Rockaway Park: The Strangest, Best Afternoon We've Had in Somerset

I went to Rockaway Park, Somerset, expecting a café with some art on the walls. I left having no idea what had just happened to me, in the best possible way.

It sits inside a former quarry in Temple Cloud, somewhere in the triangle between Bristol, Bath and Glastonbury, and it is not really one thing.

It's an arts space and a music venue and a community garden and a recording studio and a vegan kitchen and, apparently, a chapel – all stacked into the same patch of old stone and scrubby green, with almost none of the boundaries you'd expect between them. You don't walk from "the gallery" to "the café." You just wander, and things appear.

There are places in Somerset that feel designed to be photographed – neat, symmetrical, built for the postcard. Rockaway is the opposite of that, and it's precisely why it's stayed on my mind since.

A DIY Utopia, and They Mean It

Rockaway calls itself a DIY utopia, and having spent an afternoon there, I don't think that's marketing.

There's none of the polish you'd get at a proper gallery or a National Trust property. No laminated signage. No suggested route. No gift shop selling tea towels. What you get instead is handmade: murals painted straight onto quarry stone, salvaged objects turned into sculpture, bits of old festival decoration still strung up somewhere they were never meant to be permanent. It has the feel of stumbling into somebody's enormous, ongoing creative project rather than visiting an "attraction," and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Everything about the place feels lived-in rather than staged. Paint peels where it's meant to peel. A studio door is propped open with a breeze block, not because anyone forgot to close it but because someone's working in there and wants the light. You get the sense that if you came back in six months, half of what you saw would have changed, moved, or been painted over entirely – and that nobody there would consider that a problem.

Don't bother trying to plan a route through it. Just go where your eye takes you.

The Art Doesn't Wait in a Gallery for You

The best thing about Rockaway, for me, was that you don't have to seek the art out. It's just there – leaning against the quarry wall, bolted to a fence post, hanging off a building you weren't planning on looking at.

The old quarry setting does a lot of the work. Rough grey stone, ivy creeping in where it shouldn't, an industrial edge that hasn't been sanded off – and against all of that, colour. Some pieces are playful; others are properly strange, the kind that stopped me mid-sentence trying to work out how anyone got them into that particular corner. This is not a minimalist place. Give yourself more time than you think you'll need, because there is a lot to look at and almost none of it is signposted.

What I liked most is that nothing feels roped off. There's no velvet cordon keeping you three feet back from a sculpture, no laminated "please do not touch" card. You're trusted to look properly, up close, the way you would in a friend's garden rather than an institution – and that changes how you experience the work. You slow down. You notice the join where a scrap of scaffolding pole becomes an arm, or the specific shade someone chose for a mural half-hidden behind a drainpipe.

Studios, a Recording Space, and a Community Garden

Beyond the sculptures, Rockaway is a working site rather than a museum of one. Artists rent studio space here, and on any given visit you might walk past someone actually mid-piece, brush or welding torch in hand, entirely unbothered by having an audience. There's a recording and rehearsal studio tucked into the site too, which explains why the whole place has the loose, slightly scruffy energy of a music venue as much as an art space – somewhere bands come to work rather than just perform.

The community garden is easy to miss if you're focused on the artwork, but it's worth finding. It's not manicured in the way a show garden would be; it's a working plot, clearly tended by people who use what grows in it rather than people paid to keep it tidy for visitors.

There's also on-site accommodation, for anyone who wants to turn a visit into more than an afternoon – useful to know if you're coming from any distance and don't fancy the drive back the same day, particularly if you've timed your trip around an evening of live music.

The Chapel of Unrest

And then, tucked in among the studios, there's the Chapel of Unrest.

That's genuinely its name – a chapel built as, in Rockaway's own words, a monument to alternative thought and community. It sounds like the kind of detail a writer would invent to make a place sound quirkier than it is. It isn't invented. By the time you reach it, having already seen a former quarry turned into a working arts colony, a chapel dedicated to unrest somehow feels like exactly what should be around the next corner.

It's a small, strange, quietly thoughtful piece of the site rather than a gimmick, and it sums up Rockaway's whole character better than almost anything else there: a bit of the sacred, a bit of the rebellious, built by hand, and taken completely seriously by the people who made it.

Don't Leave Without Eating

The café at the centre of the site is entirely vegan, and it's clearly not an afterthought – it's where the whole place seems to gather.

If your visit lines up with one of the Sunday Sessions, held roughly once a month, that's the time to go. Expect a vegan Sunday roast, live music, an arts market and open studios all running at once, and it's free to attend, which for a family day out in this part of Somerset is not nothing. It's the version of Rockaway where everything the site does is happening in the same few hours, and if you've never been before, I'd build your first visit around one of these dates rather than a random weekday.

Even outside of an event, the café is worth the stop on its own. It sits at the natural midpoint of a visit – the place you drift towards once you've had your fill of wandering between studios and sculptures, before deciding whether to loop round again or head home.

Around the Site: Signs, Wrecks and Welcome Homes

Some of the best moments at Rockaway aren't the big installations; they're the small, deadpan details scattered everywhere. An old bus garage doubles as a workshop, half-restored vintage vehicles parked mid-repair beside a hand-painted sign. A rusted American truck sits under a hand-lettered banner for the Chapel of Unrest, promising to cure "apathy, greed, self-doubt and anxiety" or your money back. A row of scrapped cars in the woods has been turned into its own small gallery, one spray-painted with a simple, glowing WELCOME HOME.

Inside one of the old vans, someone's built a properly plush little sitting room – red velvet benches, mirrored panels, a crystal light fitting, the kind of interior you'd expect in a fortune teller's caravan rather than a Somerset quarry. It's a reminder that Rockaway isn't just outdoor sculpture; plenty of the best bits are tucked behind doors you might otherwise walk straight past.

Planning Your Visit

A few practical notes, since this isn't the kind of place you can turn up to on autopilot.

Where it is: Eastcourt Road, Temple Cloud, Somerset, BS39 5BU – roughly equidistant from Bristol, Bath and Glastonbury, which makes it a reasonable stop whichever direction you're coming from.

Getting there: parking on site is limited, and it gets tighter still during events, so Rockaway actively asks visitors to come by public transport where they can. The 376 bus stops at Cameley Road Surgery in Temple Cloud, a short walk from the entrance. Whatever you do, don't park on Eastcourt Road itself – it's narrow, and parking arrangements shift depending on the weather and whether something's on that day.

When to go: check the website before you set off. Rockaway runs a constantly changing programme of workshops, exhibitions, music and community events on top of its normal opening hours, so what you find on a random Tuesday will look nothing like a Sunday Session weekend.

How long to allow: longer than you'd think for what sounds, on paper, like a café with some art attached. Between the studios, the sculptures scattered across the site, the café and the chapel, a couple of hours disappears easily, and if there's an event on, you could happily lose an entire afternoon.

Is Rockaway Park, Somerset, Worth the Drive?

If you want manicured gardens, a proper gift shop and a clearly signposted walking route, this isn't your Somerset day out – go to one of the county's stately homes instead.

But if you like art that hasn't been curated within an inch of its life, music, slightly weird buildings, and the feeling of dropping in on a real community rather than a manufactured "experience," then yes – very much so. Rockaway doesn't feel like it was built with tourists in mind. It feels like a place that exists for its own reasons and happens to let the rest of us wander through, which is precisely why it's worth the detour.

There are plenty of beautiful spots in the English countryside. There are far fewer that make you stop every few minutes and ask, out loud, "what on earth is that?" Rockaway Park, out here in the Somerset countryside, is one of the few, and I'm already thinking about which Sunday Session to time my next visit around.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.