In September 2008 the author created an encounter between herself and Rick Walker, the Director of Cartwheel Arts, a small community arts company in Rochdale, in the North West of England. As one of the three founding workers of what was then Cartwheel Community Arts in 1984, she hoped to create a conversation which recollected or traced some of the changes that had taken place in community performance culture in subsequent years. This article presents the author's conversation with Rick Walker on archives and artefacts. In the conversation, Walker talks about screen-printed posters from performances that the author had been involved with the mid-1980s and comments on their significance in relation to aesthetic changes in the intervening years. Discussing the role of Cartwheel in relation to young people led the author and Walker into a conversation about shifts in language in relation to community arts and about the ways in which the success of the work is conceptualised. (Contains 2 notes.)