Some exhibits from the Museum of the Future. Photograph: Ministry of Stories
Novelists, illustrators and others with overactive imaginations have long concocted visions of future Londons – the dystopias of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World immediately spring to mind – so perhaps it’s not surprising children are now doing the same.
Sci-fi, futurology and fantasy lend themselves well to a city that breaks boundaries in fashion, architecture and the like, and now a “museum of the future” is to be added to the many institutions in the capital displaying objects from the far distant past.
The “museum” is in fact a temporary exhibition at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, and it will introduce visitors to possible sights, sounds, threats and artefacts from the future.
Curated and created entirely by children, whose naturally overactive imaginations mean they probably needed no encouragement, it is the brainchild of charity Ministry of Stories.
It features space-football and “evil washing machines”, and there will be five zones, each exploring a different theme including “creature attack,” natural disasters and time travel.
All of stories in the exhibition were penned by Hoxton children aged 8-12, who have been working with Ministry of Stories in its Thursday and Saturday out-of-school groups.
Hoxton Museum of the Future will open to the public on Saturday 30 July (11am-5pm) and Sunday 31 July (11am – 3pm).
Imagine what Samuel Pepys might make of Pokemon Go and you will have some idea of how our city in four hundred years’ time might look to us today.
Catch the show soon before it’s a thing of the past.
Award-winning: Stepney City Farm. Photograph: Stepney City Farm
Stepney City Farm today received a prestigious Green Flag award from environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.
The scheme, now in its twentieth year, recognises the best parks and green spaces across the country.
The farm was one of the highest-scoring among a record 1,686 recipients.
Commenting on the farm, the judges said: “This community award is well-deserved in all aspects – an amazing example of an operational city farm in the heart of a very mixed urban community. Those who manage and maintain this site should be highly praised and commended.”
Kevin Moore, CEO of Stepney City Farm, said: “We are absolutely delighted to receive a Green Flag Award from Keep Britain Tidy.
“This award recognises and highlights that people in Tower Hamlets are benefitting from a green space of the very highest quality.”
Along with the animals, the farm hosts events for the local community.
On Sunday 31 July from 10-4pm, the farm is running a special event in conjunction with The Spark, a free festival focused on bringing positive change to the UK. “Where Does Our Food Come From?” features a full day of workshops about local food and the politics surrounding it.
A new series of FoodTALKS also kicks off on the day with a discussion on the controversial topic of ‘fast fashion’.
The talk will be led by anti-poverty campaign group MADE, which has teamed up with organisations across the UK to expose poor working conditions and hold big corporations to account.
It was previously scheduled for 28 July but is now included as part of Sunday’s festival.
In an exclusive interview with the Hackney Citizen, the founder of Passing Clouds has vowed to keep the Dalston venue afloat, in spite of her recent ban as a company director for failing to pay tax.
Eleanor Wilson, boss of the much-loved nightspot, is also in dispute with the building’s new owners Landhold Developments over its tenancy.
Passing Clouds’ ten-year tenancy agreement expired last month, though Ms Wilson insists they are not currently occupying the building illegally.
Wilson told the Hackney Citizen she had made a private agreement with the landlord to remain until 11 August, but admitted no contract had been signed by both parties.
The premises was last week ‘reclaimed’ by protesters after staff arrived at work to find the locks had been changed.
In triumphant scenes, supporters were able to clamber in through a second-floor window and wrest back control of the building.
Jubilant: Passing Clouds supporters outside the Dalston venue
The disqualification, which kicked in on 1 June 2016 and lasts for five years, was the end result of an investigation by the government’s insolvency service.
Wilson’s bid to have the ban overturned in a court challenge last month (11 May), but was unsuccessful.
In a statement to the Hackney Citizen, a spokesperson for the government’s insolvency service said: “Eleanor Mary Wilson, the sole director of a community arts centre and live music venue, has been disqualified from acting as a director of a limited company for a period of 5 years for failing to pay tax and failing to properly maintain and/or deliver up the company’s accounting records.
“An Insolvency Service investigation found that Ms Wilson had been the sole director of Passing Clouds Limited from March 2011 and failed to deliver up accounting records to explain cash withdrawals and transactions debiting the company bank account totalling more than £80,000.
“The company also failed to pay sufficient monies to HMRC in respect of VAT and PAYE/NIC throughout its period of trading which resulted in a debt due to HMRC of more than £170,000.”
Wilson told the Hackney Citizen that the company’s tax liabilities had now all been settled with HMRC.
She admitted her “bookkeeping wasn’t on point”, and put it down to “complicated personnel issues” at the time.
