@aviewfromabridge
Updated: Sep 22
A View From A Bridge was created and curated by artist Joe Bloom.
Joe is a collector of stories and experiences from guests, including familiar voices and passers-by who have picked up his red phone. There is no interviewer and no studio. Just people talking into a telephone from a bridge.
In the summer of 2025, in the thick of my second year of training to become a midwife, and in the depths of endless shifts, I was scrolling through Instagram on the bus home when I came across A View From A Bridge. On a whim, I wrote to ask if I could hold the red phone. Honestly, I didn't expect a reply. But within a few days, I was asked to meet on a bridge in an area of London that was completely unfamiliar to me. I'd just finished a night shift. It was early morning. My husband had sorted the childcare so he could take our son in, and I set off across London. I still wasn't entirely sure who I was going to meet. I quickly checked my emails and realised it was Joe himself, along with his sibling. We met on a park bench and quickly familiarised ourselves with one another. It was a lovely coincidence that, of all the places Joe could have come from, he had been educated at the local state school that I one day hope our son will attend. A local London artist.
We eventually found the bridge. Joe handed me the red phone, and we started chatting as though we were old friends having an informal catch-up. I hadn't rehearsed what I wanted to say. I didn't need to.
I'd been bottling things up for months. I had felt increasingly frustrated by aspects of my experience of midwifery training, and when I finally had the opportunity to speak, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
Joe was incredibly gracious in helping me edit the recording into something I felt comfortable sharing. There was a difficult balance to find: I didn't want to create even more fear for pregnant women and birthing people, I was conscious of my responsibilities as a student midwife and the professional expectations around representing the profession, but I also needed to speak honestly about my own experience. It was a conversation between fear, responsibility and truth. And then it went live. Within 24 hours, the post had gone viral. It has reached more than 2.1 million views on Instagram and 280,000 views on TikTok, alongside thousands of messages. Most were messages of thanks from women birthing people, midwives, students and others who said they were grateful that someone had spoken openly about what they were experiencing too. I was incredibly nervous going into the hospital after it was published. I wondered whether speaking publicly would affect the completion of my training. I didn't know who had seen it, who might recognise me, or what people would think. At the end of one particularly nervous day shift, a senior midwife came over to me, put her hand on my shoulder and simply said: "Thank you for speaking on behalf of all of us." I asked her how she had seen it.
She told me that everyone had seen it. It had been shared across WhatsApp groups. Over the following days, so many midwives, many of whom I had never met before came up to me and thanked me for speaking.
This was the recording that started the conversation:
“I’ve just come from a 12-and-a-half hour night shift. I started at 7pm last night and I finished at 8am this morning. I witnessed three babies being born, two vaginally, one caesarean birth.I’m a student midwife. I’m just finishing my second year of training and I’m in placement, and I absolutely love it, but it’s hard. It’s really, really hard.There are a lot of induction of labours these days. We have a huge caesarean section rate. We should be around 15 to 20 per cent worldwide, but in the UK alone, I think we’re somewhere between 50 and 60 per cent now.You know, birth is birth, however babies are born. But we need to give women, birthing people and babies the time and the space to be born. It’s sacred. It’s profound and it’s transformative.And in a labour ward setting, it’s a conveyor belt model. Physiological birth is being eroded because we’re seeing more medicalised birth, and we’re forming more of a fear-based practice.There’s a lot of litigation in maternity, and so we’re very quick to intervene.So many midwives that I meet are exhausted. They have anxiety, they’re burnt out. And they get up every day and work 12 and a half hours, often with no breaks.I’ve been told if I feel like I need to take a nap on a 12-and-a-half-hour shift, on my lunch break or night break, I can sleep in a linen cupboard.Being a midwife is about being with women. It’s about connection, communication, trust, care. And I see a lack of that from midwife to midwife, particularly as a student.And that’s not what midwives came into the profession to be like. But the system has made it like that.I feel like I’m being eroded, and I haven’t even started getting paid. And that’s one of the hardest parts for me.I don’t think midwives are looked after. They give their all to care for women and birthing people, and they’re not really cared for themselves.”
Everything I said in that clip was my truth and my experience as a student midwife. I was speaking from what I was seeing around me: exhausted midwives, long shifts, increasing intervention, the pressures of working within a stretched maternity system, and the growing tension between the kind of midwife I believed I was training to become and the reality of the system I was entering. I also wanted to be careful not to imply that one way of giving birth is better than another. Birth is birth, however a baby is born. Caesarean birth can be lifesaving and absolutely the right decision for some women and babies.
My concern has always been about whether people are genuinely being given the time, information, support and space to make choices that are right for them. I quoted caesarean statistics in the original recording as being between 50 and 60%. I recognise that this was higher than figures being widely reported in the press and public-facing reports at the time. My figure came from the maternity dashboards for a number of NHS trusts.
For clarity, the relevant maternity dashboard can be found here:
The national caesarean rate across the UK has also continued to rise and is now around 45%.
With maternal mortality also a serious and ongoing concern, with recent reports showing an increase of 20% compared with a decade ago.
These figures matter, but they are only part of the story. Behind every statistic is a woman or birthing person, a baby, a midwife, a family and a healthcare professional trying to make the best possible decisions within a system under enormous pressure.
I don't believe the answer is to blame individual midwives. Quite the opposite. Some of the most passionate, compassionate and dedicated people I have ever met are midwives. They are working incredibly hard within a system that is stretched beyond what many of them feel able to sustain. And that matters because midwives need care too. We need more midwives. We need appropriate staffing. We need more time. We need supportive working environments. We need to listen to the experiences of student midwives as well as those who have been practising for decades. And women and birthing people need time.
Time to ask questions.
Time to understand their options.
Time to process information.
Time to change their minds.
Time to labour.
Time to be listened to.
Time to make decisions that are right for them.
Because informed choice isn't simply about being handed a list of options. It requires the time, relationship, information and support to understand those options in the first place.
The messages from midwives were particularly powerful. So many told me that they recognised what I was saying. Not because they didn't care about women, but because they cared deeply and were exhausted by a system that often made it incredibly difficult to practise the kind of midwifery they had entered the profession to provide. That distinction matters. I don't want to create more fear around birth. I want to create more trust.
Trust in women and birthing people.
Trust in midwives.
Trust in evidence.
Trust in informed decision-making.
And, perhaps most importantly, trust that we can have honest conversations about maternity care without turning them into a battle between one type of birth and another. I picked up the red phone because I needed to say something. Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that sometimes speaking honestly doesn't make you the problem. Sometimes it simply gives other people permission to speak too.
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