A COMMUNITY kitchen for people experiencing hard times hosted a picnic to bring people together in a different setting on Walney.

Barrow Community Kitchen put on the outdoor event at Biggar Bank on Saturday to mark the group being up and running for seven months.

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With food donated by Tesco and Morrisons, families gathered on the coast to enjoy a free lunch followed by games.

The kitchen, which is normally held every Sunday at St Matthews Hall in Highfield Road, Barrow, between 3pm and 5pm, was set up to help people in financial difficulty, with benefit sanctions or who may be feeling isolated.

The picnic event was the first of its kind and one of the founders of Barrow Community Kitchen John Wright hopes it becomes an annual thing.

He said: "The Big Picnic is going to be the start of an annual event.

"Next year we hope to have bands and stuff. It's going to be a major fundraiser event every single year. It's just to bring people together.

"We have seen over the weeks the numbers have been increasing and we are getting a mixture of people that are homeless, people with addictions and they need somewhere to come to get some food and we get some people who are working on zero hour contracts and after they pay their mortgage they don't have enough money to eat."

Fiona Lowther, community champion at Tesco Metro in Barrow, said the day was an example of great local work.

She said: "We donated some tea and coffee and vouchers for it.

"There's a lot of nice people. It's a lovely team.

"We do the Food Connection with them and we donate our waste to them. We do that as a company."

Another of the goals of Barrow Community Kitchen is to open on a second day and to do so the group has launched an online fundraising page to pay for the hire of St Matthews Hall.

Donations can be made here .