Briony Shennan has learned, over the years, to make herself look busy at dinnertime. The 33-year-old, who has three young children and another due any day, settles her youngsters down at the table, serves up their food and then occupies herself with whatever chore she can find – tidying the kitchen, hanging the laundry, reloading the washing machine – so they don’t realise she isn’t eating dinner herself. Sometimes, she simply can’t afford to.
I meet Shennan a few weeks before Christmas at Ely Baby Bank in Fordham, a small village in rural east Cambridgeshire. She is just days away from giving birth to her fourth daughter and, with money tight, has been visiting the bank over the course of her pregnancy to stock up on formula and nappies. It’s one way in which, in challenging times, she is able to prepare for motherhood again.
The baby bank, which was founded by 54-year-old Cilla Palmer, is a community-based project that offers help to families with babies aged up to 18 months, free of charge. The UK now has more than 200 similar establishments, working out of shops, community centres, warehouses and even private homes in response to an increase in poverty, especially child poverty. Recent research by the London‑based baby bank charity Little Village revealed that 12% of parents aged between 25 and 34 said they would need to visit a baby bank for clothes, toys and equipment this Christmas.
Palmer’s baby bank, located on land owned by her family, is a sprawling green space made up of sheds, tents, marquees and even a lorry donated by a neighbouring transport company. Each container is jam-packed with baby‑related items: everything from clothes and toys to pushchairs and feeding equipment, all donated by the community.
When I visit, the site feels decidedly festive. Baubles and tinsel bedeck the sheds and a cheerful bustle of volunteers – in the main, retirees with a desire to support others – offer helping hands and listening ears. At this time of year, visiting families are also invited to help themselves to one wrapped present for each child, in the hope that even those who are struggling will be able to give their children something to unwrap on Christmas morning.
Like many others at the bank, Shennan has come with a friend: Tanya Forder, 36, a mother of four. They each have their youngest child in tow – Maeve and Gabriel, born just five days apart – while their rosy-cheeked one-year-olds, bundled up tightly against the bitter December cold, are sitting in pushchairs that their mums found on a previous visit. Like Shennan, Forder has had to choose between feeding her children and herself, a choice made all the harder because she, too, is expecting. “It’s awful. I need to eat, because I’m pregnant, but I also need to make sure Gabriel eats. And I’ve got to make sure the older kids have got dinner. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
Like millions of Britons, she has also had to make the choice between heating and eating. “My poor kids are standing there cold and I can’t put the heating on just yet, because we need to get shopping at the end of the week.”
Palmer is flitting between families and sheds, a force of nature in a fleece. At one point, she beckons me over to show me a photo of twins who have just been born to one of the mothers she has helped. “We need to make up a premature bundle for them today,” she says, as she dashes off once again, this time to gather up some tiny clothes.
Palmer – a Christian who has been involved in a number of outreach projects over the years, including food banks – realised the need for a baby bank after she saw her local food bank struggling to meet the demands of parents due to a lack of space and volunteers. Thus the Ely Baby Bank was born in Palmer’s house in January 2020. However, due to Covid, it only really took off in August of that year, when she began to convert the chicken sheds on her land into containers suitable for donations, of which she gets many.
So many, in fact, that Ely doesn’t have to vet the visitors who access the site (unlike most baby banks, which typically work on a referral basis). The great advantage, Palmer says, is that opening up the baby bank for everyone – from those on the breadline to those who are trying to be environmentally responsible – means that the people in desperate need feel more able to ask for help without fear of standing out or being labelled. “People in need are very cautious about approaching,” says Palmer, who tells me she has witnessed this reluctance first‑hand when working with food banks. In the main – apart from high-value items such as buggies, which have to be checked out by a volunteer – visitors simply turn up and take what they want, no questions asked.
Not all baby banks can do this. According to Cat Ross, the CEO of Baby Basics, which has more than 50 centres across the UK, some are finding it harder to bring in donations because of the cost of living crisis. Whereas, previously, people would add things such as toiletries and nappies to their weekly shop and drop them off at their local bank, tighter household budgets have led to a reduction in these types of donations. “The other thing our centres are really struggling with is larger-ticket items, like Moses baskets, cots and prams – things that people previously would have been able to afford to donate, but now are having to sell.” While donations have slowed, the demand is still very much there. At Baby Basics’ Sheffield branch – the longest-running baby bank in the country, which launched in 2009 – need increased by 400% during the first Covid lockdown and hasn’t dropped.
