“There should be spaces like this in every major city."
- Caitlin Doughty, founder of the Order of the Good Death
“This is exactly the right initiative at exactly the right time.”
- Charles Cowling, Good Funeral Guide
"I really feel that this concept is revolutionary to our language and communication towards advancing and comprehending nature. Love it! A place to talk about the elephant in the living room."
- Hasina Zaman
"Each one is like a piece of performance art- a fascinating journey into our thoughts and feelings a questions about death, determined by the people who attend."
- Cynthia Stadler
"Every time I either learn something or I feel that my experience helped someone else."
- Julie Nicholls
Support the continuation of Prestwich Death Cafe!
What is Prestwich Death Cafe?
Prestwich Death Cafe is a community enterprise set in the heart of our town established to encourage people to talk about death. The Death Cafe movement was founded in 2011 by Jon Underwood and is present in 92 countries - find out more here.
The overall objective of a Death Cafe is: “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.”
We've been open since March 2024 and attendance has been growing since then. People make either infrequent visits or regular ones, alone or with friends. Every group is different.
We hold our cafe at the local community centre, chosen instead of a church hall or a pub, to make it as welcoming and accessible as possible.
Why did you set one up in Prestwich?
Death is something that affects us all but we, especially in the UK, do tend not to talk about it.
This has implications for the way we die with 60% dying without a will and 81% of us not having written down funeral wishes.
Not talking about dying can also impact on the way we live in terms of our mental health, perspective on our life and the choices we make.
Certainly not everyone wants to talk about death but we have found that a large number of people in Prestwich and the surrounding area, on some occasion, do want to talk about death.
What is more, we have found that talking about dying can even be enjoyable as well as useful and illuminating.
Is Prestwich Death Cafe accessible to everyone?
We believe that nothing brings out our shared humanity as much as death. As such, this event dedicated to talking about death will foster empathy and understanding between diverse groups.
Focusing on death also brings a requirement to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about society including racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia and transphobia.
Prestwich Death Cafe is held on the third Thursday of every month in a wheelchair accessible community centre with nearby transport links and a taxi rank.
What is the money for?
The event is completely free to attend and the tea, cake etc is complimentary - this is to make sure the event, the company, the warm comfortable space and the food is accessible to ALL regardless of circumstances. The money raised will go to pay for the venue hire and the refreshments on offer. In the past this has been paid for out of my own pocket but a few people have shown an interest in contributing to the running costs and therefore I've set up this crowdfunder.