She explained that tax deadlines were missed due to her competing commitments, which included work in Sierra Leone.
“I’m involved in international development work [as well as running Passing Clouds] and wasn’t able to juggle the two things,” she said.
Insolvency investigation
As long ago as 20 August 2013, Wilson decided that one of her companies, Passing Clouds Ltd, would be wound up voluntarily and a liquidator appointed, according records held at Companies House.
Passing Clouds Ltd is one of five companies linked to the venue run by Ms Wilson.
It was formed on 31 March 2011, however it went into liquidation less than three years later.
Two other companies, Passing Clouds Community Limited and Passing Clouds Community Trust Ltd, were struck off a year later, in December 2014.
Three of the companies, Passing Clouds Trading Limited, Passing Clouds Community Limited, Passing Clouds Community Trust Limited were formed on the same day, 24 January 2013.
When asked why she had set up so many companies with similar names at the same time, Wilson explained that each was set up as as “interim experiment” with the idea that each would run for specific projects, but that this did not materialise.
Future
But despite the travails of of the iconic club, Wilson still predicts a bright future for Passing Clouds.
“It doesn’t need to be me running it,” she said, commenting on the new situation. “I may not be the best person to head up Passing Clouds in the future.”
Wilson added that the organisation, which she founded ten years ago in June 2006, could survive by adopting a different operating model, such as a cooperative, a Community Interest Company (CIC) or a charitable trust.
Asked by the Hackney Citizen what she would consider to be a best-case scenario, Wilson said ideally she would like Landhold Developments “to sell us the building or grant a long lease – 10, 20 or even 30 years.”
She also pointed out that she was looking at cooperative and other business models for the future.
“With a project as pioneering and long-term as Passing Clouds, I need look into different types of corporate entity to find out which is the right one,” she said.
“I need to consider how it functions in the community – perhaps something like a charitable trust foundation.”
When asked by the Hackney Citizen if Passing Clouds might look for premises elsewhere, Wilson said it would be very difficult.
“Rents have gone up astronomically,” she said.
A late licence was crucial to keeping the business financially viable, she added, and said the council is no longer issuing them.
“We would never find a building like that in central London. We’d have to find a derelict warehouse, soundproof it as a music venue. As an international and cultural community cohesion project – that would be over. It would be almost impossible to set up a project like Passing Clouds again.
“We are a frontline community project that set up in what was known at the time as Crack Alley.
“Running the place in terms of all the paperwork and licensing and so forth, was a very difficult thing to do.
“Finally after 10 years the project has found its feet. They [the landlords] can buy any building, they can wipe us out just like that.”
Jubilant: Passing Clouds supporters outside the Dalston venue
Dalston venue Passing Clouds has been ‘reclaimed’ by protestors after the landlord changed the locks, shutting venue staff out.
The venue was able to open later to host its scheduled event.
The premises, which first flung open its doors ten years ago, was sold by the previous owner in September last year to a new landlord, Landhold Developments.
The lease expired last month, and so Passing Clouds were legally bound to vacate the premises.
Eleanor Wilson, the founder of Passing Clouds, last month told <em>Hackney Today</em>, the council’s fortnightly freesheet, how she she first began back in June 2006: “Our vision was unique and there was no model for what we were doing. On a business level,though, we were stepping into the unknown.”
“It all happened so fast. Suddenly, I had signed the lease and had the keys. It was the beginning of an incredibly steep learning curve.”
A spokesperson for the landlord, Landhold Developments, said: “Passing Clouds have been aware for many months that her lease was due to expire in May of this year.
“They have continued to occupy the premises without the landlord’s consent.
“Whilst there is no obligation on the landlord to serve notice in such situations, our solicitors wrote to Ms Wilson on two occasions to inform her that she was occupying as a trespasser and if she did not leave the premises immediately, the landlord would take back possession.
“Passing Clouds failed to respond to either of these letters and so bailiffs were instructed accordingly.
“Possession of the premises was lawfully taken back by the landlord on 16 June 2016, with two security guards remaining on site to protect the property
“Later that day, a mob of 30-40 people, forced their way into the property, damaging the new locks that had been installed and ejecting the security guards.
“Any occupiers who remain on the premises are occupying unlawfully which constitutes a trespass.”
Chair repair: upholstering in action at the School of Stuff
The shapes of furniture are weird. Their curves and angles of wood or plastic, strange bulges and depressions, make sense to the body but not to the eye.
So it’s at once unsettling and reassuring to rifle through the Pictorial Dictionary of British 19th Century Furniture Design, in which chairs and their friends throughout the ages are depicted without any humans present.
