The Metronome Be Well Café in Morden – creating social connection in the heart of our community an interview with Tom Featherston, Café Manager

Introduction

Based in Morden (8 Crown Lane), Metronome is an atmospheric coffee shop and creative business that is doing so much for its local community. The Café joined the South London Listens Be Well Programme in 2024. The café manager Tom Featherston was recently interviewed at their café, and provides some reflections on their experience and learning to date since joining the programme.

When was the café opened?

The Metronome café was established just before the pandemic, and the team behind it decided very early on that it wanted to create a sustainable, inclusive and dynamic space, putting the local community at the heart of everything they do. As well as a focus on offering high quality coffee, food and a warm welcome.

How do you create listening and social connections for your customers?

Our team is fully committed to creating a very welcoming and inclusive space, and we work in partnership with many local charities who deliver a range of sessions within our cafe. Many of them have approached us and working in partnership with them has been very positive. This includes a monthly ‘Space to Talk’ session delivered by Third Space Ministries, a service which was developed during lockdown in 2022 when the organisation became aware of the increased need for people to talk and have meaningful connections, with follow up signposting where needed.

We also have a young carers group, a running group, pub orchestra session, quiet time and advice service on heating your home, and have also worked with the Alzheimer’s Society. We are always open to new ideas and partnership opportunities that will help our customers.

Why did you get involved in Be Well?

We often have people who come into the café every day who may be quite isolated and many have health challenges. Our team need to be very emotionally in touch with our customers and we wanted to help them to develop the right skills to enable them to do that. Such as active listening, empathy and kindness, whilst also being aware of boundaries and how to signpost people to access the right help.

How have you benefited from the Be Well programme?

All of our café staff have gone through the Be Well training. We found the mental health training really inspiring and helpful, and we think about and use what we learned on the training every day in our work. The training has helped us shift into a different gear and has given us a different mindset. One of the team who attended the training said:

“The training really helped me understand the importance of language and how talking to people can effect their day - either positively or negatively and the importance of treating everyone with respect and equal kindness.”

We also attended the Be Well community of practice recently and it was great to learn from other Be Well sites about supporting the mental health and wellbeing of your team, we plan to implement many of the ideas shared and see this as really important part of who we are. In addition many of our staff completed a session on working with people on dementia, and the whole team had some top up training this year to focus on active listening, empathy and looking after our own wellbeing which was very helpful.

Being part of Be Well has been very beneficial, it has really helped us think about how we interact with our customers, and also how we support the wellbeing of our staff. We are committed to continuing to get involved in the follow up Be Well training and communities of practice to enable us to continue to grow and learn as a team and continue to build community focus.

We would encourage other businesses to get involved and make the same commitments.