Mon 13 may 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE POWER STATION

A SPECULATIVE FICTION

Mon 13 May 2024

The ultra-green of the lime tree park parade still stuns. An early dog walk is deserving of the Hollywood tracking shots and that’s what we’re continuing to do. The story of the street is being released in episodic form on an online streaming service - enabling us to take time to construct the feature documentary film of the project. The struggle has always been the balance of making things happen and filming them. Not only the things happening but the time between. The time to notice and capture the geese flying overhead, the buds erupting into blossom, the foxes trotting along with carrier bags of leftovers, the mysterious guano on the front wall. This has always been a story of a street – a story of all the beauty and wonder in the everyday and the possibilities it holds and in this first spring in the POWER STATION HQ that has come to be known as the POWER HOUSE those possibilities are every day becoming realities.  

It isn’t really, never was, a ‘house’ as such. Always an in between space, a space that served the community in different ways- from dairy to garage to art studios. I ‘ve always been warned not to fall in love with buildings and sites but I do anyway and this one deserves and gives that love. If not a house then it is ‘home’ to a lot of people, a place at the centre of our shared habitat, a space to hold history and to build and imagine now and the future.  I still haven’t found any images of it in the local archives but the heritage project that seemed to take an age to fund is now beginning – this week sees the first oral history training workshops in the space and a growing collection joining the ‘infrastructure archive’ – from gas pipes to chimney pots. I’ve been chatting to the industrial history experts at the Local Pumphouse Museum finding out more about Walthamstow’s vanished coal Power Station and gas holders.  I lug evidence of this past into the main studio space that holds material experiments and making sessions  - rubbings that find ‘gas’ labelled beneath our feet are tacked onto the walls after a treasure hunt with local school children as we create the map of AR treasure hunt of the borough triggered by these overlooked marks of former and future energy transitions.

Facebook reminds me it has been a year already since we launched the community share offer – determined but uncertain, full of hope and anxiety. In the imposed rush of it all it was an exercise in lucid dreaming. When I think back to how much we crammed in – to time and space my chest constricts.  

I walk up the street to the deep turquoise doors and greet Kristin. She’s popped in to pack away the communal crockery from the weekend’s ‘potluck meal’ and pick up her own vegetables from what has become the local food growing co-ops drop off point. Since we’ve had this space attendance at the meals has increased. People know where to come and when. It is special. The regulars sit for hours drinking tea, the oldest on the street amusing the younger generations with tales of their time as dancers and dressers in the West End or working in the local pie factory and up the market. Leonie who’s been working with us since the early days training up in camera and editing is enthralled and has become an expert at recording such tales. Siddiqi and family came this time bringing their pre brewed to sweet perfection tea. The continued horticultural collaborations are opening up new connections. This year he’s been taking cuttings of the roses overflowing the park fences and a rose garden and orchard are beginning in The Grange – the housing estate at the top of the road. All these relationships take time and need space. The crockery was washed up and used straight after by Stories and Supper at their regular, joyful meetings to which tentative new participants are arriving. I think that’s why Kristin popped in – she doesn’t quite trust Helen’s stacking methodology.

Dan and Natalie are already upstairs updating the latest in the video episodes from the street to share with the still growing membership site and ensure we meet the deadline for the streaming platform. The membership site is a work in progress just as our work on the street is but we have spent a lot of time making it accessible and navigable so it can really be a tool for action on other streets, in other communities.

Natalie is relieved that backup admin is much improved now that we can centralise the complex editing systems in one production office. She’s even given up bringing her own coffee. The small kitchen is set up for the communal cooking and eating that play such a big part in what ‘Stories and Supper’ call ‘the quiet politics of welcome’. We begin our weekly team meeting in the yard space. It has to be a quick one as it’s a busy day today. I look at the sunflowers growing against the chipboard border wall and think back to a year ago when the task of nurturing thousands of sunflowers out-growing their pots and spaces became the all-consuming task. I remember dreading the summer heat as we planned June solar panel installation and July SUN DANCE solar celebrations.  I feel that same dread now. We are waiting to hear from funding applications for an eco-audit and subsequent upgrade works on this space. They are urgently needed as much for heat as cold. It will be a disruption but we’ll work around it as work begins on the studios. We don’t want to disrupt the patterns of use that are already emerging but everyone understands that this is a vital step. The place needs to be hospitable. It can’t be like our ‘rebel bank’ where we had to hand out multiple blankets at events to keep from hypothermia.

