Yesterday The Warren was full of people. Not for Sunday lunch or Friday & Saturday night dinner, but for something that feels just as important to this next version of what we’re trying to do here.
Together with Sophie from Ein Cegin and Amie from Aberystwyth University, we hosted a Community Inspiration Day, bringing together people from across West Wales working on community meals, growing projects, village halls, community kitchens, local food and food resilience.
The idea wasn’t really to have experts standing at the front telling everyone else how to do it. It was about getting people who are actually doing this stuff into the same room and talking honestly. What works, what doesn’t, how we find and look after volunteers, how we pay for things, how we work with growers and producers, how we keep projects going, and how we stop the people who care about them from completely burning themselves out.
We talked about The Warren and Cegin Hedyn, but we heard just as much from everyone else in the room. Different projects, different communities, different ways of doing things, but loads of the same challenges. There was something really reassuring about that.
And this is a big part of why we’ve reopened The Warren differently this time.
The restaurant is open Friday and Saturday evenings and for Sunday lunch, but for the rest of the week we’ve got this building, a professional kitchen, meeting spaces and all the other things we’ve built up over the last ten years. We want to actually use them.
Our Thursday volunteer days are already bringing people together around cooking, preserving, learning and food. Yesterday showed another way this place can be useful, bringing people together to share knowledge, make connections and hopefully make all of our individual projects a little bit stronger.
Someone described all these different projects yesterday as pebbles being dropped into water. Each one creates a ripple, and eventually those ripples start meeting each other.
I loved that.
After nearly a year of this building being quiet, seeing it absolutely buzzing with people again felt pretty bloody special.
The restaurant might only be open three days a week.
The building doesn’t have to be.
What people said
Zoey Briggs · 22 September 2026
Wow What a great initiative Greatest of luck with all the ventures at the warren. As a local growers we Woukd’ve loved to attend, how do you get invited to such days ? And what’s the profile needed to join in ? Keep on keeping on with all your ideas and enthusiasm, I think you’re doing Carmarthen the greatest of good.