Forms are presented in all their stand-alone visual bizarreness, but are also domesticated into changing styles and periods, and shown to be part of life after all.
It helps to have a guide. Amanda Girling-Budd, a one-time TV producer, has been a professional upholsterer for many years and holds a PhD in the history of design.
She now teaches the craft – alongside cabinet-making and furniture restoration – at her establishment the School of Stuff, housed in Lighthouse Studios on Shacklewell Lane.
The Pictorial Dictionary has been brought out to illustrate the history of ‘buttoning’, the activity being done in the workshop by students on the School of Stuff’s two-year traditional upholstery course.
‘Traditional’
“The interesting thing about traditional upholstery is it sounds like ‘upholstery the way it’s always been done’,” muses Girling-Budd.
“But in fact it refers to some quite specific techniques that were done in the 19th century. In the 18th century there were other techniques, but they become most elaborate in the 19th century.”
Buttoning is a case in point, developing from a functional way of tying a thread through a chair to hold the stuffing in place into a highly decorative method of folding deep gorges in geometric patterns into the shape of a piece of furniture.
Step by step
But buttoning comes late in the process. Traditional upholstery starts with a wooden frame for the chair, onto which strips of webbing are tacked.
Over the webbing is placed a stretch of hessian, a coarse, tough fabric, which is the base, ultimately, for everything that goes between the webbing and the eventual posterior of the seated user.
The next step is, surprisingly, to add coconut hair. Coir fibre, as it is known, is shaved from coconuts then washed, dried, permed and dyed before being shipped to upholstery studios worldwide.
Animal hair used to be used, but is very expensive compared to coir.
Springy, if rough, to the grip, there is a huge sack of coir in Girling-Budd’s workshop and the three students are as we speak stuffing it into the chairs they’re upholstering.
Once the coir is in place and covered with another layer of fabric, stitching can be applied to shape it into decorative or functional contours.
After this is done, another layer of softer stuffing – usually animal hair this time – can be added for a more comfortable sedentary experience.
Then it’s time to add the final covering, which can be coloured or patterned or fulfil whatever decorative desires a client has voiced.
This is also when buttoning takes place, adding further interest and shaping to the finished chair.
‘Like tailoring’
“Traditional upholstery is rather like tailoring,” reflects Girling-Budd. “You start with a body and you fit some clothing to it.”
Like tailored clothes, traditional upholstery is labour-intensive and can, therefore, be expensive. But even in the age of flat-packs, Girling-Budd is confident of traditional upholstery’s continuing appeal: “maybe it’s because we’re a bit of a throw-away culture, people like the idea of doing something that’s going to last a bit longer,” she reflects.
“I think there’s several things people find appealing about it. There’s the whole design-y side – making something look lovely – and then there’s the craft skill, finding out how to do a craft; and then there’s also recycling: sometimes you’re bringing something that would otherwise be fit for the rubbish heap back into use again.”
So if you too sometimes fear chairs, you could do worse than getting to know them and their place in the world better, and taking a course in upholstery.
The London Festival of Architecture, taking place this month, is this year centred around the theme of ‘community’.
Although a capital wide affair, several events will invite Tower Hamlets residents to consider the impact of the built environment on their lives, as well as hear about exciting ideas and initiatives for the future.
Stock Bricks to Brutalism: Housing Design History in Poplar
This guided walk, taking place throughout the month, focuses on the massive overhaul of housing stock in Poplar during the 20th century. Overcrowding, dilapidation, poor sanitary conditions and bomb damage in Poplar spurred some of the most emblematic and bold designs that continue to divide opinion.
The two hour walk will aim to trace social housing from the end of World War One through to the 1980s. It will stop off at estates built between the two World Wars in the ‘economic Georgian style’ (e.g. Will Crooks Estate) before taking in some celebrated and notorious post-war estates: Lansbury, Brownfield (home to Brutalist masterpiece the Balfron Tower), and Robin Hood Gardens. The walk is led by Andrew Parnell, a qualified City of London Guide, who will be seeking to impart a little of the history of Poplar along the way.
Shoreditch Architecture Surgery
Shoreditch architects Finkernagel Ross, designers of “bold unassuming architecture and interiors for high-end residential, industrial and commercial clients”, are throwing open their doors on 16 June and inviting visitors to come in and have a look at their work.
Models, renderings, and drawings will all be on display, and the practice will also be offering professional advice to anyone who needs it on all matters relating to design, planning or construction, with a 30-minute one-on-one meeting with an architect. There is no charge to attend the architecture surgery, though donations of £25 to homelessness charity Shelter are encouraged.
