GRAVITATE SUMMER SOCIAL 2026

Last week, alongside our friends at Vivobarefoot, we hosted our third annual coastal gathering in Bigbury Bay.

This place means a lot to us. It's where we first brought people together through movement, creativity and time spent outside. Since then, we've returned each summer with the same idea: create space for people to slow down, meet someone new, and leave with more than they arrived with.

Words below by Emma Price and photos by Jay Bing and Bertie Bettesworth

Fifty-five strangers hit the road down to the southwest on a Friday. Roads narrowed, and the signal dropped. By the time Bigbury Bay came through the windscreen, the week had already started to feel like someone else's problem.

In the same bay as always. The same
farmer's field. The familiar DIY signs hammered into the ground, pointing toward your newly-pitched bedroom for the weekend. This time, a different group of people. Fifty-five strangers with the same reasons for being here.

BBQs in the shelter of the rocks. Sandy
toes. Shoulders catching more sun than originally planned. Strangers become less strange over food cooked outside.

Farmer Jon's land has hosted this before
and he knows it now. You'll see him redirecting traffic as the unairconditioned vans and buses pull up to the site. What you won’t clock immediately are the little novelties that fill the weekend. Unintentional congregation around a farm vending machine after a long hike. Local milk in flavours specific enough to spark conversation, sweet treats nobody planned on. People connecting over the unexpected, without meaning to.

Jon singing songs he learned as a
schoolboy, acapella, in front of fifty-five strangers. Everyone joining in the second time around. Dancing and twirling with some as the light goes gold behind him. Unplanned, and unrepeatable. That's the register of the weekend.

Freeing up feet with a barefoot mobility
workshop on the crest of Burgh Island. Connection in nature led by Vivobarefoot.

The coast opens up. Laura Crane arrives at the bay, nine months out of the water with an injury. The first British woman to surf sixty-foot faces at Nazaré, now sat on a rock with the sea as her backdrop. She talks about what happens when the thing you've built yourself around gets taken away without warning. About learning to appreciate the little things. About proof. About the evidence that builds every time you do something tough and come out the other side. Everyone in one way or another knows what she means.

By mid-afternoon a net is strung across
the sand. No team sheets, no formal sides. People rotate in and out as the mood takes them; diving, jumping and launching themselves at balls that are never going to make it over. The heckling is playful, the cheering is genuine. New connections form over a terrible serve and existing ones get stronger over a good one. A projector comes out as the sun sets. Someone patches in the World Cup and England wins. The night goes long.

Hikes go through headland and farmland. People forage as they walk. Sea glass gets pocketed. Grass gets blown like a harmonica. The path winds up, down and around the cliffs. By Sunday afternoon, people who arrived alone were leaving with plans together.

Sunday wraps up with Becky Bettesworth's Heart Box workshop, an experience the whole weekend has been quietly preparing for without anyone realising. Every conversation, every piece of sea glass pocketed on the hike and every small object that caught the eye over seventy-two hours gets brought to a table. "You have to practice creativity like a muscle," Becky tells the group."

Disconnect from reality to reconnect within." A guided meditation first, creating space between where you are and where you want to go. Then creativity gets let loose and the resin comes last. "It symbolises solidifying your heart centred vision," she says. The weekend becomes something you can hold.