that add to their lives and kind of keep them going to the next week and the next week? And maybe that's why we get lots of people coming week in and week out in some of the more rural areas that need to do some analysis on this to see if there was transaction, different, you know, different people shopping in different frequencies.
SPEAKER_02:I agree with you. I agree with you. And the first time I went to Loftus to meet Julie, I went in the bar and took Blue, obviously.
SPEAKER_01:Took the dog, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Blue had a whale of a time, but so did the old boys that were sat there that came in, it was 10.30 in the morning, they were enjoying the a pint at 10.30 in the morning, but at the same time, Blue had a great time eating their crisp for them, and they were having a lovely time with him. Something they wouldn't have experienced if they just got the bags delivered to their home.
SPEAKER_01:No, so you took dog therapy to loftest.
SPEAKER_02:I did, yeah. Nice, and he got crisps, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:He got paid in crisps, yeah. What more could we want? As a dog, I think that's quite a good deal. I think it was.
SPEAKER_02:And if you have any feedback or thoughts on the podcast or you want to come and have an attack, be a guest, be our guest. And we nearly broke into song then. You can email us at podcast at breadandbutthing.org.
SPEAKER_01:Lastly, we're always open to new members at all of our hubs. If you or someone you know would benefit from our affordable food scheme, you can find your nearest hub on the Become a Member page of the website.
SPEAKER_02:And please do all of those things that podcasts ask you to do. You know, like us, subscribe, leave us a review, New Year's resolution, bring a new listener to our pod. That'd be great.
SPEAKER_01:Well, see you next time.
SPEAKER_02:See ya.
