With everything I've been sharing recently about The Warren, I want to talk about something that is really important to me, and hopefully clear up some understandable confusion. The Warren and Cegin Hedyn are two completely separate projects.
They share a lot of the same values. Of course they do. I founded both of them, and they have both grown out of my belief that food can be about much more than simply feeding people. Food can support farmers, improve our health and wellbeing, bring people together, strengthen communities and show that there are different ways of doing things. But they are separate organisations, with different teams, different structures and different purposes.
And the reopening of The Warren does not mean that I am stepping away from Cegin Hedyn.
Cegin Hedyn has become something I am incredibly proud of. What started as an idea about creating a different kind of community food project has grown into something that belongs to far more people than me. There are the pay-what-you-can meals, the allotments, the volunteers, the growers, the staff, the directors and all the people who come through the doors. There is a whole community around Cegin Hedyn now.
I remain deeply invested in it. I still believe enormously in what Cegin Hedyn is doing and what it could become. I will continue to champion it, support it and be involved in its future.
But part of that future, for me, also means recognising that something doesn't have to depend on me in order for me to care deeply about it. In fact, I think the opposite might be true. One of the things I've learnt over the last few years is that if we genuinely want to build community organisations, we have to allow other people to have ownership, responsibility and a voice within them.
So my role at Cegin Hedyn is changing. I am stepping back from some of the day-to-day operational responsibilities and handing more of those things over to the wider organisation. I think that's healthy. Cegin Hedyn has directors, staff, volunteers and a community around it. I want to give those people the space to help shape where it goes next, while remaining part of it myself.
So why reopen The Warren?
I came very close to letting The Warren go. After closing the restaurant last September, I had reached a point where I genuinely thought selling the building might be the right thing to do. The Warren had been such an enormous part of my life for nearly ten years, but carrying the responsibility for it had also taken a huge amount out of me.
For a long time, The Warren was effectively on my shoulders. And I don't want to recreate that.
What has changed recently isn't that I've suddenly decided I want my old restaurant back. I don't. What has changed is that I've started asking whether The Warren could become something different.
Could we take everything that was good about it, the food, the farmers, the ethics, the creativity, the people and the sense of community, and build a new model around it? Could The Warren become something that isn't dependent on one person? Could the community be much more involved in shaping it, using it and perhaps, eventually, running or owning it?
I don't know the answer yet. That's why what we're doing is a pilot.
Over the coming months, we're going to experiment. There will be community meals, events, volunteer days, guest cooks and opportunities for people to get involved. We'll try things, learn from them and see what works. And importantly, we'll see whether there really is a community that wants to build this with us.
There is inevitably some overlap between The Warren and Cegin Hedyn. Both projects care about good food. Both care about accessibility. Both care about local farmers, sustainability, community and finding alternatives to the conventional food system. I'm not going to pretend those similarities aren't there.
But I don't see the projects as competitors.
Cegin Hedyn is already an established community project with its own directors, team, volunteers and activities, including its community canteen and allotments. The Warren is a separate experiment taking place in a different space, with a different structure and a different question at its heart: what could this particular place become if we rebuilt it with community involvement from the beginning?
I actually hope the two projects can strengthen each other. There may be opportunities to collaborate in the future, just as I hope The Warren will collaborate with lots of other organisations, farmers, businesses and community projects. But any collaboration between The Warren and Cegin Hedyn needs to be approached properly, transparently and as two separate organisations choosing to work together. That's important to me.
And where does that leave me? Probably somewhere much healthier than where I was before.
For years, I had a tendency to create things and then carry far too much of them myself. I'm trying to learn from that. At Cegin Hedyn, that means trusting the organisation and the people around it and allowing my role to evolve. At The Warren, it means refusing to rebuild something that relies entirely on me in the first place.
There is also something quite personal about reopening The Warren as we approach its tenth birthday. The Warren opened in 2016 because I believed restaurants could do things differently. I wanted to support local farmers, cook with the seasons, care about the environment, treat food with respect and put people and planet before profit.
I still believe all of that. But ten years later, I think I'm asking a bigger question.
What happens if we don't just rethink the food? What happens if we rethink who a restaurant is for, who gets to participate in it and who ultimately gets to shape it?
That's what I want to explore with The Warren. And none of that takes anything away from Cegin Hedyn.
I'm incredibly proud of what we have built there. I'm deeply invested in its future, and I will continue to support and champion it.
The Warren isn't replacing Cegin Hedyn. Cegin Hedyn isn't becoming The Warren. They are two separate projects with some shared values and one very obvious connection: me.
I'm fortunate to have been part of creating both of them. Now I want to see what happens when I become a little less interested in being the person carrying everything, and a lot more interested in what we can build when other people carry it with me.
Thanks for caring.
Deri Reed.