TEN YEARS ON…

Calais, August 15-17, 2025

Our mid August visit saw changeable weather in Calais, sometimes intense heat, at other times an autumnal bite in the air. We heard the tragic news that early last week a woman in her 30’s from Somalia had died from drowning in the Channel near Dunkirk. Once again, ‘borders kill’. The French-British cross border rules have recently changed, again throwing fresh new challenges at people hoping to reach the UK to seek sanctuary.

This was an unusual visit for us, taking place at the weekend to mark ten years of Art Refuge’s delivery of arts-based psychosocial support on this northern France coast. We visited the beaches in & around Calais, and the north cemetery where the simple graves of some of the hundreds of refugees who have died on this border nestle amongst the marble & stone.

Across the weekend, we spent time on the site of the ‘Calais Jungle’, a sprawling refugee camp which grew to 10,000 people, the result of 1 million people fleeing conflict and persecution to come to Europe in 2015. Here we first started working in August that year alongside @medecinsdumonde & @doctorswithoutborders until it was demolished in October 2016. Leaving no large camp in the area since, this landscape has been reshaped, evidence of the presence of an alive society actively erased, the area now turned into a nature reserve. If you look carefully, in amongst the German bunkers, monolithic WW2 structures that line this coast, you can find remnants of graffiti that speak of what was there before, and of people’s hopes & dreams.

On Saturday we visited Maria Skobtsova safe house where we set up The Community Table for 3 hours across the afternoon. We brought the chalk tablecloth, and made sunprints together using natural objects gathered from the garden. The women we met have already overcome unimaginable losses and challenges to reach this border. They showed us their resilience in various ways, their children remarkable in their playfulness, quietly supported by the kindness and stable presence of the volunteers.

Words by Bobby Lloyd & Aida Silvestri.