How should the churches engage with poor communities? Here, Sam Williams tells a story of incarnational presence amid the post industrial reality of Cornwall. From Funeral Director to Community Organiser, his journey is inspired by examples of incarnational ministry and by the people he meets. Sam describes his experience of working alongside food bank users in Camborne as they wrestle with bureaucratic obstacles to reimagine a flourishing future for their town.

A story of Camborne: community, callings and carpets

“Go back to the land of your fathers and to your relatives. I will be with you.”

If I walk out of my front door in Camborne, turned right, and crossed over the road, I’d find myself standing in a Tesco car park. But that wasn’t always the case. Previously to Tesco occupying such a large space, the land was home to a factory and head office of one of the most famous companies in Cornish history. It was the home of Holmans.

Founded in 1801, Holman Bros Ltd was a mining equipment manufacturer. In its heyday it employed over 3,000 people and every year took on 100 school-leavers as apprentices. It didn’t just employ engineers though, it had its own printing works, accounting department, canteen staff and cleaners. The community at Holmans didn’t just stop with the siren that signified the end of the working day. Holmans also had its own male voice choir, bowls club, social club and many other homegrown organisations. It got to the point where they had to print a quarterly magazine to report on the many clubs and societies that Holmans workers enjoyed in their free time.

Similar to the Cadbury family and their Bournville village, with Holmans in Camborne there was benevolence and a strong sense of paternalism. Holmans felt a real responsibility to the community, to Camborne, and their workers felt safe and secure.

In 2003, five years after the closure of Cornwall’s last working tin mine, the factory siren sounded for the final time, bringing the company, and its community, to a close. The four-thousand-year history of tin mining in Cornwall was over. As the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Since the closure of Holmans and the end of mining in the area, Camborne (like its neighbour Redruth) has become one of the most deprived areas in the UK. These inland towns aren’t like the coastal locations so popular with tourists – places rife with second homes. Nor are they scenic locations like those where Poldark, Doc Martin, and House of the Dragon were filmed. These towns are post-industrial places of struggle, of hardship, and they have been left behind.

I first encountered Camborne in 2015, when aged 23, I moved there for work. I worked as a Funeral Director in the town and it didn’t take long to recognise the tight-knit sense of community. I got quickly involved in church, community groups and organisations, and included myself in the friendly rivalry Camborne has with Redruth. A rivalry aggravated at the time by the traditional Boxing Day clash of the towns’ rugby teams. I left Camborne, and the profession, in May 2019 to test a calling to Ordained Ministry within the Diocese of Truro. (Long story short, it didn’t work out).

In the last few months of 2019, while I was volunteering once a week in Hospital Chaplaincy, I found myself drawn to reading about Fr Joe Williamson of Stepney, Canon David Diamond of Deptford, and Rev’d Bill Kirkpatrick of Earls Court. I learned that the vocation of each of these three priests was to a sense of incarnational posture of the church working in the community. At the beginning of 2020, I began volunteering at a drop-in centre for a homeless charity. To begin with, this was beyond my comfort zone, but I quickly felt at home. It sounds odd to feel at home in a homeless drop-in centre, but it’s true. I began to learn how it is possible to live with fewer things and less convenience, what Henri Nouwen calls “downward mobility”.

Sensing some uncertainty about volunteering in this scheme that offered me ministry experience, I approached one of the centre managers about a job. The next day she phoned me with an offer and three weeks later the country went into the first lockdown. Over the next two and a half years, in and out of lockdowns, I began to understand that we needed to address the drivers of what leads people to experience homelessness. In doing so I discovered Archbishop Demond Tutu’s famous line, “there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

This desire to work “upstream” led me to my current role at Transformation Cornwall, a charity founded with the support of the Church Urban Fund whose mission is to strengthen faith-based social action in this region. Working across food banks in Cornwall, I engage with the staff, volunteers, and users to identify and address the local drivers of emergency food provision in our communities.

I trained as Community Organiser and began to have conversations with local people. The work of an Organiser is the process of bringing people together to identify common problems or issues within their community, then working collectively to address or solve them. It involves building relationships, mobilising and empowering people to take action on the issues that directly affect their lives. Our goal as Organisers is to create social change by fostering collective action, increasing community engagement, and improving the overall wellbeing of the community. Most importantly, I feel that being an Organiser is about being present for people.

This sense of being present goes back to that sense of incarnational posture, and how we as Christians, and as the Church, should be in the community, listening, partnering with people, and most importantly to remain with them. It’s tempting to leave for pastures new when the going gets tough, or when we feel we’ve done a good job, but things take time. We’re called to build one Kingdom, not many little castles.

During my work as an Organiser, I learned about the lack of affordable housing in Cornwall and how people can no longer afford to buy in the local area they grew up in and went to school (myself included). I heard stories about transport too, from people who have been sanctioned because they were unable to attend a Job Centre appointment. The intermittent services and unreliability of buses afflicts so many of our towns and villages.

