On George Street in Altrincham, just opposite the Bricklayers pub, there’s a space that doesn’t fit neatly into categories. It’s not quite a shop, not quite a studio, not quite a classroom. Walk through the door and you might find someone learning film photography, another person creating a photo book, or a business owner finally articulating what their company actually does.
This is Share Your Story, and its founder, Simon Hepburn, has spent decades learning that the most powerful asset any of us possess isn’t always obvious until someone asks the right questions.
Hepburn’s journey from a council estate in Sunderland to opening a creative hub in one of Greater Manchester’s most vibrant towns is itself a study in unexpected trajectories. It winds through Oxford chemistry labs, corporate marketing departments, secondary school classrooms, and eventually to a shopfront designed to help others discover narratives they didn’t know they had.
The Sunderland Years
Growing up in Sunderland in the 1970s and 80s, Hepburn experienced what he describes as a post-war, working-class reality. His parents were teachers, which marked them as relatively well-off in a city that, at one point, briefly held the dubious distinction of being Europe’s car crime capital before Liverpool claimed the title.
“We didn’t understand that there were rich people, people who were well off, and people who were working class,” Hepburn recalls. “It was a very different world.”
With twin siblings born when he was just two and a half, his parents were overwhelmed with childcare. Young Simon spent significant time with his grandparents—members of that stoic, NHS-supporting generation who built their lives in council houses and believed deeply in the promise of the welfare state.
The shift from that world to Oxford University was seismic. Arriving in the 1980s to study chemistry, Hepburn encountered “bling money” for the first time—a culture of wealth and privilege he hadn’t known existed.
“It was a major shock,” he admits.
The experience taught him an early lesson about storytelling: recognise what you don’t know, and learn to work with people who see the world differently.
Among them was a fellow student whose printer he once fixed so she could submit an essay. That student would later become Prime Minister—a fact Hepburn mentions with characteristic understatement before noting they “don’t talk about her very much.”
The chemistry degree may have been the official purpose of his Oxford years, but it was the student newspaper where his real education began.
Finding the Story
Working on one of three weekly student newspapers serving a community of 30,000—an almost unimaginable level of journalistic activity today—Hepburn discovered where his real interest lay.
He was one of only two science students involved. Everyone else came from arts backgrounds, creating a collision of perspectives that fascinated him.
“I think science has always been the thing I was better at, but not the thing I really enjoyed,” he reflects.
In an era when students were simply told to “do the thing you’re best at,” Hepburn followed that logic to chemistry. With today’s career guidance, he suspects journalism would have been the obvious choice.
The newspaper introduced him to both the power and the peril of storytelling. One particularly memorable incident involved publishing rumours about Prime Minister John Major’s affair with government minister Edwina Currie. The Oxford Student was one of only two publications in the country to run the story, which later proved true.
“I was sitting in the office, got a phone call from the government lawyers saying, ‘You better retract this and we will sue you,’” Hepburn remembers. “I had no idea what to do with it.”
That baptism by legal fire would prove unexpectedly useful as his career evolved from journalism to corporate marketing, teaching, and eventually entrepreneurship.
The Corporate Education
After Oxford, Hepburn moved into marketing, working for major companies including Esso and Reed. These roles became masterclasses in communicating at scale.
At Reed, the recruitment giant, he worked with a steady stream of workplace surveys and data. His job was to find the newsworthy angle, pitch it to journalists, and turn employment statistics into stories people cared about.
This was pre-social media, pre-content marketing. Success meant landing stories in newspapers and magazines—convincing editors that your data said something meaningful about the wider culture or economy.
Not every idea worked. He recalls a 1996 survey suggesting politicians should consider fitting spikes to steering wheels to reduce accidents by making drivers more cautious.
“We attempted to publicise that, and it didn’t really go anywhere,” he says with dry humour. “So don’t always do all the stories that people suggest.”
But the wins taught him what resonates: how to frame complex information, how to uncover the human impact behind abstract numbers, and how to understand the wider conversation people are already having.
Alongside full-time work, he studied for an MBA at Henley Business School. Evenings and weekends were spent in seminars and reading business theory—not to tick boxes, but to understand how organisations function and how stories flow through them.
“I’ve always invested in continual learning,” he says.
The Classroom Revelation
Then came another shift: Hepburn retrained as a teacher at the Institute of Education in London and moved into secondary education.
He worked in several schools, eventually becoming Head of Chemistry and Head of Careers at St Bede’s College in Manchester.