I ‘m going to have to move the ‘knowledge bank’ temporarily. It was one of the first things we set up in September in all the excitement. Books moved from private space onto open shelves. It began in the rebel bank – a space for self and communal education. At the bank, hosting events with authors like Max Haiven we had generous book donations from Pluto Press and as we establish this new space we’re starting moving some of our online book clubs to in person events as the evenings extend.  There’s one man who just comes to the meals to read the books. Leonie asks what he’s reading and it’s a well leafed book on Solar Power by Dustin Mulvaney.  I recommend Ashley Dawson’s ‘People Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons.’ We’ve a long way to go to reclaim the energy commons of Waltham Forest but things are moving - Solar for Schools have done their solar installations on the first five local schools and the education programmes are underway, Repowering London are pushing through with first solar installations on other large rooftops. There is momentum building and the co-op that owns this building is ready to go as the co-op that could own and manage these cross-borough rooftops and build a community wealth fund from the profits – something that was our aim from the start.

Poppy emerges from her studio and Jero is preparing ceramic glazes. The artist workspaces that surround the central studio all have specific specialisms to share and a commitment to doing this. It is a fine balance of space to think and work and space to share and learn. It feels like we’re finding our way there. In the bank, the scales at times tipped too much the way of being a building manager and tour guide and here we make sure we constantly, collectively reform and define our core vision and the ways we achieve it.  The regular visits from students from colleges from RCA to the local Big Creative with questions and challenges help this and I emerge from this recent one thinking how we can build a more defined training programme into what we already do more informally.

I pop home to greet the children. There’s a calm that hasn’t been in our house for a long time and I think they appreciate it. Tonight there is an event on ‘changemaker mindset.’ It’s proving popular and is live and online. I’d been slightly sceptical as Dan pushed ahead on this avenue within the work but realise that it is invaluable – so many people, particularly artists,  trapped in thinking their work has no value - defined by narratives society increasingly pedals about the arts and what is deemed ‘realistic’ or ‘useful’.  If we are to stand up and use whatever skills we have to collaborate we need all the changemaking mindset we can get. It is too urgent not to. I’m in the rota to clear up and after stacking chairs I pop up to check on what need’s doing to make sure the room upstairs is more than habitable as we prepare for our first residency this week.

When I walk back out onto the street the sky is indigo blue. I look up at the swift boxes – more have been installed this spring since our lone one last year and we’re all hopefully watching the skies.  The gate creaks and the ragged robin brushes my leg. There have been teething problems with the pesticide free street with some questioning just how far we let the ‘weeds’ take over. A balancing act of freedoms and responsibilities that applies to everything.

From the archive

Mon 15 May 2023

We squeezed past the trolley Kat brought down the road that she’d salvaged from the local off license. It’s got great cornering but no one’s bothered to corner it. I tell George I need to check on the sunflowers and he mutters the rather too consistent refrain ‘I hate your work.’ He sits at my desk making a stop frame animation out of tin foil with candy eyes. We’re late for school and in turn late for a meeting with the school PTA to plan the July SUN DANCE. We meet outside Crate - a container block building housing multiple local businesses.  Discuss timings. Risks of sunflowers not flowering. Risks of heat. I ‘ve handed Kristin the job of compost negotiations – we have a massive load donated from London Waste Authority and due to come in an articulated lorry from Biffa but haven’t confirmed where it’s going to/allowed to go. The arguments being made against a pile of it coming to the corner of the park  - biodiversity loss, loss of play space – don’t stack up and we challenge them.

 Once we know when and where we have to be on it with distribution to all the sites growing the sunflowers and needing massive repotting sessions. POTS – that’s what we’re urgently lacking now. The bigger size pots. 7 litres and over.  Katie is back from Sicilian adventures. She has a key and when I hear it turn I shout ‘oh no’ reprovingly thinking E had come back home and not gone to school. As Katie cuts out templates of houses for the model of the street we’re constructing I write what is now the regular update to the team – Mark, Nick, Leonie, Natalie, Kristin, Dan, Katie.  Giles emails about the solar as we get onto Octopus organisations now we have the go ahead for this first wave of street solar installation. It’s a big admin job – the administration of trying to get solar on a few rooftops is actually unbelievable. Meanwhile we should hear from Solar for Schools re a second rooftop condition survey on the local school.  I check sunflowers and see they all need repotting and spot a massive black slug.