Lansbury Estate. Photograph: Michael Owens
Homes not Houses: Putting Wellbeing First
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has declared the housing crisis “the single biggest barrier to prosperity” and has vowed to build more houses. But in last month’s East End Citizen, Nicholas Boys Smith of research institute Create Streets argued that housing is not just about numbers. High land costs and limited housing supply, he said, is a “vicious circle” that will lead to buildings that are “less popular and that people don’t want to live in”. Smith will be discussing his own radical lower-rise vision at the Legatum Institute in a panel that includes architecture critic Rowan Moore.
Getting stuffed: Handle with Care is being performed in an Old Street self-storage facility this month
Rather than constructing detailed theatrical worlds in abandoned or ‘found’ spaces, Dante or Die makes theatre in already working spaces.
Having previously designed pieces for hotel rooms, and a ski-lift, the company’s latest show is set in the lonely corridors of a self-storage building.
Created in collaboration with acclaimed playwright Chloe Moss, Handle with Care follows the fictional Zoe on a 30-year journey, viewed through the prism of her belongings.
Two years ago, when she was storing some of her own stuff, co-artistic director Daphna Attias fell into conversation with the manager about exactly who uses self-storage.
“People come to these places at a crossroads in their lives, whether it’s death or separation, or a big move. It’s never a really calm moment of your life,” explains Attias.
“Lots of couples who break up go to these places to store their stuff, and then they never come back for it”, she says.
Priceless discoveries such as the entire oeuvre of US street photographer Vivian Maier are rare. “Almost always the value of people’s stuff that they keep isn’t what they paid for it,” she says.
But there is a huge emotional value harnessed in lock-ups like these, and people respond to different triggers in order to access their memories.
The show plays on this sensory experience to explore the power of memory as well as our modern relationship to the things we own.
“We don’t need tapes, or CDs, or records, and we don’t need photo albums because they’re all in a cloud,” says Attias. “But we buy a lot more now because of how easy it is to consume.”
She explains that in the modern world, the acquisition of property – housing and otherwise – can be seen as a measure of maturity, a milestone towards adulthood.
“Once you have stuff, like a flat and a sofa, it feels like you’re a person, that you’ve arrived, and it gives us some kind of comfort, but of course its not true.”
Part of the show’s development was conducted with professional hoarders, the V&A. One of the museum’s missions is to give young people a sense of responsibility over their own belongings, and to convince them to regard social media and other online spaces as their own personal archives.
And it is that space that will be the location for a forthcoming Dante or Die production. Site-specific in the intangible, hyper-public world that is the internet.
Handle with Care is at Urban Locker, Paterson Court, Peerless Street, EC1V 9EX until 25 June. shoreditchtownhall.com
East London Suffragette: Sylvia Pankhurst. Photograph: Roman Road Trust
A statue of Sylvia Pankhurst could soon take pride of place on Roman Road.
Plans are in place to erect a statue in Bow of the radical feminist who founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1913.
The Roman Road Trust, a community development organisation, wants the Pankhurst statue to be located on the junction of St Stephen’s Road and Roman Road.
It would form part of a wider public art trail focused on East End women such as Annie Besant, who played a prominent role in the Bow matchgirls strike of 1888.
“A lot of people don’t realise that Bow is the heartland of Sylvia Pankhurst,” said Tabitha Stapely, CEO of the Roman Road Trust.
“Due to the bombing in the war and various council initiatives to tidy up the area afterwards, there are no buildings or sites left of where Sylvia worked on Roman Road.”
“We want people to know the history, feel part of it and engage with it. So all these things have been leading up to the idea of celebrating her work with a statue.”
Radical speaker: Sylvia Pankhurst outside the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Old Ford Road, Bow. Photograph: Roman Road Trust
But a statue is only the start of the Trust’s ambitious plans to celebrate Bow’s heritage.
“What we want to do is even bigger,” Stapely said. “Bow was an area that was very very deprived 110 years ago, but it attracted a lot of amazing visionary women. What we’d like is to see them all celebrated.”
The statue and art trail is part of the Roman Road Neighbourhood plan, a legal document that sets out planning policies for a given area, written by its residents and businesses.
Although other campaigns for statues – such as those for Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Seacole – have rumbled on for years, Stapley is optimistic a Pankhurst statue and art trail will be a reality in four years’ time.
“We already have a lot of ducks in a row, we’ve got backing from key Tower Hamlets councillors, and we have a good working relationship with Poplar Harca who own a lot of the land around Bow Road,” said Stapely.
