East End Review

Tag: Growing Communities

  • The Hornbeam café – review: ‘a true community hub’

    Hornbeam
    Visible from a distance: Jenny Parker and Kate Bentley outside The Hornbeam Café on Hoe Street, Walthamstow

    The Hornbeam café and community centre can be found on Hoe Street, an ancient thoroughfare lined with no-frills shops and eateries with local colour aplenty. The street made national news recently when residents lifted up a bus to free a trapped unicyclist, and again when it had to be closed following a mass brawl between teenagers.

    With its murals, flowerpots serving as bike locking stations, and funky lettering, the Hornbeam is easily visible from a distance. The café is run by an organisation called Norman Loves – headed up by Jenny Parker and Kate Bentley and boosted by volunteers, who serve simple and wholesome vegetarian breakfasts and lunches made from largely organic ingredients.

    A warm and pleasant space, the café also hosts film nights and supper clubs, and sells locally made organic jams and chutneys. On Saturday mornings families fill the tables soon after opening, while young couples as well as older residents stop in for a coffee before picking up fruit and vegetables at the stall operating outside. Children filter in through the side door on their way to music lessons upstairs.

    The Hornbeam also houses the Forest Recycling Project, a community enterprise selling reclaimed paint at vastly reduced prices, diverting the paint from landfill to homeowners with DIY needs; and OrganicLea, a local growing initiative that runs a local veg box scheme akin to Growing Communities. People can sign up to the scheme in the café, which also operates as a pick-up point.

    The Hornbeam has a loyal local following, with heartfelt reviews on Yelp. With the boost to the area that the new Lea Bridge station will provide, it should continue to thrive, as it serves people from vastly different age groups and backgrounds, and provides avenues for further involvement for those who wish to socialise. Although may look a bit threadbare inside, this is a true community hub.

    Hornbeam Café
    458 Hoe Street, E17 9AH
    www.hornbeam.org.uk

  • Film night to screen moo-ving tale of dairy farmer

    Farmer and Hook & Son – Emli Bendixen 620
    Bovine inspiration: Farmer Stephen Hook of Hook & Son with ‘queen of the herd’, Ida. Photograph: Emli Bendixen

    The Moo Man has many qualities one might not expect from a film about milk.

    The documentary, which is being screened this month at Growing Communities’ Moo-vie Night, has a dreamlike quality. It is intimate, funny and quite captivating.

    Sussex farmer Stephen Hook, who has a stall at Stoke Newington’s farmers’ market selling ‘raw’ (non-pasturised) milk, tenderly strokes his happy-seeming cows and addresses them by name. Ida is the “queen of the herd”, he says.

    But this picture of the dairy industry is increasingly rare. Stephen is solemn as he laments: “Family farms are being lost… that’s what makes me angry, it really does.”

    In an economic climate of plummeting prices and rising production costs, more than half of Britain’s dairy farmers have gone out of business since 2002, with 9,724 remaining as of this August – a fall of 0.5 per cent from July. Indeed, British dairy farmers have recently protested in various supermarkets after major milk producers announced more price cuts.

    These issues can seem remote for city-dwellers, who are inevitably alienated from the production of much of their food. According to charity Wide Horizons, over 35 per cent of UK children have never visited the countryside, and LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) found in a survey of 2000 British young adults that 40 per cent did not connect milk to an image of a cow.

    For urbanites then, The Moo Man may shed light on the reality of life on a small dairy farm, as it documents the farmers’ determined efforts to secure the cows’ welfare and produce an ‘ethical’ product. Going thoroughly against the grain, Hook attempts to save his family farm by rejecting cost-cutting dairies and supermarkets, and instead fostering a familial atmosphere with his team and herd.

    The Moo Man will be screened by Growing Communities, the Hackney social enterprise that aims to bring people closer to food sources, as part of their Urban Food Fortnight and Organic September. Viewers will be offered milkshakes and cocktails made with cream and milk from the farm, and there’ll be a Q&A session with Stephen Hook afterwards.

    “It’s vital to pay fair prices to support these small family farmers, who are the basis of a more sustainable food system and have really high animal welfare standards,” said Growing Communities market manager Kerry Rankine. “This film shows just what it takes to keep a small farm going.”

    The Moo Man
    11 September
    St Paul’s Church Hall, N16 7UY
    billetto.co.uk/en/events/growing-communities-moovie-night-the-moo-man