Sneh Zaveri swapped her corporate career for a creative hub in Dry Drayton. She takes us through a day at Sol Creative Foundry
7.30am: Tea, and then the day decides for itself
My day starts with a cup of tea that my partner makes for me every morning. It’s a small ritual, and on most days it’s the only fixed point I can rely on. After that it’s the school drop-off, and then things begin. I spent years working to structure in a corporate role, and there are mornings I miss knowing exactly what’s coming. But what I have now is variety. No two days at the Foundry are ever the same, and having built the place from scratch, I would not go back.
9am: Opening up
Unlocking, putting the heating on (or these days the air con), sweeping the workshop floor and checking the gallery walls before anyone arrives. Running your own space means doing the cleaning, setting up workshop tables, checking stock and everything else nobody sees. People talk about founders wearing many hats. In practice it feels more like changing hats every 20 minutes.
10.30am: Meeting the makers
This is my favourite part of the job. Most of my mornings are spent talking to artists and practitioners about what they want to teach and how we can make it work. There is always someone new at the door with ideas for workshops.
12pm: The building fills up
By the middle of the day there are people working at the desks, tenants in the studios and usually someone making coffee. We have guitar repairers, an aesthetics studio and artists working alongside each other. The Foundry was always meant to be a place where you could work on your own thing, but not be on your own. From September we are starting courses, plus we host corporate away days and business networking sessions, so the place is always busy.
1.30pm: The unglamorous half
In the afternoon I have to sit down and do the things nobody starts a creative business for. Website maintenance, marketing, social media, the newsletter, invoicing, chasing invoices, bookkeeping, grant applications, insurance, business rates. It’s genuinely never-ending, but it’s what decides whether any of the good things happen. I thought I’d be the kind of person who was organised and protected a block of the day for it rather than letting it eat into the evenings. Unfortunately, it always does.
3pm: The gallery and workshops
Curating and planning workshops takes more time than people expect. Selecting work, hanging it, writing labels, lighting it properly. Right now, I am pulling together a children’s exhibition and finishing the plans for Wild World on 13 September, a family day about wildlife and conservation with Dr Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey and his wife, the illustrator Lisa Fretwell. It means giving children a Sunday where they meet a real scientist and learn about life in Antarctica. We have kids’ workshops that weekend, all based around the theme of animals and conservation.
5pm: Evening workshops
Evenings are when the Foundry converts into an event space. Our autumn evening courses start in September, including lettercarving with Tim Brookes. We are also setting up a ceramics studio for hand building and painting, with memberships for those who want somewhere to work regularly, as well as introducing evening creative gatherings.
7pm: Still building
We opened on 27 March this year with a launch weekend that brought over 200 people, and it confirmed what I suspected: people out here want this, they just did not have anywhere to go. The next focus here is the Hands & Heritage festival from 9 to 11 October, which has travelled the world and is now coming to a farm in Dry Drayton. The work does not stop when the doors close, and I do not think I would want it to.
