Going slow in Clapham
Following the lovely bursts of local insight into Brixton and Dalston, we’ve invited Hannah Wiltshire to share her favourite slow things about life in Clapham. Hannah is the founder of This is Your Kingdom, a delightful website that asks Londoners to share their favourite local things to do and see, so it’s no surprise she’s responded with such inspiring ideas…
I currently work from home running my ‘local-centric empire’ This is Your Kingdom (TiYK) – an insider’s guide to lovely local things to do in the UK. As I am always on the look out for lovely stuff to feature and am generally a.) not very good at sitting still and b.) not terribly keen on being inside, I can often be found pottering around my local area under the guise of carrying out important ‘research’.
So… my perfect Autumn outing in SW11… This would begin with a potter across the common (past my favourite oak tree) and down to Northcote Road – home to the most brilliant selection of independent shops, lovely locals and yummy cafes. On arrival I am usually lured into my favourite foodie hangout, Brew, for one of their delicious lattes accompanied by soft boiled eggs and toasted sourdough marmite soldiers. Ideally I would secure a perch at one of their outdoor tables (under the heat lamp for extra cosy factor) where I would tinker around on my laptop, utilising the free wi-fi, in a bid to appear productive…
Then, positively stuffed and feeling reasonably pleased with myself I would then set off to Northcote Road Antiques Market in search of a reward for my good behaviour. It usually takes longer than expected to reach the market as, being hidden away at the end of Northcote, you are required to ‘pass’ a great number of rather lovely looking shops on the way… One safely inside Northcote’s ‘best kept secret’ I would then turn my attention to the serious business of purchasing a suitably lovely trinket. Being of an age when lots of my friends are getting married and having babies – this is a brilliant place to pick up a unique and lovely gift for that special occasion.. My current favourite picks have to be the lovely pieces of vintage glassware and antique silver which are always very well received.
Being a country girl at heart my outing would usually end with a wander round Clapham Common which, luckily for me, lives just at the end of my road. This 220 acre park provides a mass of gorgeous green space for all the surrounding residents, a lovely spot to meet and greet friends and family, it is also home to hundreds of majestic looking trees which, at this time of year, are certainly at their most beautiful… After this well needed blast of fresh air I would then head home for more TiYK-ing accompanied by a cup of earl grey and a large slab of cake.
Written by Hannah, founder of www.thisisyourkingdom.co.uk.
TiYK are always on the look out for lovely local things things to feature to raise awareness of all the fabulous independents on your doorstep. If you run a lovely business or are simply a passionate localite, send TiYK a few words (or more if you fancy!) about your favourite local thing to see or do (sadly this cannot be your own venture). Provided it fulfills TiYK’s ‘lovely, local and independent’ criteria, it will be published on the site for all to see – accompanied by a suitably detailed accreditation by way of a thank you of course.
Happy birthday happiness!
One of the best things about writing this blog has been getting to know a passionate online community revelling in this lovely little town called London. One of my favourite projects celebrates its first birthday today (with cake and a lovely post about the journey so far). Written by ‘Sasha’, a Scot living in Brixton, The Happiness Project delights in the best of life in London while giving something back to the community in the process. We chatted to Sasha recently, and though a complete coincidence that it happens to be the blog’s birthday, today seems like the perfect day to share it with you.
How easy is it to live by the Happiness Project rules in London?
It gets easier the more I get used to it. The ‘making the most of London’ bit is fairly easy – if I’m meeting friends for dinner, I’ll bet I can find a lovely, quirky, local place that we’ve never tried. And you start looking out for a great local coffee place rather than a chain, or popping to an exhibition or gallery in your lunch break. There’s almost too much going on in London, but the key is to try something new now and again. The ‘helping others’ bit is harder – but just remembering to give some money to the busker on the tube who made you smile, or going out your way to help a friend, makes all the difference.
Do you feel noticeably happier since doing so?
Definitely. It could be a combination of several factors – and the process of writing itself has certainly given me confidence – but doing something positive to make myself happier, and being mindful of the rules, has meant I appreciate my friendships and the little things in life more, am more sensitive to others, more adventurous and open to life’s possibilities.
Tell us about one of your happiest days in London.
I can recall a few – a picnic with good friends in Brockwell Park, wandering round Spitalfields market and Brick Lane followed by a burger and a pint at Vibe Bar, cycling to Hyde Park and lunching by the Serpentine, sharing a roast dinner with friends in a warm pub in Dalston for Sunday lunch. What these days have in common is being surrounded by close friends and talking for hours and hours over glasses of wine and food. I go home with a smile on my face that lasts for hours. I also get all zen if I do yoga regularly.
The HPL rules seem to seek a balance between getting the most out of life and giving back as much as you can. How do you find this balance?
Difficult. Life in London is inherently selfish as we generally work hard to make money and have limited time to spend it so we choose fun things that we enjoy. Finding time to help out a friend or volunteer is pretty hard. But it’s possible to combine the two – last Christmas, I held a ‘bad jumper’ party for friends where we asked people to dress like Noel Edmonds and donate to St Mungos. It was really popular and everyone seemed happy to help. We had a brilliant night and then drove to the shelter the next day slightly worse for wear with toiletries and clothes and were told how pleased the residents would be. It felt brilliant. St Mungos also did a great sounding ‘hold a picnic for charity’ event this summer. It’s an excuse to get friends together and I’m sure us Londoners would be glad to chip in – we’re kind and generous people really we just don’t have much time. I want to do this sort of thing more.
