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This June, artist Anna Maria Nabirye will host a pop-up of Black British Kitchens: The Funnest Room in the House at Towner. Here, Anna Maria writes about a visit to SAWN Allotments in Oldham for a summer cookout with the community. Anna Maria met the SAWN team by chance when they happened across Afri-Co-Lab, a shopfront gallery she founded in St Leonards, built on the cultural mash-up of Ugandan & British culture.

Date: 11 September 2025
Location: SAWN Allotment, Oldham
Team: Nicky Childs, Esther Collins, Audrey Murphy, Lillian Musiitwa, Anna Maria Nabirye, Rose Ssali

I met the SAWN team by chance in 2023 in my home town of St Leonards, East Sussex. They were on a research trip to find out about co-operatives and community assets here in Hastings & St Leonards, and they passed by Afri-Co-Lab when we were closed, returning in the morning to see if we were there. The Lab wasn’t meant to be open, but I happened to be working there with a friend on another project, so they walked into my creative home. It was clear from the get-go we were kindred spirits.

The founding members of SAWN are Ugandan, which created an immediate kinship. It's not everyday three Ugandan creative activists walk into the creative hub you founded in a small seaside town, working from the cultural mash-up of your British and Ugandan heritage. It became clear we had to reunite, and some collaboration was destined in the future. Fast forward to 2025. After lots of conversations, emails and a visit to see their amazing space in Oldham, where I was equally soothed and thrilled by the warmth of SAWN’s welcome, here we were starting a collaboration, where The Funnest Room in the House pop-up would be visiting their allotment kitchen garden.

In anticipation of our summer 2026 pop-up collab, we were invited to spend the day with them in September for their Community Harvest Cookout. SAWN had been gifted a tired allotment, with no access to water, in the middle of urban Oldham. Through their elders programme, they had transformed this allotment into a vibrant growing space, with both local produce and ingredients from their homelands, and today was the day where all the women gathered to harvest a bumper crop, cooking a feast for the wider SAWN community. I brought Esther Collins (Head of Learning at Towner) to the cookout, knowing she was working towards creating a nature-focused programme for Black Robin Farm in the South Downs. It felt like a great connection - like all good African diaspora parties, friends of friends are always welcome and there is always enough food in the pot!

We chatted, cooked over open fires and roasted chicken in rain ponchos (we were still in Oldham) while the stereo blasted out tunes from across the globe. Highlife and Afrobeats mixed with Euro-pop and American chart hits. At one point I realised I still remembered the dance to the Macarena! The sun came out and treated us to a delightful rainbow. Families from neighbouring homes popped down to share a plate. I was given jobs - taught, corrected and re-taught how to prepare greens that were a staple from Zimbabwe - these hadn’t travelled that far and had been grown in this unassuming corner of industrial Oldham. This green, vibrant, fertile kitchen garden, with corn taller than all 5'11" of me, was surrounded by warehouses and suburban rows of houses - an unlikely oasis, but thriving all the same.

The work that SAWN does is epic, they are amazing - I have never met such a group of ambitious, formidable, open-hearted, intelligent, powerful women. I was left inspired and in awe of all they do and how they do it. It is an honour to know my corner kitchen pop-up installation is being given space to live and thrive in this community. Spending the day with SAWN mamas and the wider community was the balm I didn’t know I needed. It transported me back to Uganda, to being surrounded by my aunties, cooking multiple dishes for 30+ people, whilst laughing, learning and loving seasoning the food and our hearts.

Read next: Getting to Know All About You - Four day residency at Towner Eastbourne