Benana started with two music teachers and an idea.
We didn't start Benana with plans for multiple studios, a big team or hundreds of students.
Two very different experiences. One shared idea.
We met while working professionally as music teachers at another music studio.
Music came with rules and pressure.
Anna grew up with strict, traditional music teaching. There were rules, expectations and pressure, with very little choice over what or how she learned.
Traditional lessons simply didn't stick.
Ben wanted to pick up a guitar and learn the music he actually listened to - not necessarily whatever happened to be next on page 32 of a book.
We wanted lessons to be encouraging without losing quality. Personal without losing structure. And built around the person learning, rather than expecting the person to fit the method.
That became the idea behind Benana.
One of the early Benana teaching spaces at Dimond Road.
It really did start with one student.
Our first Benana student was three years old.
Her family responded to a Facebook advert, and Anna started teaching her piano and singing from a spare room at Dimond Road in Bitterne Park.
And when we say she was our first student, we mean it.
She stayed with Anna for years. Today, she's still part of Benana — only now she learns with another member of our teaching team.
There's something quite special about that.
Almost everything around Benana has changed since that first lesson, but she's been here growing alongside it.
We created another teaching space, kept promoting Benana locally and gradually started welcoming more students.
Then we needed teachers too.
What had started as a way for the two of us to teach independently was quietly becoming an actual music school.
Benana or Banana?
We get this one a lot.
When we started, we wanted a name that felt personal, friendly and a little less formal than a traditional music school.
Then it clicked.
Ben + Anna = Benana.
The fact that it sounded suspiciously like a piece of fruit made us like it even more.
We experimented with all sorts of ideas for the name and logo before a designer friend created the black-and-white Benana identity.
But the banana never really disappeared. Students drew them for us, parents joked about them, and eventually it simply became part of Benana's personality.
We didn't set out to build a big music school.
There wasn't a grand business plan sitting on the table.
We wanted to teach more students ourselves, work for ourselves and teach music in the way we genuinely believed in.
Then more people came.
We needed teachers because we couldn't teach everybody. We needed more space as Benana continued to grow.
And with every stage came something else we hadn't necessarily expected: learning how to actually run a growing business.
Systems. Schedules. Recruitment. Policies. People. Mistakes. And plenty of learning things the hard way.
But every stage taught us something.
More importantly, every stage introduced us to more students, parents, teachers and musicians.
Benana grew because people kept choosing to be part of it.
Then we saw a Facebook post.
Pure Rehearsal Studios was for sale.
We saw the post on Facebook and started thinking about what Pure could add to Benana.
There was the practical side: more teaching space and access to professional equipment.
But the bigger opportunity was what could happen beyond a lesson.
Pure was already an established professional rehearsal studio used by musicians and bands in Southampton.
Bringing it into Benana gave us a way to connect people who were just starting to learn music with professional rehearsal spaces and more opportunities to make, rehearse and perform music.
So we took another leap.
In October 2024, Pure Rehearsal Studios became part of Benana.
And Benana kept moving.
As the school grew, new spaces allowed us to welcome more students and bring Benana to more parts of Southampton.
Bitterne Park
Benana began teaching from a spare room at Dimond Road and gradually expanded the teaching space as more students joined us.
Pure Rehearsal Studios
More teaching space, professional equipment and a closer connection between learning music and Southampton's wider community of musicians.
Southampton City Centre
As Benana continued growing, we opened a city-centre teaching location at Royal Mail House.
Shirley
Our teacher Jo was already teaching students through JoJo Studio in Shirley.
By bringing the studio into Benana, we could welcome her existing students and offer Benana lessons to more people in that part of Southampton.
Queens Terrace
Extreme summer temperatures meant Royal Mail House was no longer the right space for our city-centre lessons.
Luckily, we didn't have to move far. Our city-centre studio relocated roughly ten seconds away to Queens Terrace, where that part of the Benana story continues.
From one student to around 350.
Today, around 350 students learn with Benana across Southampton, supported by a team of around 20 teachers.
And that's still quite strange for us to write.
For a long time, Benana meant the two of us teaching lessons ourselves.
Now it means teachers, an office team, studios, rehearsals, showcases, events, group activities, collaborations, schools and lessons taking place across Southampton throughout the week.
We're incredibly proud that Benana has become something recognisable in Southampton.
We run the business now. But we're still musicians at heart.
Ben & Anna at a Benana showcase.
Our roles have changed as Benana has grown.
Teaching was where Benana began, and we both absolutely love it.
But as the school grew, eventually we had to make a difficult decision.
In summer 2026, we stepped away from regular teaching so we could give the wider organisation the attention it needed.
These days, you'll find us working behind the scenes across Benana and Pure — recruiting and onboarding teachers, supporting the team, developing new projects, organising showcases and events, working with schools and other organisations, building partnerships, developing the studios and working on funding and new opportunities.
There's also teacher training, marketing, social media, policies, websites, work experience, merchandise, project management and all the other things we definitely weren't thinking about when we put out that first Facebook advert.
And every now and then, we get to cover a lesson.
We still really love those days.
A lot has changed. The reason for doing it hasn't.
Benana looks very different from the spare room where it started.
There are more rooms now. Quite a few more teachers. And definitely more paperwork.
But the idea behind it is still remarkably simple.
Music belongs to the three-year-old sitting at a piano for the first time just as much as it belongs to the musician stepping onto a stage.
For us, that's what Benana is really about.
It's seeing someone arrive for their first lesson feeling nervous, and watching music gradually become part of their life. It's the first song they learn, the confidence they build, the friendships they make and, for some, the first time they find the courage to perform in front of other people. Every student comes to us for a different reason, and success looks different for every one of them. If Benana can be a place where people feel comfortable being themselves, enjoy making music and discover just how far they want to take it, then we're doing what we set out to do back in 2021.Explore Benana
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