During the late seventies and early eighties, Revd Bill Hall (he may have been a Canon) was Chaplain to Arts and Recreation for the Durham Anglican Diocese. He started to meet with long-term unemployed people and at some stage asked the question, if you set aside a wage, what else do you gain from employment? His group of unemployed people brainstormed answers and found 6 or 7 practical advantages to being employed besides income. I'm not sure I can remember them all but they included a structure to the day, friendships, opportunity to use or develop skills and so on.
The next step was to ask why should the unemployed lose these opportunities as well as an income by virtue of being unemployed? And so Impasse was born.
There were several Impasse centres mainly around Teesside. The biggest was on the main street in Middlesbrough. There people could spend the day practicing car maintenance or needlework, making furniture or preparing economic meals which were on sale at low prices. Skilled workers taught the less skilled and people were enocuraged to find work to do for themselves.
This idea was copied around the county (Cleveland) and during the period I lived there (1983 -89) there were several Impasse centres and other copycat centres. Bill saw this as revolutionary, he used to say the unemployed were the vanguard of the revolution. However, it was another project RESPOND! - Churches' Response to Cleveland's Industrial Crisis which really addressed and more about that another time.
I wrote these few paragraphs and then thought to Google Middelsbrough Impasse and I'm delighted to find it (and Bill Hall) were still going strong in 2001. Comparison between this article and my memories above may illustrate how time dilutes memory!
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