Help Making Connections: at The Old Waiting Room

Aim

Help us bring back Making Connections, an artistic event series focused on co-creating with Peckham's artistic community.

Hi there and welcome to Lost Text/Found Space. We are a small, Peckham-based theatre company focused on making immersive, site-specific performances and community projects in re-discovered spaces.  

Our strong belief is that theatre and the arts should be accessible to all, regardless of background and providing artistic expression to communities can strengthen local bonds and understanding.  

Making Connections at the Old Waiting Room

Our story for this project started in 2023 where we successfully completed a pilot season of Making Connections in the Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station. This extraordinary space has been unavailable to the public for many years. This season was designed to champion arts accessibility to this space, local ownership and agency. 

Making Connections 2023 was an artistic events series, co-created with Peckham based artist, activists and community groups. 

2023 Highlights

We worked with 10+ local groups to curate a vibrant, unique mix of performances, including: 

• Talks from local writers
• Sketching classes
• Print workshops
• Mixed media installations
• Live music
• Theatre productions 
• And more! 

The response to this project was overwhelmingly positive with many community groups commenting that this diverse artistic programme will have an important and lasting impact on Peckham and beyond. 

"Inspiring, diverse, celebratory"
"Joyful, soulful, cosy"
"Very very magical." (Sample feedback from attendees) 

Making Connections: 2024

In 2024 we want to work with the Arch Company to build on our first season of Making Connections to continue the creation of this space for the community to explore their experiences of Peckham and beyond. We have funding in place from the Arts Council England and are hard at work fundraising to match that, and we need your help!   

At the heart of the 2024 season will be a new production of Noel Coward’s beautiful play, Still Lives, which is the play that Brief Encounter is based on. Working with Coward’s estate, and playwright Dan Rebellato and directed by Rebecca McCutcheon we have created a new, site-specific staging of the play which is perfectly suited to the incredibly atmospheric Old Waiting Room.

We have already completed a research & development run with audiences describing the show as “superb”, “inventive” and “moving”, delighting in the play and the place. We hope this magical combination of both site and words created an enduring memory of this work.

Your support would enable us to directly benefit participants from local arts and community groups, provide local audiences with access to performances and provide talented emerging creatives with paid experience and the opportunity for future involvement. It is also the opportunity to support the creation of a brand-new, uniquely situated venue and to have a hand in laying the foundation for future generations of theatre makers and artists.

Join us on our mission to join communities together through the power of artistic expression.

This project successfully funded on 19th April 2024