The charity casting a magical spell over Rotherham

The building had lain empty before her charity took it over last summer. Now it is being turned into an adventure playground, an educational Disneyland with a backstory worthy of Hogwarts.
Its transformation has come not a moment too soon, for Ms Bullivant believes it has never been needed more.
Grimm and Co, the literacy charity she runs with the support of such authors as Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson and Joanne Harris, had been based until last summer in an old pub 400 yards from the former church. But it had outgrown the premises, which in any case were too small for social distancing.

So it bought the shell of what had been the Talbot Lane Methodist Church and began renovating it with a grant from the Arts Council. When complete, it will have a shop and a cafe, as well as space for the reading workshops that attract more than 3,000 children a year.

They are drawn there by the fantasy world created around it, said Ms Bullivant, a former headteacher. At its centre is the imaginary Graham Grimm, an apothecarist supposed to have been running it since the 12th century. Jeremy Dyson, one of the writer-performers behind TV’s League of Gentlemen, dreamed him up.

“It’s all about capturing the imagination of young people,” said Ms Bullivant, who helped found the charity after a two-year research programme with Sheffield University aimed at narrowing the gap between children whom society had marginalised and those who were doing well.

“Among those in the bottom 10 per cent we saw shifts of 23 per cent in their reading and writing abilities, and we couldn’t let that go,” she said.

“Rotherham was where the study was conducted and I started to create a model to continue the work, right on the doorstep of where it was needed most.”

The enforced absence of children from their classrooms for much of the last year had made it more valuable than ever, she added.

“I am very worried that the gap is going to get bigger. We know that educational activities in homes can vary dramatically from one community to another and from one home to another. So the gap will inevitably be huge.

“The schools will have a major task on their hands, just in getting children motivated and back in the habit of learning, let alone meeting their targets.

“So we can’t wait to have Grimm and Co up and running. Our new building is huge and cavernous – very Gothic and very fitting. The demand for places like this will be bigger than ever.”

In the meantime, the charity has been active online, running a children’s writing competition for which the prize was to have their stories read on YouTube by such actors as Olivia Colman, Gary Oldman and David Mitchell.

“It’s about championing the writer in every child,” Ms Bullivant said. “The more they read and write, the better they become.”

Visitors to the charity’s original premises journeyed from across Yorkshire and, in one case, from South Korea just to see it, and Ms Bullivant is confident they will return.

“Since we went virtual we’ve been more in demand than ever,” she said. “But we can’t want to welcome people in person. We have three times the capacity of the old place and we’ve never had a problem engaging with young people. It happened in the other place and in the old church it will be spectacular.”

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