Cafe combating loneliness is like 'adopted family'

Cafes including tables specifically for people to sit and chat with strangers are being expanded to twenty extra venues in the South East.

The cafes, including seven more in Berkshire, will set aside a weekly "chatty table" which is a designated area where people are explicitly invited to sit and socialise.

A chatty cafe aims is to make social interactions feel more normal and easier, particularly for people who may feel isolated.

Diana Williams 74, who is a member of the chatty cafe in Sonning, said: "The first day I entered the doors, I never felt so welcome in all my life. I never thought I would be with people again and to be alone after you've lost your partner is very very difficult."

The chatty cafe launched in the UK in 2017 but grew post-pandemic.

Williams was widowed in 2019 after 50 years of marriage just before the Covid pandemic and had to go through lockdown alone, with her son being her social bubble.

The chatty cafe started at Berkshire County Sports Club in Sonning in January last year.

Williams now calls the members her "adopted family".

She added "I could go weeks and weeks in seeing nobody other than the ladies and gentlemen in the supermarket and I am so grateful for the people I have met, I have met personal friends […] I look forward to going every Friday".

Another member who attends weekly is Jan Fielder, 76, who has been widowed for three and a half years.

Fielder, who lives in Sonning, recalled walking into the cafe for the first time. She found it difficult but she encourages others to "be brave" as "everyone is kind". She has met a good friend who she now goes on holiday with.

She added that a lot of members have lost their partners and a cafe like this helps: "You realise others are in the same situation and you can learn from how they cope with things on their own too. We miss our old lives. It's important that people have somewhere to go".

Ian Gordon volunteers at the chatty cafe he helped set up: "My wife and I turned up [at the first session] and thought we had to spend the next hour and a half talking to each other but we didn't, because about 10 people turned up […] since then we regularly have 15 people a week."

The new chatty cafes in Berkshire will be in Lower Earley, Basingstoke Road and Richfield Avenue in Reading, Bagshot Road in Bracknell, London Road in Slough, Maidenhead Road and Straight Road in Windsor.

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