Food, Glorious Food: How Intergenerational connection, creativity and nutrition came Together at the Bridgewater Hub

The third session of the Access All Ages Creative Community Hub at The Bridgewater Hall was unlike anything we had done before. For the first time, we partnered with nutrition students from Manchester Metropolitan University to co-deliver a morning that wove public health messaging seamlessly into music, creativity and intergenerational connection. The result was one of the most powerful sessions the programme has seen to date. 

A New Kind of Partnership 

The Access All Ages Creative Community Hub has always been rooted in the belief that music and creativity can do more than entertain. They can educate, connect and genuinely improve health and wellbeing. Our collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University on 13th April 2026 brought that belief to life in a new and exciting way. 

Four nutrition students from MMU; Samantha, Claire, Lucy and Kaileigh, joined our IMM facilitator Matt and the wider team to co-deliver a fully themed morning around food, fibre and sugar. Over forty participants attended in total, spanning an extraordinary age range: from toddlers just two years old to care home residents in their nineties and every age inbetween. Two councillors from Chorlton Park and Tameside were also present, witnessing first-hand what community health promotion can look like when it is genuinely inclusive, joyful and creative. 

“Sessions like this reaffirm why I retrained as a public health nutritionist. Incorporating music into public health nutrition allowed students to see how small, thoughtful actions can lead to meaningful engagement and how health promotion can be inclusive, participatory, and lasting with very small simple powerful memorable messages. Messages were brought to life, helping them stay with people long after the session ends. I think we all had a Food, Glorious Food Ear Worm for days..” 

Ann Marie Hunt, MMU Programme Support Tutor 

Why This Matters: Public Health and Creative Health Working Together 

Across health and policy sectors, there is growing recognition that prevention, creative health and community-based care are essential to long-term wellbeing. The NHS Long Term Plan and the Creative Health Review both highlight the need for more innovative, community-led approaches to health promotion, particularly those that reach people in accessible, trusted settings and make healthy behaviours feel relevant and enjoyable rather than prescriptive. 

The Bridgewater Hub session on nutrition is a clear example of what that can look like in practice. By embedding evidence-based health messages around fibre and sugar reduction within music, movement and group creativity, the session made complex public health information genuinely accessible to participants aged two to ninety-seven. Nobody sat through a lecture. Nobody filled in a form. Instead, they sang, shook instruments, laughed, debated food swaps, and wrote a song together. 

This approach directly supports NHS priorities around prevention and healthy ageing, wrapping care around communities and demonstrates how arts and cultural organisations can act as genuine partners in public health delivery, reaching communities that traditional health settings often struggle to engage. 

My personal favourite was being around the children! They were very well behaved considering the amount of energy and excitement they had! It was so brilliant in the activities to see the children engage in the thinking around fibre and sugar, shaking their instruments to signal the sugary foods” 

Hub participant 

What Happened in the Room 

After a warm-up led by Matt, the nutrition students introduced themselves and delivered a clear, engaging presentation on fibre and sugar. What followed was a series of activities that turned health education into something that felt more like play than learning. 

Using shakers and instruments, participants used slow, sweeping rhythms to represent fibre and quick, energetic bursts to bring sugar to life, before everyone came to a sudden stop to represent the sugar slump. In the food identification game, participants voted on a series of foods using their instruments, with real props including sugar cubes and a bag of shredded wheat used to reveal the answers. The room erupted in laughter throughout. 

The session came together in a group songwriting activity, with participants working in intergenerational table groups, each led by one of the nutrition students. Using laminated food images and paper plates, they debated healthy swaps and shared food memories across the generations before writing their own pledges and contributing verses to a new version of Food, Glorious Food. Everyone performed the finished song together to close the morning. 

“It was so lovely to see the students from the university interacting with everyone. It made the health side of things feel like a game rather than a lesson and you could see the little ones enjoying it.” 

Hub participant 

The Power of Intergenerational Learning 

One of the most striking things about the session was the quality of conversation it generated between different generations. Toddlers enthusiastically placed food pictures on plates. Older participants shared recipes and food memories stretching back decades. And children repeatedly surprised the room with how much they already knew about healthy eating. 

“The Bridgewater Hub event was absolutely fantastic. Watching people of all ages sing and work together to learn about simple healthy eating messages was inspiring.” 

Orla, MMU Programme Support Tutor 

For the MMU nutrition students, the experience was equally valuable. Working alongside IMM gave them a live environment to see how public health nutrition can be delivered in a way that is participatory and genuinely community-led, skills that sit at the heart of modern public health practice and align closely with the kind of asset-based, relational approaches championed by NHS and local authority health strategies. 

“The sessions highlighted how powerful music can be in bringing generations together, fostering communication and creating a sense of community. It was a genuinely enjoyable and inspiring experience to observe.” 

Samantha, MMU Nutrition Student 

What This Looks Like at Scale 

The Access All Ages hub operates as a replicable community model, bringing together culture, wellbeing and social connection within a trusted, accessible setting. By embedding regular open sessions within major cultural and central community venues, it creates a consistent point of connection for communities who might otherwise remain isolated from both one another and from health, wellbeing, education, community services. It also works to challenge the silos in which we live and interact and replacing value on the power of intergenerational collaboration. 

“Spaces like the Bridgewater Hall hub show what’s possible when we intentionally bring generations together. Through music and shared creativity, we’re not only supporting wellbeing, but creating meaningful connections that strengthen communities and help people feel seen, valued and part of something bigger.” 

Emily Abbott, Programme Director, Intergenerational Music Making