Gopshop is a community group created by and for Bangladeshi women at the Newcastle Bangladeshi Association in the West End of Newcastle. It is the only regular Bengali group in the city and the word ‘gopshop’, or ‘gofshof’ in the Sylheti dialect, means ‘chitchat’. The group meets every other Tuesday morning to share a cuppa, catch up on life and support each other. Other activities include going on trips, and there are many opportunities to build long-term friendships and ask questions/raise concerns about the local community. I felt it was important to put a spotlight on this group, its achievements and interview its facilitator, Johurun Nessa.
I initially joined the group to continue practicing my spoken language, Sylheti, with hopes of building a community with other Bengali women. I grew up in Tower Hamlets in London, a place where most of my classmates, teachers, friends and the people I saw out and about were Bengali, so I didn’t need to actively seek out opportunities to nurture this part of my identity. Since moving to other cities and contexts across the UK, now settling in Newcastle, I am constantly grappling with what it means to be from Bangladesh and a member of the Bengali diaspora in the UK. As an ESOL teacher as well, it is hard to hold onto my mother tongue. Joining Gopshop was a way to help overcome this confusion and feel at home outside of my home.
This exclusive space has given its members a chance to be ourselves and unpack certain parts of our domestic lives in a public space. There are stories – especially migration stories – that have been left untold that can now be shared at Gopshop. A lot of the women have experienced forced migration and, having a social group that lets us speak of our experiences in our mother tongue whilst sharing traditional food, we can now build a community that connects us back to our motherland.
Johurun Nessa does a fantastic job of getting the women together and building relationships within and beyond the group. Johurun was motivated to set up the group by the need she felt within her home and smaller friendship and family circles to combine her creative skills and community connections to carve out a space for women in similar circumstances. She has always prioritised the Bangla language, specifically Sylheti, which is the mother tongue of most members of the Bengali diaspora in the UK. By centering the language, it has allowed many members of the community to feel instantly at home in the space and comfortable to invite others as well. So, word about the group has spread fast.
From September to December 2024, the group took part in an art project with simone rudolphi, which was funded by Newcastle Arts Development at Newcastle City Council. Johurun organised and supported the group to commit to the project. Although aspects of the art project such as sewing, embroidery, photography and storytelling were all skills the women had engaged with, the commitment to an art project that combined all of these for an exhibition was new for a lot of the women. We worked together during this time working on a variety of different artistic outputs.
We decided that making a tapestry would be a fitting way for the women to honour Bengali textile heritage. simone taught us how to use cyanotype photography on patches of fabric that we illuminated with hand-stitched embroidery. It resonated with the skills and techniques that go into making a traditional Bengali quilt – the khetha/kantha. Through this process we saw how immensely talented in handicrafts the group was. We also decided that capturing memories in poetry would be important, to honour the Sylheti oral heritage of storytelling, and so I supported the group to express their migration stories. I used drawings the women made about their journey to the UK, words and phrases women used that often incorporated English and Sylheti and my own experience of migration to create a multilingual poem. For me, making poetry with these women was such a special, collaborative way of working and learning about each other. Oftentimes, we had other members of the group who didn’t feel like making, who sat by, watched, and supported. These art sessions culminated in a community exhibition that showcased the women’s work. We had over 100 people come to visit the final exhibition event and enjoy the various outcomes that represented and commemorated the group and its communal stories.
What Johurun has achieved as a facilitator is a great example for others who want to carve out exclusive community group spaces. Especially now as funding for creative, community and public activities are being constantly slashed. This is an example of people coming together despite that. Gopshop is a space where people can grow at the pace they want and forge a relationship with the North East without diluting their relationship with their homeland and mother tongue. But most importantly, it is a space to help people tell their stories in the way they feel is right. I spoke to Johurun about her experiences of setting up and running Gopshop, and about her future plans for the group.
Mymona Bibi: What made you set up Gopshop? And what does it mean to you?
Johurun Nessa: I think there were just some conversations I’d had with my mum and women of that generation from the Bangladeshi community, who have done so much in their lives and who’ve done so much for their kids, but there’s always an element of not doing something for themselves.
And my thoughts were, you know, inspired by my mum to think I’d love to create just a little space for them. And I chose the Bangladeshi Community Centre as a way of claiming space and being like, oh well, let’s create something where it’s as simple as a coffee morning, really!
We just generally have a laugh and a joke with other Bangladeshi women and speak in Bangla and Sylheti. So it definitely feels like a family. And once I started it up, people told one another, and one by one we managed to build a core group of about twelve people, who just keep coming back!
MB: What did the art project mean to you personally?
JN: Well, I guess when I initially set it off, I was like, it would be nice to create the space, but what I found was, as we got talking, all the stories and memories of past times, of current times just came flowing from these women – and it’s often like you can’t stop it flowing and it just comes out, and it’s lovely.
So, we had all these feelings of nostalgia and curiosity and just wanting to hear more of the storytelling that I really, really enjoyed. And these stories, they’re like this golden thread that runs across the whole group the whole time. There are just so many stories, and I kept thinking, ‘We’ve got to do something where we capture them in some shape or form!’ That’s what led to the project that we did with simone.
The project helped me and the group to sort of zoom in and focus a little on something specific. Before it was more general gofshof – chitchat – and then we started to focus on how we want to share our stories.
MB: What is the biggest challenge of running the group?
JN: The biggest challenge is probably the limitations of the venue. Where we are, it’s a nice space and a good location for the people in the group, but we are currently the only social group here and there isn’t much support to build those social spaces. I have been asked to do the same for a men’s group, but I am just not the right person for that! The community centre has been around for decades and there definitely were more creative and community activities in the past – but now it’s almost just a hire space!
MB: Is there anything you’d like to say to others looking for a community group or setting one up?
JN: Firstly, just talk to other people, just air the idea. Get it out of your head, because often we let things stay in there and if we ruminate they do not come out. So have an initial chat with someone and just bounce ideas around, and then from that, you’ll be surprised to hear support for the idea, or like, yeah, just try it, and then from that, just take a small step.
For me, the small step was to put a message out in various WhatsApp groups. Just asking if people would be interested in coming to a first meeting to chat about potentially starting up a women’s group, and I had loads of women turn up. I mean, a lot of them were people I know, but still.
I would tell people not to put pressure on themselves. Be okay with the pace of things, because if you can’t sustain it, you know, then it can get difficult.
And then I’ve learnt that I have a very creative brain, and I’ll start something, and I have a lot of energy, but then I’ve got to a point where I’ve needed other people to come on board to support the idea or support the deliveries and my sister’s a big part of that.
MB: What are the next steps for Gopshop?
JN: I want to make more connections with different people and organisations in the region, to just start building more of a network to see who might support us if there was a future project, or who might be a friend of Gopshop, and you know, to advocate for us or to be a potential partner or something.
Mymona Bibi is a writer based in Newcastle.
This is an independent commission from Corridor8.
Published 14.07.2025 by Lesley Guy in Interviews
1,735 words
