This Saturday (8th March) at 7:30pm, you are invited to Dock Cafe for a night to remember…

Exactly two years ago, Tegan snipped the ribbon on this strange-looking pop-up cafe – a big empty shop unit with the dream of becoming the hub of a new community…

Two years, 100,000 cups of coffee, countless friendships, conversations and golden moments later, we’re gathering together to give thanks for Tegan, for two incredible years, and for DOCK Cafe – the centre of Life in the Titanic Quarter.

(And also to eat some birthday cake and lots of non-Lent-appropriate goodies!)

Whether you’re a regular customer or a first-timer, a Titanic Quarter resident, student, professional, local or visitor – everyone is welcome.  See you there!

One of the first events in the diary for the lovely shiny DOCK Cafe 3.0 was a new venture called Singergy, which happened on Tue & Wed this week after the cafe was closed for the day.

Ian, the mastermind and maestro behind Singergy, had invited people from local businesses to call on their way home from work to sing together for an hour – with the promise that an unprepared, unpractised bunch of strangers would be singing in perfect harmony before going home for their dinner!

Was he successful? – see the link below and judge for yourself! – but there’s no doubting that it was amazing for the body, soul and spirit to lift our voices and make music at the end of a busy day.

What a fun drilly hammery sandy painty lifty movey scrubby brushy buildy week it’s been…

The results of all our hard work are now OPEN, 11-5 Mon-Sat as usual – call in and tell us what you think!

A very special Sunday night service this week:

we’ll be reflecting on the stunning, stirring words of St Patrick’s Breastplate

we’ll be praying for our city in these turbulent days

we’ll be singing old hymns and sharing new insights – snug between the decks of the ship

And to finish in style, we’ll cross the bridge to the Cafe and officially open DOCK Cafe 3.0 – the new, improved and extra-shiny result of our week of renovations!

Well I say we’ll open the newly-renovated cafe – as I type, the place looks like this:

Will we make it in time?  Will we figure out where all the pictures go?  Will we manage to plug the leaks?  Will I have one bright idea too many and be lynched by the rest of the volunteers?

Only one way to find out – don’t miss it!

…as it always does during the last week of February – The Dock’s annual pre-Spring refurb week.

So the cafe is closed until Sunday Evening (when we will have a grand re-opening as part of our Sunday Night On Nomadic at 6pm) so that we can take a perfectly nice cafe, turn it into a chaotic building site, and then make it even prettier and lovelier as we put it all back together!  (You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs… It has to get worse before it gets better… and other such things I can be heard muttering as I survey the devastation.)

Hats off to the volunteers who are doing a  fantastic job cleaning, dismantling, repainting, fetching, carrying, drilling, hammering, and even staggering down the road from the Drawing Office with some newly-on-loan pieces of lovely shipyard heritage.  (Or at least they will be when we’ve cleaned the bird poo off.)

And I have faith that it will all come together in time for re-opening – it always does…

This is last year’s race to the finish line: