THURS 16 MAY 2024
Thursday 16 May 2024
We have Welsh visitors. I’ve been wanting this to happen since visiting Swansea in Spring 2023 to meet and find out more about the project ‘The Street Matters’. At that time it was good to have a moment of time and space away from this North East London street and the intensity of the project. Isabel had invited me to spend some time as a ‘critical friend.’ I remembered her from before the pandemic when she’d met me from the train and introduced me to the taste explosion of baba ghanoush before I gave a talk about Bank Job with creative regeneration agency - Urban Foundry. I remembered her telling me of her home in the chalet communities of the Gower and their fight to stay involving a walk all the way to the House of Lords. I said yes.
The Street Matters is led by ‘Ways of Working’ - a social enterprise rooted in local ideas with the aims of rethinking structures of power and imagining new ways of making, designing and doing with communities. Artist Owen Griffiths is founder and director and someone who also invited me to the same Turkish restaurant to sample the delights of baba ghanoush two years later - this time after a talk about POWER STATION with Urban Foundry. On their website they state - ‘The Street Matters is a project in partnership with Caredig, EYST, YMCA and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, which aims to bring significant cultural and community investment into St Helens Road to develop a community vision. This will see the development of a creative, collaborative, citizen-led urban design programme with the potential to culminate in a sustainable neighbourhood plan for St Helens Road.’ I was up early with enough time to explore Swansea’s indoor market, buy Welsh cakes and glean a spring wardrobe from an array of charity shops before meeting Owen and Isabel for an introduction to the road and their work there. We walk and talk the street that is home to care homes, Mason’s Lodge, international supermarkets, boarded up shops and a board game café.
Upstairs in the YMCA building we map out their work in coloured pens – work that involves multiple residencies, recipe cards, a hunt for patterns, the production of rain planters, film screenings, shared text, sounds and stories. I tell them about the artist steering committee I ‘m part of. We discuss these networks of mutual support and care and how they are critical. I tell them I ‘m writing a bid for National Lottery Climate Action Fund and perhaps we can build something into this that is about exchange and sharing - learning from each other in our different communities and contexts. Asking how we make citizen led transformation happen.
And now here we are. The POWER STATION team and a group of interested residents clearing space and setting up for their arrival - Owen and Isabel and a group of artists and residents of St Helen’s Road, Swansea. We have a packed couple of days planned – a basic schedule with space for meanders and gatherings. Just as they’ve been building an interactive cardboard model and map of St Helen’s Road we begin with a model of Lynmouth Road and area that is constantly evolving in the space and online - asking what patterns they see, inviting new eyes and perspectives to meet this place. Two groups venture out – one testing out the infrastructure treasure hunt we’re developing. We fill the space with a textured vision of the street – rubbings of pebbledash, London brick stock and manhole covers that merge with the other groups ‘finds’ from a botanical quest. Since the withdrawal of pesticides the street has an abundance of wild flowering in the cracks - cornflower, poppy, clover - and, inspired by local botanical adventurer Rachel Summer’s chalk marked notes of recognition we do the same here - a naming of the overlooked pioneers that becomes the draft of an urban ecology guide to these terraced street’s cracks and the potential they hold. The ‘bee friendly streets’ sign is stencilled by the council on the pavements in a style reminiscent of the Terry Gilliam film ’12 Monkeys’ Why is it that these streets are marked as the exception amid the rule of poison?
We ask questions. What is a neighbourhood? What scale works best for this work? What are the challenges? What is community? How do we work together?
In the evening Stories and Supper host a storytelling workshop inviting an exchange of tales around the theme of ‘terroir’- a French term used for food intimately tied to a specific place. It is an open event and Ejaz and family join with dishes of saag and cardamon sweets. We eat together. Exchanging recipes and words from different languages and places. Welsh is a new language on the street but it emerges that more people than we knew speak it – their Celtic roots disguised by other accents. As the sun sets the word Hiraeth resonates – a Welsh word with no direct English translation meaning a deep longing for home. Others mention similar terms of yearning – the Turkish ‘huzun’, the Portugese ‘saudade.’ Conversation turns to Empire, to colonialism past and present and a brief history lesson of Wales as the first conquest of England’s colonial expansion….
