Wellbeing Innovation Centre
Places and everyday practices shape how people experience their lives. This centre studies cultural participation, contact with nature, shared activity, and the rhythms of daily life.
The Abbey offers a setting in which these relationships can be explored through carefully designed studies. The aim is to understand who participates, what people experience, which changes can be measured, and whether useful approaches can be sustained and adapted elsewhere.
This programme concerns research into non-clinical environments and activities. Any study involving clinical care is developed with the responsible healthcare and research partners.
Research strands
Four lines of enquiry, each with the goals it pursues and the studies it is designing.
Experiences of making, singing, learning and interpretation, including the difference between taking part and attending. The questions concern belonging, agency and continued engagement. We do not assume that every cultural activity produces a benefit, and establishing when it does not is as useful as establishing when it does.
We are interested in how cultural activities can be made accessible, acceptable and sustainable in everyday settings. This requires attention to participation, practical delivery and the circumstances in which an approach may be useful.
Studies will examine the experience of making, singing, learning and interpretation, alongside barriers to participation and the resources needed to sustain an activity. Measures and comparisons are selected with research partners for the specific question.
Gardening, seasonal work and the experience of landscape are forms of participation as well as forms of contact with nature. We want to study what participants themselves value, what prevents access, and how activity, setting and social contact relate to one another.
One distinction governs this strand. Research in this area divides into everyday access to green space, active nature-based health promotion, and therapy delivered to individual patients. This estate works in the first two and does not enter the third. Where a study requires a clinical intervention, a licensed partner holds it.
The goals here are to establish what participants themselves value in gardening, seasonal work and the experience of landscape; to identify what actually prevents access to nature-positive environments, rather than what is assumed to; and to separate the contributions of activity, setting and social contact, which are routinely confounded in work of this kind. This is social-science territory, and we keep it there.
A structured day, a common table, protected rest and opportunities for quiet are the ordinary materials of a residential setting. Their acceptability and their experience can be studied.
One methodological care matters here: the effect of a residential stay is not the same as the effect of a particular activity within it, and a study has to be designed to tell them apart. Food’s origin, quality and cultural meaning are researchable dimensions, not evidence of therapeutic superiority.
Our aims here are to study a food setting as a social meeting place that carries meaning for the people who use it, not merely as a room where eating happens; to test whether linking a kitchen to nearby producers changes what people eat and how they eat together; and to design studies capable of telling the effect of a residential stay apart from the effect of any single activity within it.
Questions of autonomy, mutual support, housing use and social participation, developed jointly with the Bauhaus Vision Implementation Centre.
A béguinage — modest independent dwellings around a shared court and a shared social life — belongs here as a research and development concept. It is not available housing and not a care service. The estate would be the community-living setting; where personal support is involved, a licensed operator provides it.
The goals of this strand are to study autonomy, mutual support, housing use and social participation in a shared-living setting; to examine what the shift away from institutional care toward living in the community actually demands of a place before it can receive anyone; and to develop the béguinage as a research and development concept, bringing cultural heritage, local food and contact with nature to bear on ageing, place and home.
These priorities build on existing research. The contribution of the Abbey is a defined setting in which experience, participation and practical delivery can be studied together.
This programme begins with feasibility, acceptability, access and implementation studies. Validated measures are selected with qualified researchers, alongside interviews, activity records and appropriate follow-up.
Any claim of causal effectiveness requires an appropriate comparison and sample planned in advance. Fifteen private rooms describe hosting capacity, not a study sample. Feasibility work can examine recruitment, participation, measurement and delivery before a larger study is considered.
Specialist studies are developed with the relevant scientific leadership, ethical approvals and formal arrangements in place before recruitment begins.
Three studies are being designed, each of which we are seeking a research partner to lead:
If one of these is close to your own work, this is the point at which a collaborator has most influence over how the study is framed.
We are interested in hearing from research teams in public health, social science, cultural participation and gerontology, and from public bodies working on access, ageing and rural services.