A Final Word

It is 15 May 2025, and I am waiting in the Creative Learning Space in the Warwick Arts Centre for a celebration event that is the culmination of a six-week project with the local community theatre group Underground Lights, which works with and for people who have experienced homelessness, mental distress, and social isolation. Funded by the Warwick Institute of Engagement, the project has explored co-created songwriting and enabled Underground Lights members to write, record, and perform songs that responded to fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and stories, including Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Humpty-Dumpty. From the project’s inception, it was agreed that it would end with a celebration and showcase of the material generated during the creative workshops. The space has been cleared to accommodate tables, chairs, and temporary exhibition boards that are full of photographs, printed song lyrics, and testimonials of what the project and Underground Lights mean for its members. There is food, bunting, and a multi-coloured chalk message on a large blackboard proclaiming ‘Congratulations to Underground Lights’. The Warwick Arts Centre is not a venue used or necessarily frequented by Underground Lights members, but they arrive in droves, often supported by staff who meet them at bus stops so that they can navigate the unfamiliar journey and university campus together. The atmosphere is warm, convivial, and people gather to chat, laugh, and look at the work they have produced together. At one point, a member declares, ‘It’s like an Underground Lights party!’. The event encapsulated the ways that Underground Lights enmeshes its creative practice with practical support and sociality. One of the testimonials included in the exhibition states: I like the fact that we work together. I like the teamwork. It’s like a little family, and we all get to know each other personally … I enjoy the songs and the creativity that other people throw out there, and it’s really nice to watch their performances come to life. I’m completely anti-social outside of here, and the fact that I came here and actually made friends like this is just amazing to me, because I never thought I could go out and make friends, because I usually just sit all day and go on YouTube, but I’m actually socialising, and I’m doing better than I was. It’s just a really nice place, and it’s just, how do I explain it? It’s very friendly, very welcoming, very inviting, very understanding. In the context of contemporary neoliberal logics, which stresses the power of individualism and the desirability of autonomy, this statement powerfully conveys the importance of relationality and interdependence, but also the value of creative processes that enable people to come together in supportive, caring, and non-judgemental ways. Throughout this book, I have argued for the generative potential of socially committed arts, performance, heritage, memorialising, and creative practices in the lives and afterlives of people affected by homelessness. I want to end by briefly touching on how these practices are reliant on solidarity, which galvanises the foundation of organisations, the shaping of individual projects, working processes, and the relations that are fostered.