The 240 Project on Bramley Road is an arts and wellbeing centre which offers support and hope for those among us who have found themselves vulnerable and excluded from everyday society. For 20 years the project has worked to boost peoples self-esteem, confidence, motivation and skills with it’s friendly space.

Edward Farrelly, Director, 240 Project. Photo: Mary-Lu Bakker

Charismatic, forward thinking and solution-based director Edward Farrelly (left) has had to adapt Project 240 to the weeks of pandemic lockdowns. “In the first lockdown we realised we needed to keep social distancing, so we actually changed the nature of the project,” he explains. “It was never a drop in, it’s always been an activity centre, but people would come in who weren’t doing anything at a particular time, they might even spend the whole day here. This hasn’t been possible during the lockdown, [so] what we have been doing is giving everybody one table two meters apart and that limited the numbers, so we used to have 45 to 50 [people] a day and now we have a maximum of 23.

“The system also changed so that you have to pre-book for one of the tables, so what inevitably happened is … that made us more of an art centre. We have effectively rebranded ourselves as an art centre. We are trying to back away from the word homeless, partly because it reflects onto self-identity. In other words, it’s not the key thing about these people, they may have had a history of homelessness and they may have had mental trauma or addiction, [but] I would say the key thing is that when they go forward in life, a lot of the time they seem to be going sideways, or other people would say backwards, or their relationship to life is complex.

“So the question is, how best can we help people who are in that situation? Whether they are sleeping on the street or whatever they are doing, [perhaps] if they have just come out of a difficult experience or even prison, how best can we deal with it? That may be why calling ourselves an ‘outsider arts’ centre might help, both with funding and with the [general public] understanding a bit better what we do.

The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by art critic and professor Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an synonym for the French art brut (raw or rough art), a label created by the French artist and collector of art brut Jean Dubuffet, to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. The photographer, Vivian Maier along with other well known creators are considered outsider artists.

Farrelly believes the 240 Project artists wouldn’t be accepted by the art world even though some are creating amazing art pieces. He says: “In my experience that’s why the category of outsider arts was invented, because before they would be classified as crazy people but now they can be classified as outsider artists and accepted and we need to understand how best to support and even commercialise that. Outsider art was born in the 1970s and it has been coming on and on. There are examples of some people who through a combination of skills and luck have become outsider artists with big reputations, but for us it’s more about self fulfilment.”

Around half the people who attend Project 240 have histories of some kind of addiction, whether to drugs, drink, gambling or antisocial behaviour. “The most valuable work we do can be when people are actually on a downward trajectory like having a terminal condition or are in the last stages of addiciton.” Farrelly says soberly: “They still count, people cared about them, they were not on their own.” 240 Project staff are continually asking, and trying to answer: “How do we make one person’s life a richer, deeper experience?”

But that story of the deep sadness inherent in some lives isn’t one that is good for fundraising. People tend to value only the story of “how we take people and turn their lives around”, like the story of one of the artists who attended the 240 Project, John Sheehy, who arrived with an alcohol problem and discovered he was an artist and poet. Since then he has exhibited in Germany, Norway, Somerset House, The British Museum and The Royal Academy.

In October the 240 Project will have a selling exhibition at the Tabernacle, individual artists also sell their work to the Big Issue and show their work in a programme called Cafe Art.

There are four staff at the project, plus others who do sessional work, like a Craniosacral masseur plus 10 volunteers. If you would like to help in some way, there are places for more helpers, plus a trustee vacancy.