The move from corporate marketing to the classroom might seem dramatic, but for Hepburn it made sense.
“When you’re teaching, you’re constantly telling stories,” he explains. “You’re making complex concepts accessible, you’re inspiring curiosity, you’re helping young people see themselves in narratives they hadn’t considered before.”
The careers role resonated deeply. Having once been advised simply to pursue what he was best at rather than what he loved, he was determined to help students think more broadly about their futures.
Success, he’d learned, isn’t about following a prescribed path. It’s about understanding yourself—and being willing to change direction.
The Altrincham Opportunity
After years in London—“as everyone does,” Hepburn jokes—he and his partner decided to move north. With Rachael already working from home before it became the norm, and Simon able to teach anywhere, Altrincham offered proximity to family and a different pace of life.
It also offered a gap.
The town had galleries, restaurants, a thriving market, and a strong cultural scene. What it lacked was a space dedicated to helping people actively create and preserve their stories—not just as marketing content, but as meaningful personal archives.
“There were all these people with stories they wanted to tell or preserve, but they didn’t know how to start,” Hepburn observed.
Some had boxes of old photographs. Others were writing memoirs or starting podcasts. Local businesses struggled to articulate their impact beyond transactional descriptions.
In May 2025, Share Your Story opened its doors.
The space defies easy categorisation. At the back, there’s a studio equipped for podcasting, video and photography. One wall houses cameras, audio-visual gear and film photography supplies. Books and journals offer prompts for fiction, memoir and business storytelling. There are services too: photo books, printing, framing and courses.
“What generally happens is people come in and we talk for a while,” Hepburn says. “It’s really nice being in the store where you’re actually talking to people and taking them round and explaining.”
That conversation is the business.
Democratizing the Narrative
When asked to define storytelling beyond the buzzword, Hepburn keeps it simple.
“It’s about impact. It’s about connection. For a business, it’s thinking about what you’ve done for people and looking at the impact you’ve had—taking it beyond ‘we saved them this much money’ to what that actually means for people’s lives.”
For individuals, it’s even more fundamental.
“Everyone has a story,” he insists, “but many people don’t recognise it until someone asks the right questions.”
The film photography club at Share Your Story embodies that philosophy. It brings together different generations around a shared analogue process. In a world of AI-generated images and infinite digital storage, people are choosing film—waiting for processing, holding prints in their hands.
“I think they are far more likely to pick up a film camera, or to pick up a notebook,” Hepburn says of younger creatives. “An AI could do the technical stuff, but what people are moving back to is the physical stuff they can have more control over themselves.”
The Stories That Emerge
Eight months in, powerful narratives have already surfaced.
“Everyone’s path to storytelling is different,” he says. “Some people need technical skills. Some need prompts and structure. Some just need permission to think their story matters.”
There are memoir workshops, fiction courses, technical training sessions—and long conversations that uncover the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Often people leave, reflect, and return ready to commit to a project. The space gives them permission to take themselves seriously.
Looking Forward
Five years from now, Hepburn hopes the impact will be cultural as much as commercial.
“The biggest thing we want is getting people interested in the whole idea of storytelling,” he says. “With school children, getting them interested in the skills they can then go and develop. Setting up clubs where we can bring people together of all ages.”
There’s a personal element too. Having navigated several career transitions himself, he understands how vital community spaces can be.
Share Your Story hosts exhibitions and works with organisations like Oyez, becoming not just a place where stories are created, but where they’re shared and validated.
Standing in his George Street shop, surrounded by cameras, notebooks and half-finished projects, Hepburn embodies his own philosophy. Chemistry graduate. Journalist. Corporate marketer. Teacher. Entrepreneur.
Each chapter feels different—until you notice the thread running through them all: helping people find and communicate what matters.
“One of our major failures,” he admits with a smile, “is the 32-second explanation of what we do.”
But perhaps some ventures resist neat summaries for a reason.
In an age of AI-generated content and endless digital noise, Share Your Story offers something rare: a physical space for the patient, human work of figuring out what you want to say—and how you want to say it.
And maybe that’s the story Simon Hepburn has been telling all along.
Follow Share Your Story and connect here
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With over 80 attendees, Smiley Happy People continues to be a standout networking event in Altrincham, bringing together inspiring speakers like Simon who share their real-world insights and practical advice. A big thank you to Simon for his engaging talk, and to all the attendees who make these events so impactful!
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Event Photos by Chris Currie
https://www.chriscurriephotography.co.uk/
