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Explore our eclectic lineup of inspiring events. From death tai chi to forest feasts, birthing workshops, talks, exhibitions and so much more.
In this online workshop, we’ll go through everything you need to know about funerals. By sharing stories, insights and practical advice, we hope you’ll discover that funerals can be meaningful, personal and cost-effective.
Coming soon.
All That We've Lost. exists to acknowledge the many things we’ve lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic – people, places, projects, jobs, income, security, homes, hopes, dreams, and so much more.
Progressive funeral director Louise Winter and end of life doula Anna Lyon want to change the way we think and talk about death and dying. They talk to Alex Clark in this intimate event which will consider how exploring our morality can change our lives.
In Anna and Louise’s talk, the two share important lessons learned from their work with the living, the dying, the dead and the grieving. Together they’ll share a profound but practical guide to rethinking the one thing that’s guaranteed to happen to us all.
Join us for an evening with authors Rachel Clarke and Louise Winter as part of BrumYODO's A Matter of Life And Death festival.
Coming soon.
On Monday 1st October, you're invited to an evening exploring the subjects that everyone NEEDS to talk about but no one knows HOW, in a beautiful grade two listed house on the banks of the Thames.
In our work we've come across so many difficult subjects that need to be discussed. We've been privileged enough to meet people who are finding imaginative, intelligent, creative and inspiring ways to open up the conversation, however difficult the subject.
In our first event of this kind, we've put together a vibrant evening of talks addressing some of these subjects and the creative approaches to talking about them - to inspire us to open up and having difficult conversations of our own, to reduce the stigma surrounding them and to bring them out of the shadows and give them the platform they deserve.
We’ll be exploring stigma, shouting about subjects too often ignored and facing the ‘unfaceable’ head-on. We hope you’ll join us for a brave and brazen exploration and deconstruction of so many of our society’s taboos.
Come along for a surprisingly uplifting, life-affirming and cutting-edge evening and be at the forefront of the movement to abolish ‘taboos’ and normalise ‘difficult’.
The Evening
In the beautiful setting of Linden House, a grade two listed house on the banks of the Thames, we'll hear from speakers who are facing their subjects head on with style, substance, determination, grit, boldness, bravery and impact.
The Ballroom will be set up salon style and you're welcome to attend as much or as little of the evening as you want.
The bar will be open from 6pm for drinks and will remain open throughout the evening.
Talks will begin at 7pm.
The Speakers
Join artist Daniel Regan to hear about his practice, past and present, working in arts in health. Daniel will be discussing his therapeutic arts practice to process and manage his own mental health difficulties, as well his current project I Want to Live, made in collaboration with suicide respite centre Maytree.
Daniel is a London based photographic artist, captivated by the human condition and complex emotions with his works focusing on themes of wellbeing and the processing of life’s experiences. Daniel regularly exhibits, runs arts workshops across both clinical and arts institutions and is the Artistic Director of the arts and wellbeing charity the Free Space Project, based in Camden (London).
He completed a BA in Photography at University of Brighton in 2006 and subsequently an MA in Photography from London College of Communication, 2013.
Meet the brilliant Cash Carraway, who will be talking about the realities of life as a working class single mother living below the poverty line in modern Britain.
Cash is a working class playwright, author and spoken wordist from Penge in South East London. Her one woman spoken word show REFUGE WOMAN is currently touring the UK and her debut book SKINT ESTATE is due to be published by Ebury/Penguin Random House in June 2019.
She’s not a journalist, and she’s definitely not a Tory.
Website
Instagram
Meet The Fandangoe Kid, the print artist who is plastering the streets of London with bold messages that deal with life, love and grief.
The Fandangoe Kid has used her creative practice to process an enormous traumatic loss of family, and processing this and unlocking the grief remains a key driving force in her work. Having experienced society’s discomfort with talking about death and loss when trying to come to terms with her own bereavement, The Fandangoe Kid seeks to use her practice as a platform for unearthing conversations around the vast and complex subject of grief, something that will affect us all, yet something we are still so ill equipped at handling.
The Fandangoe Kid’s main remit is to challenge social taboos and encourage emotional honesty through her narrative driven large scale installations.
Website
Instagram
Robin’s groundbreaking PhD examined the experiences of involuntarily childless older men. He’s a founder member of the campaign group Ageing Without Children.
His counselling and own experience of childlessness led him to self-fund his MA and MSc (University of Manchester, 2008; 2009) on the desire for fatherhood and the levels of desire for parenthood in childless people and parents. He was born in Manchester, seventh of eight children.
Website
Meet Rod Silvers, a former market stallholder and stand-up comic who has written plays and sketches for the Edinburgh Fringe as well as for BBC Radio 2 and 4.
He recently finished a run of his comedy play Terry and Jude exploring the lives of two older, childless men. The story was inspired by his 2011 film England Expects; following one man’s journey of IVF, which he also wrote and Co-Produced. As an actor he has appeared in TV and film including Agent Cody Banks 2, The Infidel and Namastay 2. He has also recently played Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream for the Infinite Jest Theatre Company and has just arrived back from Sri Lanka after filming The Good Karma Hospital for ITV. He is also about to publish his first novel Chips On My Shoulders.
