In Rotherham, near the town hall, stands a centuries-old gothic former Methodist Church. Get closer, and the swirls of red metal lettering reveal it is no longer a place of worship. Pass underneath the words ‘Emporium of Stories’, and you have entered a magical world.
Grimm & Co was established in 1148 by founder Master Graham Grimm, but only became visible to mortals in 2016. Inside, tree roots splay from ceilings, a giant’s bookcase is a staircase, and fireplaces hide secret doors.
The Apothecary sells essentials from hexes to elixirs, goblin mucus to pearls of wisdom. Diners at The Feastery have a choice between magical or mortal menus. And children have been known to pass through Graham’s study and began to tell the most extraordinary stories from their own imaginations, inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales.
“I’ve lived in Rotherham my whole life and I’ve been coming to this church since I was a little girl,” says 80-year-old Marilyn Moreman, who has been bringing her 11-year-old grandson Leo here, since he was five. “What Grimm & Co have done here is unbelievable. When it opened and we walked in, we just gasped at how beautiful it was. It absolutely captured the whole spirit of Grimm, and the fairy tales.”
Marilyn helps run a breakfast club for adults while the kids are engaged in the magical realm. “I can’t express enough what Grimm & Co has done for Rotherham,” she says. “It’s the only place children are allowed to be themselves.”
Grimm & Co was imagined by local children asked what they wanted in a town blighted by negative headlines, and facing bleak indices of deprivation. “We asked young people to come and build an embassy for reimagining Rotherham, says Deborah Bullivant, a former headteacher commissioned in 2009 to find a local intervention on children’s literacy. “We asked them, ‘what do you see as your town?’ We were inundated – over 100 young people became ambassadors. And they decided they wanted the embassy for reimagining Rotherham to be a real building.”
Then Deborah came across a TED talk by Dave Eggers called ‘Once Upon a School’. The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had set up a Pirate Supply Store in San Francisco, that sold essential kit for pirates, – like planks – but was also a literacy hub, opening imaginations.
“I approached the Arts Council and said, ‘I want to create this centre as an action research project in literacy, and the children want it to be a place for magical beings’,” Deborah says. “And by 2025, we want Rotherham to be the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture… Grimm & Co was born.”
Arts Council England are major investors in Grimm & Co, and today it’s the turn of Dawn Airey CBE, the newly appointed Chair and former Channel 5 boss, to experience an immersive, multi-sensory journey partly designed by Lumsden Design, the wizards behind the Warner Bros’ Harry Potter Studio Tour.
“It goes without saying that young people and children are our future,” Dawn says. “If they don’t have rich cultural experiences, they’re going to have a life less lived as a result. It should be a human right to have arts and cultural experiences embedded into being a citizen in this country – that you are given the opportunity to discover your own creativity. Here, you can feel the imagination oozing out of every pore.”
Young people in Rotherham are used to being on the wrong side of national statistics. In September, the IPPR’s local Youth Opportunity Index named the town as having the fewest suitable entry-level jobs for young people anywhere in Britain – 46 vacancies for every 1,000 young adults, compared with 288 in the Cotswolds. Meanwhile, young people from Yorkshire and the Humber are least likely to own their own book at home.
21-year-old writer Kensey Phillip, who is autistic, used to come to Grimm’s as a teenager. Now her 11-year-old twin brothers come. “I got into writing because of Grimm and Co,” she says. “I was amazed when I first saw this place. I still come weekly to use the space to sit and write. This place helps young people figure out what they want to do. I never knew what I wanted to be – now I know I want to be a writer.”
16-year-old Kara Hirst, who has learning disabilities, discovered Grimm & Co five years ago during a school trip. “I used to be a young leader here, which meant we got a say on how it was designed and built,” she says. “My confidence has been built here.” Now Kara is is studying fashion at college. “The beauty of this place,” her mum Donna says, “is that it’s everything you dream about, and it actually comes true.”
Joss Stephenson, 11, says: “It’s definitely helped me with my writing and my confidence. I really like how magical it is here. We write stories, comics and make games. They really encourage us to be creative.” Her mum Jen adds that Grimm & Co has helped daughter work with her dyslexia. “The learning styles really suit us,” she says. “It’s just different ways of learning. Grimm’s does literacy, but in a really fun and creative way.”
Final year university student Sohail Boota, 23 says the ‘Emporium of Stories’ shows a different side to the town. “There’s just a lot of stigma when it comes to Rotherham,” he says. “People need to get out and see some of these events, the amount of community work that goes on, and how much closer people are being brought together.”
Last year, as the town’s young people once dreamed, Rotherham became the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture. And now the town has been shortlisted for Town of Culture – a twist in the tale not even dreamed of in Grizelda’s Trove of Twists, Tales and Trinkets.
“We’ve seen thousands of people engaged in the town centre that haven’t been in the town centre for years,” Deborah says. “It’s changed the whole way people talk about the town. It’s now the community themselves who are sticking up for Rotherham.”
The late, great Dolly Parton showed she was ahead of the game when she chose this South Yorkshire town for the UK launch of her book donation scheme, the Imagination Library, back in 2007. Now, the young people of Rotherham are imagining their own futures, and lives are changing – one story at a time.
