John Tomlinson (JT), Executive Director: We’re delighted to be creating part of the immersive world for The Railway Children. Our Soap Box Bradford group, currently around 15 people, meets every Wednesday afternoon. They do creative skills and are already becoming artists themselves, working with our team, and we’ve connected lots of ideas from the themes of The Railway Children with them. We’ve created a soundscape for The Railway Children through the voices of the people that we’re working with. They’ll introduce and welcome people onto the train before they see the show, and then afterwards as well.

RM: The Railway Children audio experience is designed to welcome people. It’s about how they might feel welcome in a new place, so across different languages and cultures, exploring what ‘welcome’ is. Maybe I would kiss you on either cheek, or I would bow in front of you because we don’t touch if we don’t know each other. Perhaps I’d make you a cup of coffee or I’d refer to you as the sun, because I’m seeing you for the first time today. There are some really beautiful moments, insights into how people like to be made to feel at home.

JT: City of Sanctuary UK is an amazing grassroots organisation. There are City of Sanctuary branches across the country, including Bradford, and they then look to other companies to do some of the work – to campaign for and support people, to welcome them in different spaces. We became the first Theatre Company of Sanctuary in 2016, which was a really important moment for us. City of Sanctuary has now grown as an organisation, with Libraries of Sanctuary, Cafés of Sanctuary, Schools of Sanctuary, Universities of Sanctuary – it’s all connected. Now, brilliantly, Bradford 2025 has become the first Cultural City of Sanctuary, an amazing thing that we’re very proud to be associated with.

RM: We were really keen that rather than specifically speaking to Bradford 2025 about commissioning a show for us to do, we instead talk about how we could work together and embed the needs and priorities of people seeking sanctuary across everything. We originally set up specific training sessions with the full Bradford 2025 team, then started working with smaller teams on what specific departments would need in order to make sure this work is threaded throughout everything. There have also been lots of consultations with communities in Bradford about the way they want to be engaged with, as well as sanctuary round tables between all the organisations working with people seeking sanctuary – not just in the arts but in Bradford City of Sanctuary more widely, trying to connect to support services that could really benefit from what the arts can do. Having a place where people are able to come together and not compete for the same opportunities for support feels like a really exciting thing. I know that Bradford 2025 is really keen to enable that to keep happening beyond the year itself. It’s a huge change for the city.

JT: We feel very lucky to have this connection between us and Bradford 2025 in general – but I think the size and the scale of The Railway Children means it can shine a really interesting light on the theme of seeking sanctuary, and we were really interested and keen to explore how we do that in an artistic way. There are some really lovely things we’re adding to the whole experience: to make people aware of other connected themes and what the world looks like now, and also to keep the experience really positive, welcoming, hospitable. Hopefully, at the end, people will think, ‘I just watched this amazing production, and now I understand better the current context of the world that we’re living in and what we’re going back to.’