The death of someone we love or the end of a relationship can put us in a position where our words remain forever unspoken. Or it can be that we're simply unable to say what we need to say the most to someone who is still around.
The staircase at the National Trust's Sutton House displayed thousands of messages showcasing the words that were left unsaid, contributed by visitors to Life. Death. Whatever. during October 2016. Since then, Unsaid has been on tour, stopping at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Winchester University, St Thomas' Hospital and Redbridge Libraries in East London.
The entire exhibition will be displayed in the Captain's Room at Linden House throughout the evening.
You'll be able to write your own unsaid message, or spend time reading the thousands of unsaids that have been collected over the last two years.
Website
Join Carla Valentine, author, mortician and Technical Assistant Curator at Barts Pathology Museum, Louise Winter, funeral director & founder of Poetic Endings and Caroline Rosie Dent, an end of life doula and death cafe host, to talk about our weird relationship with death and how to re-imagine it.
Hosted by Suzanne Noble of Advantages of Age as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. Buy tickets here.
To philosophize is to learn to die’, writes Michel de Montaigne, in a lineage of death-preoccupied thinkers reaching back to Plato’s Socrates. Can philosophers fulfil such a lofty injunction? How might learning to die teach us how to live, or how to live-on while mourning another’s death? London School of Economics bring together practitioners and thinkers to discuss how medicine, technology, art, and philosophy might make a good death possible.
Speakers
Conor Cunningham, Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham
Laura Salisbury, Professor in Medicine and English Literature, University of Exeter
Louise Winter, Funeral Director, ‘Poetic Endings’; Founder and organizer, Life. Death. Whatever Festival
Chair
Danielle Sands, Fellow, the Forum; Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London
On the evening of Friday 3rd November, you're invited to explore our complex and contradictory attitudes to death through the paintings in the collection and the Gallery’s own architecture in this Gallery Late: Death: A Portrait.
Etiquette of Grief is a playful and provocative solo show that takes audiences on an irreverent journey through private and public grief in all its gory and glorious manifestations.
Take time to explore death and dying through life drawing with Art Macabre - purveyors of sketching salons infected with a lethal dose of curiosity and creativity.
Explore a little bit of the history behind angels and gargoyles. Then create your own version of these magical, elemental creatures in chalk and charcoal with artist and teacher Cate Field.
Come along to Sutton House from 26th - 30th October to spend some time with the Therapy Dogs and the one and only Pat Cat.
Join the Good Funeral Guild to hear from Lara-Rose Iredale and Carla Valentine - Living for the Dead.
Through storytelling and a guided hands on activity, Caroline Lloyd aka The Grief Geek will guide children through the bonds that form attachment and loss in a fun and interactive workshop.
A life affirming foraged Supper Club brought to you by Herb Lab London and Mama Xanadu served in the splendour of Sutton House's Great Chamber.
The wonderful team at Neville Hair & Beauty in Belgravia are offering a complimentary blow dry to those who deserve a break at the popup Sutton House Spa.
Join us on an immersive, visceral Hallowe’en experience that will transport you back in time and bring you face to face with your darkest nightmares. The story you thought you knew, stripped bare.
Join the Good Funeral Guild to learn how to put together a creative funeral ceremony with the help of the UK's best ceremonialists and celebrants. Featuring Tiu de Haan and Emma Curtis of Extraordinary Ceremonies.
A feast of puppetry, song, shadow and story with a dark and irreverant undertone. Twice Shy Theatre take you on a journey to delve the depths of story and song as a means of exploring the unknowable depths of what may lie beyond and what is left behind.
In this entirely improvised event, Zoie Kennedy (Twice Shy Theatre & The Shadow Travellers) and Drew Colby (Finger and Thumb Theatre) will conjure up other worlds of story and shadow and delve headlong into the unknown
From brilliant funeral directors to artisan stonemasons, innovative coffin makers, memorial art workshops and woodland burial grounds, the Good Funeral Guide has handpicked funeral services for you to experience. There might even be beautiful funeral horses!
Death & Cocktails.
An evening of deathly talks by Dr John Troyer, Dr Helen Frisby, Nuri McBride, Ivor Williams and Sarah Kingham supplemented by death themed cocktails from the bar.
Join the founder of Death Cafe, Jon Underwood, for an evening of talking about death, dying, live and living in Sutton House's Great Chamber.
Life in one corner, death in another and grief centre stage; join us at the National Trust's Sutton House for an interactive & thought provoking spin on grief from The Grief Geek, Caroline Lloyd.
So you want to work in the #DeathBiz? Join the Good Funeral Guild to hear from a fascinating panel of people who work in all aspects of funeral service. From mortuary technicians, funeral directors, natural burial ground managers, crematorium superintendents to Funeralworld CEOs.
Bringing together over 15 years’ experience in the birth world, midwife and author Clemmie Hooper and birth educator and yesmum® founder Hollie de Cruz are joining forces to present "In The Beginning", an exploration of their insights into the world of birth.
