The Club on the Edge of Town: A Pandemic Memoir

When the theatre company, Slung Low moved into the oldest working men's club in Britain it looked like, in the post-industrial Leeds city centre ward of Holbeck, a small moment of peace had broken out in a tiny corner of the culture war raging across Brexit Britain.

But the Covid crisis hit and the shows stopped, the bars were shuttered and, like so much of the arts industry, it was unclear what the most useful thing a theatre company holed up in a closed pub could do.

The answer was to become a food bank and one-stop-help-shop for those in need. In a year they would deliver over 11000 food parcels, gather themselves an army of scores of volunteers and find themselves back in the middle of that culture war.

As they strive to find a reliable source of food for increasing demand in their community Slung Low come to realise that even the simplest act in this world of food and charity in the Covid age is complicated, there's no such thing as a pure act. Filled with stories about those who deliver the food and those who receive it this is the vivid story of the cost of doing the right thing in a difficult world where nothing is clear.