From café to community centre: How Wired Coffee and Cake found a social purpose

The couple and their café have become linchpins of their local community, especially after they started posting videos on social media of their local walks during the Covid lockdowns. Pretty soon, people wanted to know where the Schofields were headed on their walks and asked to join them. Ever since, they’ve been organising regular free Wired Walks for the community on Monday evenings, beginning at the café after it closes. 

“We didn’t want to look as though we were just encouraging people to come and spend money, so we just use the café as a location where we can meet up,” Oliver says.

Take a seat

He and Katie try to make sure they spend time rather than money, “working out things to do that don’t put the business at risk of going under”. For instance, they held a fundraiser for the local volunteer village cleaning group at the café on a day it was closed, partnering with a nearby coffee roaster and a baker to supply food and drink to sell.

They are now helping to spread goodwill far and wide, thanks to an encounter with Ruth Rogers, founder of the Canvas Network, at the Caffè Culture show in London. Rogers had operated her own site, the Canvas café in east London for eight years until it closed suddenly in 2022. She ran the site as a space where people could come to connect, rather than just to drink coffee, and wanted to find other cafés to serve as community hubs. She established the Canvas Network to link these socially-minded sites, using a bright yellow sofa, which served as a meeting area in her old café – as the network’s symbol.

“There are people opening coffee shops who are not hospitable, which really winds me up because if you’re in hospitality, you should be friendly and all about people”

The Schofields became one of six initial members of the Canvas Network, alongside Sibling in Cardiff, Infuse Tea Bar in Coleraine, TAG Café in Pinner, Round About Café in Southampton and Community Jam Café, Bristol.

Rogers says: “The sites have been helping us make sure the network has café owners at its very heart. I felt like there had to be a way to unite cafés that are already doing good, but also encourage others to reach out into their neighbourhoods and become mini community centres for the 21st century. But I didn’t have clear answers about what that network looked like until I talked to café owners.”

The operators discussed their daily challenges, what “doing good” would mean to them on an everyday basis and minimum member requirements of the network.

Oliver says: “I think every village should have a hub where people can just catch up. We had a lot of elderly people coming in who said they weren’t comfortable going anywhere else on their own. There are people opening coffee shops who are not hospitable, which really winds me up because if you’re in hospitality, you should be friendly and all about people.”

Rogers adds: “We weren’t expecting to see how useful the network was. So many of the individual owners want to know what others are doing, and they sound off ideas with each other, such as how to promote community events. It’s about putting in that bit extra on top of the day-to-day.”

According to Oliver, the Canvas Network “makes you want to carry on helping, because you see there’s other passionate people out there as well, doing great things”.

“Where the world is right now, hospitality is getting hit, but maybe people can find money for a coffee. It’s nice to do things for the community but you’ve still got to make a living out of it.”

Rogers’ plans to officially launch the Canvas Network with eight founding cafés on 29 July, which will mark the fourth anniversary of her being locked out of her own Shoreditch premises.

Back at Wired, the Schofields are also part of a 142-member local business association. “We’re great believers in buying local produce as much as we can,” says Oliver. “For example, we previously had a local jam and chutney supplier that gave up trading after lockdown, so we’ve been using one from the Lake District, but now there’s a new company just opened not far away in Leeds, so we met them and swapped.”

Rogers concludes: “Their mindset is they’re not just running a café in the village, they’re village ambassadors trying to raise it up. That’s really indicative of the cafés that are on the Canvas Network.”