It is a similar picture at The Baby Bank, which launched in 2015, covering Slough, High Wycombe, Maidenhead and Windsor, and was visited last week by the Princess of Wales and her children. Rebecca Mistry, the CEO and co-founder, says the organisation is also seeing fewer buggies and cots being donated – and demand is up 35% compared with last year. “The need is often outstripping the supply.”
Back at Ely, I am in the milk queue with Rebecca McGrath, 30, a mother of four. She has her one-year-old daughter, Raya, in a sling and is gently rocking her as she waits. The only things Palmer’s bank restricts are tubs of formula (it spends £50 a week on these with money from grants, works with two Tescos that run formula collection baskets and takes in any donations received by the local food bank) and packs of nappies, limiting these items to one per family per month, due to the ever-increasing demand. McGrath, collecting her formula, says Christmas, with the pressure to buy presents, is especially hard. “It just feels like you’re letting them down,” she says, stroking Raya’s face.
Many food banks do not offer formula as a result of guidance from Unicef, which warns that babies could receive the wrong type, but Palmer is robust in her response: she trusts parents to know what is best for their babies. “I believe that if a mum knows what she wants, she will ask us for that brand of formula,” she says. “If you can buy it in the shops, then we’ll stock it.”
It is obvious that Palmer and the other volunteers form close relationships with the people they support. A number of the toddlers know the helpers by name, running up excitedly to greet them. The wealth of experience in the volunteer tent is as valuable as the donations that are piled high within it: 75-year-old Margi Coe has fostered hundreds of babies – she is now looking after two under‑twos – and 65-year‑old Bridget Buchan, who helps run the pop-up cafe on site, is a former social worker.
What is also clear is that, even in the biting cold, the baby bank is a sanctuary for its visitors. Aimee Hall, who arrives with her baby, Lily, and her neighbour Sophie, is expecting her fifth child. Today, she is looking for clothes for Lily; as we talk, she intermittently holds up white rompers to admire them in the weak winter sunlight. The 36-year-old, a victim of domestic violence, was recently moved into a council house fitted with storage heaters and has just received an unexpected £1,000 bill from British Gas – a bill she can’t afford to pay.
She has written to her MP, the Conservatives’ Anthony Browne, to complain, but in the meantime is having to use food banks to support herself, on the advice of social services. “Because of the domestic violence, I’m under child protection and social services, and they said I’m better off making sure the heating’s on and the electric’s on and just go to the food bank,” she says, adding that she now visits a food bank once a week. This, though, is the first time she has been to the baby bank. She selects her babygrows and moves off to explore the other containers, all of which are already full of browsing parents and children in buggies.
In fact, the whole place buzzes with activity from 10am to 11am – rush hour, according to Palmer – and it is at this time that the spirit of Christmas is most apparent, not just in the cheerful decorations that festoon the tents, or in the unironic sign that reads “cots and cribs are in the stable”, but in the warmth and generosity shown by everyone involved.
Although inspired by Palmer’s faith, the bank isn’t affiliated with a church and welcomes all religions and none as clients and volunteers. Annette Nicholls, 78, a self-confessed “talker”, lost her husband 10 years ago. Working as a volunteer, she says, provides her with company: “I’m getting as much out of it as the clients.” Parents, many of whom are tired, overwhelmed and lonely, visit the cafe tent for free coffee and cake, and often find themselves sitting alongside like-minded folk in similar situations. Parenthood can be isolating; this is where friendships blossom, one volunteer tells me, pointing towards two young mums who have just met and are now exchanging numbers.
But it is not just mums who visit the baby bank. Twenty-five-year-old Ollie Hart is visiting with his partner and two-year-old, Oscar. While there, he runs into a friend and greets him with a gentle fist bump. Hart now works in security, but had previously struggled to find work. He describes not being able to provide for his son, something he felt he should be able to do, as “a kick in the teeth”. He has found solace in talking to other men at the bank. “When we come here, we feel at ease, because it’s not just us who are struggling,” he says. “I’ve spoken to a couple of blokes here who were in exactly the same boat as I was.”
Just before I leave the baby bank, I run into Shennan and Forder again. Forder has found a crib for her unborn baby and is waiting for a volunteer to help her carry it back to the car. As the helpers queue up in the cold to give the two mums a hand, I am heartened by the altruism on show at this bank – and dismayed that it, and others like it, needs to exist at all.
Some names and identifying details have been changed
