AFTER a very quiet two years, York company Common Ground Theatre are returning with a new project that combines poet, songwriter and open-mic champion David Jarman, theatre-maker and producer Hannah Davies, director Ruby Clarke and York record label and music promoter Young Thugs.

"We're developing a work-in-progress performance of David's debut solo show, Made Of Nowhere, for him to try out his new material as the support for the spectacular spoken-word artist Hannah Silva at the City Screen Basement on Tuesday," says Hannah, Common Ground's co-founder and director. "David will be recounting his experience of walking the Pennines coast-to-coast walk and the people he met and places he visited along the way."

Introducing his new show, Jarman says: "After doing spoken-word gigs for three years, playwriting for much longer and songwriting for about as long, I'm now drawing all that together for Made Of Nowhere, a narrative piece with poetry and songs.

"We've taken up the offer of the support slot at Tuesday's show as it's good to test 25 minutes to 30 minutes, with all of the elements in there to gauge the audience reaction. We'll do a Common Ground scratch night at the Great Yorkshire Fringe in July, and then we hope to do the complete show at the South Bank Social Club, possibly with a band playing that night too. Hopefully, we'll end up taking it around the country to spoken-word gig spaces as well as theatres."

Jarman's autobiographical show is derived from his experiences and encounters a couple of years ago on his walk from the Cumbrian west coast to Robin Hood's Bay. "I started with as little money as possible and it turned out to be a pretty intense time, as it was a couple of months after the Referendum vote, and that led me to evaluate both national identity and personal identity," he says.

"I went completely on my own, with a rucksack and fortnight's worth of camping gear on my back, hitching lifts from the edge of the A59 to Cumbria, camping wild, and my tent's now broken thanks to that adventure." Tinned food and bread was his staple diet. "I'm not a forager; no tin-can fishing or snaring a rabbit for me," says Jarman.

Striking up conversations on the walk was not the usual experience it might have been, thanks to the Brexit result. "It was just after the vote and it felt like Brexit was the elephant in the room, so it was difficult to negotiate conversations," Jarman recalls.

"I'd meet people that were poorer than me and others who were doing the walk with a Sherpa service, transporting their bags for them, and those experiences made me want to write the piece."

Coming next will be an EP of songs from Made Of Nowhere, to be recorded with Young Thugs producer Jonny Hooker. Clearly, there is plenty of mileage in Jarman's coast-to-coast trip as he talks the walk.

York spoken-word organisation Say Owt present Hanna Silva and David Jarman's Made Of Nowhere at The Basement, City Screen, York, Tuesday at 7.30pm. Admission: £7 on the door.