Dough and disco balls

In 2023, we decided to open Rise, an evening venue in the same building as our busy Bluebird Bakery in Acomb, a suburb of York. The idea was met with questions and mixed opinions. How would the spaces co-exist successfully? Would the new project disrupt focus from the day-to-day running of our primary business? Would our customers and team embrace the idea? We understood these concerns and took the risks seriously.

From home to high street

My husband Al and I started a Real Bread microbakery in 2012 and our business has grown in slow increments. After being priced out of London, we began baking in the tiny kitchen of our two-up two-down house in the heart of York. We’d sell our sourdough bread at the local market and cycle it over to a community-owned pub. At the same time, we were raising our young family in the space where we baked, juggling childcare with the demands of a fledgling business.

New customers became regulars and we made the leap from microbakery to high street bakery. As demand grew, our team did too; we rented two small shops and a space to bake from in nearby Malton. We stayed open throughout the pandemic, taught our kids to bake and launched dough-to-door, a home-delivery service.

Later, we opened new shops in Holmfirth and Beverley, moving our bread making hub to Acomb. It was the largest space we’d leased and, for the first ever time, our night bakers weren’t shaping loaves shoulder-to-shoulder. We invested in a new oven and quickly doubled our team and wholesale customers. A large, accessible café space was our next leap of faith which, thankfully, attracted an enthusiastic crowd from day one. 

Why rock the boat?

We were the busiest we’d ever been and happy with our lot, so why rock the boat by opening an evening venue? The easy answer could be that Rise is a bit of a passion project. We are enthusiastic about the arts and seeing them reduced on school curriculums and in universities is dispiriting. It certainly is a labour of love, but that isn’t the whole truth.

While the need for societal cohesion has perhaps never been stronger, grassroots venues are facing real threats of closure. Relentless government cuts to the arts and to public spaces contribute to isolated and divided communities. We had an active, supportive community and a ready-made space. We were already paying rent and bills and if we opened a venue, our operating costs would be underpinned by the bakery itself. Many of our front-of-house café team were students, eager for extra shifts and hours. If we could muster the drive for such a project, our bakery could be further embedded in the community, adding value to our own business and the area in which we live and work. As we began to develop a robust operating model for Rise, we also began to garner a clearer vision for how it might look.

There were investments to be made, including buying lighting and sound equipment (though many bands bring their own), an alcohol licence, extra staffing, a small stage and so on. But part of the payoff is that working with artists, poets, theatre-makers, musicians and promoters has introduced our Real Bread to a new demographic. The same people who come to a poetry night or to see a play will now come to us for a loaf of bread. The cross-pollination has yielded financial reward and our customers have clear evidence that we are truly invested in our local community. In the era of cheap brands, identikit high streets and out-of-town shopping centres, this is vital buy-in for a small business.

Team effort

While the bakers are shaping and baking sourdough behind a big wall, Rise comes alive. Our bakery stage plays host to live music, poetry, theatre, improv nights, DJs, craft workshops, drag and burlesque shows, storytelling, supper clubs, Northern Soul dancing and loads more. We work with all sorts of talented and interesting people to make the project work. We are firmly on the map of creative venues and our team feel that they are part of something different and special - plus they all get free tickets to gigs.

We pay all our employees the real Living Wage and our team contributes to ideas and has the opportunity to develop and showcase their skills through Rise. One barista is running lino-cutting workshops, another is designing posters and one of the bakers is helping with the menu for an upcoming pintxos supper club.

Community

We also use some of our private hire and bar profits to help fund free and low-cost community engagement projects. These include STEW (modelled on SOUP movement events, which began in Chicago) where punters pay £5 for a steaming bowl of stew and sourdough, while listening to five-minute pitches from local charities and not-for-profits. Everybody votes, and the winner receives the ticket money. This type of events help to build resilient relationships in a lively suburb that has largely been overlooked by central York funding. 

People continue to move to Acomb from around the UK and beyond and we like to think we play a big part in making our evolving local community a progressive, culturally-rich and socially-sensitive environment. Bluebird Bakery is still an independent, family-run business, for which opening Rise was a risk. So far, it is paying off and our bakery has become (as far as we are aware) the only one with a stage, spotlights and a disco ball.

@bluebirdbakeryyorkshire @rise_bluebird

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 64, October 2025.

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