Overview

Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) was founded as a partnership between Saul Hewish and Chris Johnston in 1999. Rideout is a leading organisation in developing arts-based approaches to working with people in prison and staff working in UK prisons.

Hewish had previously founded, and served as director of Geese Theatre and worked with youth offending organisations, social services departments, and special educational settings in the UK under the banner of Acting Out. Johnson previously worked in community theatre, including founding and running Insight Arts Trust from 1989 to 1999 and the Round Festival. Insight worked with the Probation Service, producing arts programmes for prison and probation contexts. 

Rideout began work conducting drama-based workshops in collaboration with prison staff over an eight year period (1999-2007). Alongside this work, Rideout worked in numerous prisons on Repeating Stories (2002), a cross-artform project which resulted in the production of kinetic sculptures. The success of this project led to Rideout receiving core funding from ACE between 2003 and 2011.

Some of their projects include: Talent 4 (2009-2018), a project which consisted of ‘strength-based’ workshops to identify things that participants were good at to improve employability. The workshops were run 85 times, and used across Europe.

Go to Jail (2010-2016), touring a replica of a prison cell with two actors with experience of prison ‘living’ in it, which invited interaction and responses from the audience.

Past Time (2018) which explored the history of prison food, the success of which led to Staging Time (2019), a project consisting of three performing arts residencies exploring aspects of prison history.

And 28 Days, a series of drama workshops looking at means of maintaining family relationships.

In 2016, Rideout began their current project The Social Agency, an arts-based support group for autistic adults and people with mild learning disabilities. This includes a series of podcasts created by participants under the title ‘Remote Operations’.

What the collection holds

The collection contains records relating to the administration of the company as well as records pertaining to specific projects undertaken by Rideout. This includes correspondence, objects used during projects, scripts, images and audio-visual material produced and used by Rideout over the course of its existence, along with publications produced by members of the organisation during that time. Access to some material may be restricted to comply with UK Data Protection legislation. Furthermore, additional access considerations have been made with respect to imagery or documentation that features people in prisons.

The Rideout company archive was catalogued as part of an AHRC funded research project and can be searched via the online catalogue.  

Further information

More information about Rideout its current work can be found on its website.