Councillor Josh Peck, Cabinet Member for Work and Economic Growth, has already thrown his support behind the campaign. “Bow was the centre of Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaigning but our area’s role has largely been lost to history. It’s time we properly commemorated her work here,” he said.
Some of the many Bow landmarks in the history of the women’s suffrage movement in East London include the former site of Roman Road Baths, where Pankhurst used to hold meetings of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as Arbers on Roman Road, the printing works that published Sylvia Pankhurst’s feminist newspaper Woman’s Dreadnought.
Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst are commemorated with a statue and plaque by Victoria Tower Gardens, but no such honour has previously been afforded Sylvia, who opposed her family over the First World War and commitment to socialism.
Another statue of Sylvia Pankhurst is planned for Clerkenwell Green in Islington in time for the centenary of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, which gave the vote to some women.
Over the moon: Oscar Lhermitte (centre) and designers from Kudu with their lunar globes
Wanting the Moon may not be an unreasonable ambition afterall.
That is because a group of designers from Hackney has produced the world’s first exact replica of the Moon – only 20 million times smaller than the real thing.
Designer Oscar Lhermitte and Kudu studio have created lunar globes using data from Nasa, allowing them to replicate all of the Moon’s craters, bumps and ridges in 3D.
Lhermitte, a Hackney-based designer from France, has long held an interest in science and astronomy.
“To me it is a combination of the unknown, mixed with accuracy and correctness,” he says.
“The Moon is special to me as it is the first astral body that you can very easily observe, every night.”
The lunar globe project took four years to complete, and started when Lhermitte “stumbled” upon some of the latest NASA images from the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter mission.
“They were high resolution pictures of the Moon,” he recalls. “ I wondered, is there enough data available to recreate it in 3D? Once I dived into the project, I became more and more obsessed at making the best lunar globe possible.”
Surface beauty: Moons accurately map all of the Moon’s craters
The complex design process saw Lhermitte print a moon in 3D. He then made a mould from the print out which could then be cast in polyurethane resin.
“Mould making is a craft by itself and there is so much to learn before being able to make a good cast. So I took a job with specialist mould makers to learn that craft,” Lhermitte says.
Shoreditch-based design studio Kudu then built a computer with the same memory as those used for the 1969 Moon landings, and used it to control a ring of revolving LED lights around the globe.
“At any given time, both the real Moon and the globe are lit the same way,” Lhermitte says.
Lhermitte and Kudu are on a mission to fund the production of the first batch of 50 moons, and have launched a kickstarter to achieve their goal.
The Pro Wrestling EVE roster. Photograph: Pro Wrestling Eve / The Ringside Perspective
When the opening bell rang at London’s first ever all women’s wrestling event last month, it called time on another fight that has rumbled on for more than 60 years.
Professional wrestling in London was outlawed in the 1930s, and when the ban was lifted in 1952, the Home Office quickly passed a by-law exempting women.
The ban was finally dismissed for both sexes in 1987, but with the rise of American wrestling and their focus on ‘divas’, women’s wrestling became, for the most part, a sideshow.
But the ‘Let’s Make History’ event, hosted by professional women’s wrestling organisation Pro Wrestling EVE at the Cre8 Lifestyle Centre in Hackney Wick aimed to ‘redefine’ this much maligned genre.
The evening featured many different styles, from the taut, technical wrestling of April Davids and local fighter Pollyanna, to the all-out physical contests often referred to in wrestling vernacular as ‘slobberknockers’.
In fact, the sheer close-up danger of the slams, leaps and head-first drops on show triggered audible shock amongst some curious, less experienced punters, who seemed surprised at just how real this ‘fake sport’ could be.
Lighter moments came with the arrival of identical twin tag-team The Owens Twins, and the suspiciously English-accented Tennessee Honey, billed as hailing from “Peckham, Tennessee.”
At one point, two wrestlers launched each other into the venue’s soundproofing tiles, leaving a visible dent and triggering speculation that EVE’s damage deposit was in jeopardy.
Luckily, the venue staff seemed to be getting into the spirit of things.
Cre8 employee Melissa Herbert, who spoke of remembering “the originals – Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks…” told the East End Review: “I hope they are successful. They’re bringing something different to Hackney.
“There are girls out there who want to do something physical, but something different.”
As if to hammer this point home, a representative from South London wrestling school Burning Hearts circulated the crowd, asking punters whether they could see themselves lining up alongside the stars of EVE in future.
A chant of ‘this is wrestling’ echoed around the auditorium and, as a bruised but triumphant Rhia O’Reilly emerged to lift the EVE Championship belt, the message couldn’t ‘ring’ any clearer.
