June 2026

At the start of June, a group from L’Arche Liverpool, Manchester and Preston travelled to France, as part of a shared research project to learn from one another’s ways of living and working. But for Ems and Katharine, from Preston, it quickly became something more: new friendships, new experiences, and a glimpse of what life in another L’Arche Community could be.

On Monday 1 June, we got up early to leave Preston and take the train to London, along with Ana from our Community. In London, we joined up with people from L’Arche Liverpool and Manchester and travelled on the Eurostar to Lille (there we all are in the photo above!) - from where our big group of twelve split into three again.

The Liverpool lot stayed with the L’Arche Community in Lille, while the rest of us went on to stay at L’Arche Trois Fontaines, in a town called Ambleteuse, right by the sea. From Ambleteuse, we could still see England from where we were, on the other side of the Channel!

After two nights there, we travelled four hours down to L’Arche in Pierrefonds. We stayed there in a house called La Promesse. They had sheep in the gardens there! One of the core members who lives there, called Anthony, loved them and looked after them. He was also a big Harry Potter fan!

In Pierrefonds, they had a L’Arche shop selling pottery, honey – “like Winnie the Pooh has”, Ems adds – t-shirts, hoodies, candles and postcards, all made in L’Arche Communities. Ems bought a ceramic fridge magnet and a mug, then we went to get a hot chocolate in the café. They put whipped cream on it, but not marshmallows like we have in the UK.

Finally, we met up with the other groups at L’Arche Beauvais, to take part in the Community’s 20^th anniversary celebrations. At the party, there was a sort of fashion show, which was designed to show off different aspects of L’Arche life. Ems (who loves performing!) really got the crowd going by performing Take That’s song Shine.

We ate a lot in the foyers (the name for L’Arche houses in France) in the Communities we visited. They always had a little starter, a main course, and a pudding. Ems ate everything. The one thing we weren’t so keen on was the cold soup. Yuk!

What impressed us most during the week were the ESAT workshops we visited. We saw some people making ceramics and mugs, while others were packing things like mops into boxes. They were even packaging handbags for Yves-Saint-Laurent. The workshops reflected people’s natural gifts and abilities – people who were creative, people who enjoyed more repetitive tasks, and others who enjoyed more physical work in the gardens.

And we were amazed how people were paid for working in the workshops too! Ems does two days of volunteering at a café in Preston – but she doesn’t get paid. At the French workshops, we met someone called Laetitia, who told us how important her work is, and how she uses it to pay her bills. It even helped her get a job at Decathlon. Ems said, “It’s not fair they get paid for doing the same work I do.” It left us wondering what meaningful, paid work could look like for people in the UK, and what we might learn from the French model.

Throughout our visit, we loved discovering how it was possible to share a lot through humour, even when we didn’t speak the language. We got a sense of love, hope, relationships, interdependence – and how you don’t need to speak the same language to experience those things. We immediately felt a sense of familiarity with those values when we went into the different foyers.

Throughout our visit, we discovered how it was possible to share a lot through humour, even when we didn’t speak the same language. Again and again, we recognised familiar values in each foyer we entered: a sense of love, hope, relationships. It reminded us that you don’t need the same words to experience those things.