One thing I didn’t expect to have a conversation about was carpets. Tenants who live without carpets and flooring in their social housing homes. Now I wasn’t completely unaware of this. When I was an undertaker, I had visited bereaved families in Camborne and noticed the lack of carpets in their home. I had thought it was because they couldn’t afford it. What I didn’t know at the time was the systematic removal of carpets by social housing providers when a tenancy is ended, leaving the new tenant with bare and concrete floors. If and when the new tenant puts carpets down for themselves, it is the case that more often than not, they too will be removed by the housing provider at the end of that tenancy. And the cycle starts all over again. I was aware of this issue, but I didn’t realise the scale of it. This is affecting thousands of people and families in social housing across Cornwall.

All of the registered social housing providers in Cornwall will tell you that this is down to “Health and Safety.” That if the carpet is frayed, if the flooring is damaged, or if there is a risk of cross contamination, the carpets must be removed and disposed of. Some social housing providers tell me this gives families the “opportunity to make it their own” and the freedom to put down the flooring that they want.

But a lot of social housing tenants are single parents, women leaving refuges, or young families who were previously in emergency accommodation because they received a “No Fault Eviction” from their Private Landlord. They are not really bothered about “freedom of choice”. If they could choose, they would choose a warm safe home for their families. They wouldn’t choose concrete floors and large carpet tacks sticking out of the wooden staircase reminding them that a carpet used to be there.

If you’re a Private Landlord, legally you have to provide sufficient “floor coverings” in all rooms, staircases, and landings in the property. But if you are a registered Social Housing Provider, you only have to provide flooring in the kitchen and bathroom.

As a Community Organiser I am working with food bank users and social housing tenants to remind them that they do have power, and they do have the ability to act, and that together they are able to change this policy that is affecting thousands across our communities.

Like the other campaigns I am involved with, I get to meet honest people who have an appetite for change. They recognise that just because something is the way it is now, doesn’t mean it has to be forever. Together, we’re calling for social housing agencies in Cornwall to provide flooring throughout their properties, just like a Private Landlord would. We encourage property maintenance teams to invest in a carpet cleaner, and if a carpet does need to be removed, that it should be replaced by the housing provider. An incoming tenant shouldn’t face financial costs due to the state of the property left by the previous tenant.

This work isn’t easy, and it’s often difficult working with people whose lives often seem to go from one crisis to the next, but honestly, it’s currently where I feel I am called to be. It’s where I believe God wants me to be and looking back on the last few years, I can see the path behind me that has now led to where I am today. I often think about the “Footsteps” story I heard a lot in funerals, where at the end of your life you look back along the beach and see God’s footprints alongside you, and when there was only one set it was because He was carrying you. I look back at my own beach, and as well as two sets of footprints, there are often deep grooves in the sand where God has dragged me to where He wants me to be. I also know that along with the occasional “spiritual nudge” He has pushed me through one or two doorways.

I am hesitant to call what I do as ministry, because I see it just being present. For me it’s showing up and having that cup of tea, listening, and showing what solidarity looks like, and what that means for the community as a whole. I look back to men that have come before me, like Father Diamond, or Bill Kirkpatrick, and if I can make half the difference that they have, then I will be a happy man.

I moved back to Camborne this year. About three years ago, the Town Council submitted an Investment Plan for the area, an official bid to government for substantive improvements to revitalise the town. Camborne went on to receive £23.7 million, which will fund ten new regeneration projects including a variety of multi-purpose work, entertainment and community spaces, a new sport and amenity facility, a food and farming enterprise, and a contemporary crafts hub.

In the absence of industry, money is now having to come direct from Westminster rather than being dug out of the ground by Cornish miners. Yet the spirit of Holmans is still present in the town. Step down off the train and walk out of the railway station and you will be met by the large sign on the side of the former Rock Drill Department. When you sit in the town square, you will see the fountain given by John Holman in 1890.

After long neglect, some money is coming into Camborne, but it is the continuing sense of community that will ensure that it is spent wisely and for the good of its residents. Our local Churches are playing their part well in this new chapter for our community, weaving hope amongst people facing difficult circumstances and helping them to understand and reclaim the power that they have.

We may have lost our industrial base, but my hope is that the Holman legacy and the energy of our people will be enough to strengthen our community moving forward. This is a new time, and without a benevolent force like Holmans, we as individuals now are called to our own shared responsibility to our community, to Camborne, to ensure that everyone has a home which is safe, warm, and carpeted. 

Sam Williams

Sam Williams is the Campaign and Community Organising Manager for Transformation Cornwall.

This story is featured in the Christ the King 2024 edition of the T4CG Newsletter.