I sense new collaborations stirring and along with the cake in my stomach it feels good.
From the archive
Thursday 17 May 2023
The dogs didn’t want to walk today. Digging their paws in as I tried a brisk march towards the ‘back field.’ Dan shares pictures of abandoned and burnt out cars that have been left there since the gap in law enforcement when police lined the streets of central London to crown a monarch. People are making pilgrimages to see them. An interactive sculpture park inviting new forms of destruction.
As we gear up for the first wave of solar installations it’s a stressful time. Sending out emails. Knocking on doors. The anxiety and propriety of discussing finances. Of avoiding it being an act of charity, implying lack. The complex layers and sensitivity of needy and not – the need for solidarity scales and fair distribution of what, with rising prices, are limited funds.
I accompany Dan to some of these chats. Angela is grieving her oldest friend. The disbelief of sudden death and realisation of mortality. She has just returned from a choir trip to Mull, her heart full of song and wardrobe full of punk tartan. We take our shoes off to enter Ejaz’s front room. Meet his wife and talk about his daughters at University. Go through the solar panel designs.
The sunflowers are rapidly outgrowing their stage two pots and needing space and water. It is a challenge keeping up with their care, maintenance and rehoming. I realise that if I knock the top layer off our front wall I can fit about 10 large pots along it. I recruit George to my demolition crew and he sledgehammers with joy – saying it was like being in a wreck room. He’s never been in one but has seen and relishes the cathartic joys of smashing things up.
Ejaz knocks for us to film with him outside the blue doors of 95a as we work on gathering interviews and testimonies of this place’s former uses, legacy and future as a space for community. He’s expounding the need for such sites as the estate agents pops her head out asking what we’re doing. We explain we’re planning to buy the place, we’ve raised about £70,000 already which obviously isn’t enough yet but we’re working on it and will be in touch next week with owner and her when we’ve raised more.
As soon as we’re out on the street with a camera things open up. Some people shuffle away but even more gravitate towards it. George the mechanic can’t film today but the little dog that bounces to greet passers by can and soon we’re chatting sunflowers through fences and over balconies. Sharon and Glen are walking up to town. He’s been working with the music team at Project Zero. Sharon says her Mum had walked past the doors of 95a and wondered if it had once been the place where coal was stored to service the surrounding streets. It makes sense. A place of coal. A place of oil - breaking and repairing petrol and diesel engines. A place servicing fossil capitalism. A hoped for place of the rapid transition away from these.
Sharon can take more sunflowers so I quickly cart some down the street and leave some outside Ejaz’s windows as a surprise for his return from the post office. We bump into Steve off to get a zip car. I ‘ve been mailing to confirm the date of our July sunflower solar celebrations but he’s been tragically busy because of the murder of a young boy outside the local school. ‘We’ve lost one of ours’. Our young people. He carries a lot.
After an excruciating back and forth with a planned compost delivery, a 30 tonne truck from BIFFA and North London waste authority will be arriving at Cheshire Field’s allotments next Wednesday. I walk with George past this site towards the back field. The burnt our cars have gone and we’re slightly disappointed. The Cow parsley is taller than us as we meander through ‘the clearing’ and the trees are laden with blossom. A team of people in high vis jackets stand around with giant plastic shovels.
Now as I write inside, the green shadow of sunflower leaves sway on the walls and outside Sipke and Monica’s white clematis is blooming. It is tiring living now and in the future. Two days at a time. I tell Leonie this idea – that I write what’s happening this day a year ahead in 2024 after having successfully raised the money to be able to operate in and radiate out from space up the road. She tells me about her involvement with Healing Justice network London and how they talk about the idea of ‘rehearsals’ using ‘the powers of radical dreaming, imagination and visioning to realise well-resourced communities that are generative, equitable and thrive beyond us.‘ Rehearsing freedoms.
.