We have to get on a zoom – giving a talk to a collaborative module called Creative Unions at UAL. It’s strange to speak to hundreds of invisible people. The other speaker is Diandra Marizet Esparza – co founder and exec director o ‘Intersectional Environmentalism.’ She is beaming through from Texas with her 8.30am morning coffee. We don’t use the same terms but share a grounding in the goal of environmental justice as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all it impacts. People and Planet. And if that is the goal then the lens is bringing injustice to the fore, sharing the tools and imagination to make explicit what that looks like and how to get there.  There are diagrams - one showing that inclusive intersectional environmentalism sits at the overlap in the venn diagram of environmental activism and social justice.  She uses examples of access to green space and shade linked to wealth and the existence of the Tree Equity Score, she explains how they use artivism in the form of wide-reaching environmental infographics. Strangely I shy away from the word environmentalism – it already seems to hold too much of the idea or baggage that people and planet are separate. The environment is too often seen as something some people care about but is somehow a backdrop to our events and existence – that we can live outside of.  Not something we are inextricably part of – a complex, interconnected web of life.  An ecology of everything that should be embedded in our curriculums and a prerequisite for economists and politicians to study and understand.

The questions are anxious ones. How do you balance the work you do using the internet with the fact that large servers are using so much energy? How do we do what we do when civil liberties are right now being eroded?  Essentially how can we do anything when we can’t solve everything? Diandra answered with a Zapatista quote – ‘questioning but walking’ ‘Walking we ask questions’  - something like that. Essentially we move. We can’t be made or make ourselves helpless to act. It takes courage. It needs humility to acknowledge the contradictions, to constantly assess and question ethics and relations, to be exposed, to fail and get up again - the choices we make by living these short lives with a people and planet we want to contribute to. Diandra talks about the importance of rest and reflection in activism which reminds me of a book I want to read ‘Rest is Resistance’ by Tricia Hersey – founder of the dreamy sounding ‘Nap Ministry’. Right now I operate and thrive on a nervous energy but know it doesn’t and can’t last interminably. I see everything more vividly. Or just more clearly – sitting beneath the green veins of sunflower leaves, holding slugs - a world teaming with life. Fragile and resilient.

I have to leave to get George and check the sunflowers at school. Since Brian, Kristin and I went around checking every pot and their children put a barrier of salt around the expanse of freshly laid tarmac that replaced a rotting portacabin they are doing well. Hannah stops me in the bustle of the playground to say she’s checked the ones at the nursery and no slugs. Yet. Which reminds me tomorrow a new batch of 500 pots are coming from Organic Lea and they’ll have to go to the school and I haven’t told the school. I chat to Kristin as the children play  - about compost and community share offers mainly but with a bit about trapeze and parkour and horse riding.

The weather is strange. In the last week there’s been hail and hot sun and torrential rain that has broken sunflower stalks. I cycle to Wilko to pick up canes - over optimistic about just how many would fit in a rucksack. We talk to Max from Crowdfunder about the campaign – that reaching 10% in the first 48 hours is good but how do we keep it going? We need to do what we do best and make the story more vivid. Make the case for this being a space of real community benefit more clearly. Perhaps I should write a journal of the future. A manifestation of how the work would grow and blossom in that space – how it is not just about us as a CIC needing more space but of what it would mean to be able to host more workshops, reach out to new communities, be a space that people know to come to to find out and share how to take action in these turbulent yet deflating times.

I race to get clay for George and try to find school uniform for E. He knocks up a stop motion animation of a hug and it brings us to tears.  Dan’s having to go on another zoom and my job seems to be to stop the barking and prevent shouting erupting by making sure everyone is fed. I can hear overlapping sound layers of ‘Brooklyn 99’ on the television and an Amercian accent and Q&A in progress from the computer upstairs. Apparently it went really well.  It is the first of a massively increased series of regular online sessions for members. Mark sent me the list through this morning so I can work it all into new funding applications.  I sit down to write ignoring the mud and compost and half made models.  I ‘m tidying away and find a card sent to us from an eco community in the Shropshire Hills  ‘wishing you all the best in all your projects despite inevitable setbacks’  - it shows a field of sunflowers.