You are invited to join us for walks, take part in theatre workshops, attend complimentary meals and contribute your voice as we answer the following questions:
You are invited to join us for walks, take part in theatre workshops, attend complimentary meals and contribute your voice as we answer the following questions:
ark bradford
Conversations for a future worth building
What would you take with you? What should we leave behind?
What are we running from, and what are we heading toward?
Ark Bradford is a city-wide conversation about survival, imagination, and collective response. It’s about climate, community, and the stories we carry. Commissioned for Bradford UK City of Culture 2025, the project gathers voices from across the district to ask: what form does the flood take, and how will we build our ark?
Over the past year, we’ve been quietly building this conversation across Bradford, through walks, workshops, meals, sculpture, and storytelling. Now we enter the Storm Cycle, a focused series of August gatherings that deepen, extend, and connect what has come before. These events will feed into Storm Gathering, a mass assembly at The Beacon on 4 September 2025.
Ark Bradford
Get involved this August
This August, Ark Bradford enters its final phase: the Storm Cycle.
We are inviting artists, organisers and neighbours across the city to host small but powerful gatherings that carry the Ark conversation into new spaces and communities. These events might take the form of a walk, a meal, a workshop or something entirely your own. What matters is that they bring people together in care, imagination and reflection.
Each gathering will help shape Storm Gathering, the culminating event at The Beacon on 4 September 2025, where voices from across Bradford will come together in a shared act of listening, storytelling and presence.
Three ways to take part
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Apply for a £500 artist-led Ark Conversation
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Host an Ark Meal with a £300 grant
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Align your own event or programme with Ark Bradford
What form does the flood take for you?
How will you create your ark?
What would you take with you?
What should we leave behind?
Artist-Led Ark Conversations
Extended deadline - Wednesday 6 August
£500
One-off projects between 18–31 August. Open to artists, creatives and cultural organisers
We’re offering £500 to support ten one-off activities that invite others into the Ark conversation. This could take any form: a walk, a shared meal, a creative workshop, something public, or something intimate. We’re looking for work that brings care, play, and urgency into the mix.
Ark Meals
Extended deadline-
Wednesday 6 August
£300
Host a meal between 18-31 August, share stories, and welcome us in. Open to grassroots groups, neighbours and communities.
We’ll support 10 groups to host an Ark Meal, a gathering where food meets listening, and conversation meets care. You bring people together. We’ll join you and gently guide a shared conversation.
Other ways to take part
Open Call - Get in touch anytime
We also welcome self-organised Ark Bradford events led by community groups, organisations or individuals who wish to host their own version of the conversation.
If you are a museum, library, funded arts organisation or climate-focused group already planning summer activity, we would love to hear from you. You can align your event with Ark Bradford, and we can support with framing, questions and visibility.
Our funding offers will prioritise support for grassroots groups and under-resourced communities. If you are already in receipt of public or core funding, we invite you to take part by aligning your existing programme, rather than applying for these grants.
This is a way to connect your work to the city-wide conversation and help amplify shared purpose across Bradford. Where possible, we may send a photographer to capture your event.
>>> You will find a 'how to organise your own ark event' guide here <<<
All August activities will feed into Storm-Gathering, the final public event for Ark Bradford at The Beacon, Lister Park on 4 September 2025.
From those taking part in Ark conversations across the city, we’ll be inviting a small number of people to join us for recorded one-to-one conversations on Saturday 31 August. These recordings will be carefully woven into the final event’s soundscape.
Some of these participants will also be invited to take to the stage at Storm-Gathering - sitting in a circle at the heart of the space, surrounded by the audience, and continuing the Ark conversation live...