Tell us about life in Brixton. How would you describe the sense of community? What makes it unique? Does it offer much opportunity to go slow?
Brixton is unique as a melting pot of different cultures – you see every colour, language and age under the sun. The community centres around Windrush square – named after the first ship from the Caribbean – with the Ritzy cinema and its pavement café, and the market where there is a lovely mix of cafes, delis, fishmongers and oddities with Spacemakers putting a buzz into formerly disused areas. There’s definitely a sense that we’re all part of this exciting community and I can’t wait to see how it grows up.
The best day out, and a fairly slow day that I do regularly, is wandering round the farmer’s market on a Sunday, tasting food and buying things you’ve never eaten before, having a coffee and watching the world go by, then wandering up to Brockwell Park with the wonderful view of the City and London Eye and Canary Wharf, having a beer at the Lido and food at the Prince Regent or the Florence in Herne Hill. I also love having a glass of wine and watching a film at the Ritzy with girlfriends. I like other places in London but Brixton stole my heart a while ago and I’m still madly in love.
Where in London would you go or what would you do if you needed cheering up?
The view from Waterloo Bridge makes me appreciate how beautiful London is when I’m fed up of the crappy tube and want to move to Cornwall. A night out in Soho makes me realise what a cool and funky place I live in and makes me feel young again. A wander down the South Bank from the London Eye to the Tate Modern feels romantic and cultured. Richmond Park makes me appreciate the green in the grey. But more than all these, I’d get a group of friends to meet in the pub and by the time we’ve finished the first round I’ll feel better already.
What other people or initiatives around London do you most admire?
I love what St Mungos and Age Concern do for the homeless and the elderly. And while I haven’t joined their outings yet, I love the idea of The Sock Mob, who meet in a group and walk round central London giving socks and supplies and talking to the homeless. This is a great idea – clothes are one thing but what we all need, what everyone needs, is the warmth of human contact and kindness. It makes us feel human again no matter if you’re depressed or lonely or coping with addictions of one sort or another. And I’m sure for the Mobbers it’s a way to connect to the community, to feel part of something bigger than themselves.
Another thing I’m excited about right now is how great London is becoming for arthouse and classic cinema. We’re so lucky to have the BFI film festival on at the moment, great arthouse cinemas like the Picturehouses, Curzon and Prince Charles, open air cinemas like at Somerset House and funky events like Secret Cinema and Cineroleum.
Interview by Hayley Cull
For the people, by the people
Arthur Potts Dawson needs little introduction, but we’ll give him one anyway. As the eco-chef behind the Acorn House and the Water House, he’s been central to encouraging London’s recent adoration of sustainable food, and nose-to-tail eating in particular. For the last few years he’s been tempting us with a promise that food co-ops are the future, a promise he put into action a couple of months ago.
And we’re most pleased to announce it’s been a grand beginning for the People’s Supermarket. Settled in Lamb’s Conduit Street (in a lovely shop fitted out with green power and organic paint, of course), this modern model of a food co-op is signing up members every day. Far from being just another wholefoods store, this is a real community affair.
The idea is simple: for a £25 annual membership and a commitment to work four hours per month, anyone can own the supermarket. (Or is it that no one owns it? We get confused.) Since the workforce is nearly all volunteers, groceries become cheaper than they might be elsewhere. Any profits go back into running the shop and reducing prices further still. Best of all, when power is taken away from big corporations and returned to the consumers, the weekly shop becomes a chance to connect with the community again. It’s the members who decide what the co-op sells, who it’s sourced from, how it’s priced… And in most cases they’re opting for sustainable foods from ethical, local and organic producers. Naturally.
The People’s Supermarket won’t be franchised – that would kind of defeat the premise – but don’t despair if you don’t live around Bloomsbury: Arthur has kindly offered to give advice to anyone who wants to set up their own local co-op. Food for thought, perhaps?
Love on the airwaves
The cheekily titled Seeks Music was originally meant to ease our heartache at the loss of 6 Music earlier in the year. A bunch of music-lovers had the brilliant idea to create a ‘homemade independent eclectic freeform internet radio station’, filling the airwaves 24-7 with their most favourite songs and plugging the gap left by the dearly departed broadcaster of independent music. Of course the BBC eventually came to their senses, but Seeks Music decided to carry on with the plan – and boy am I glad they did.
I love radio; where television bombards you, radio keeps you company. And when it comes to music, I’m definitely the type of person who needs trusted friends and editors suggesting new things worth listening to. Friendly and wonderfully surprising, this online station is perfect on both counts.
There are about twelve shows so far, whose style varies from soul to folk to dance to whatever the cool kids are listening to these days; what they all have in common is an obsession with music. Rich Martin, the station’s founder, presents a show that attempts to ‘create flow and sense out of disparate music sensibilities’. The DNR Collective focus on up-and-coming locals, with live acoustic sessions, freestyles, spoken word and lots of laughs. Charlotte Livingstone, author of the Brixton Beats blog, shares her broad music taste in such a lovely way that it’s like listening to a friend (disclosure: it’s not only because she actually is a friend). Sack of Soul speaks for itself, while Low End Theory might take you anywhere. Tune in and you’ll fall in love too.
If you go down to the allotment today…
I don’t remember exactly when Luke and I started helping out at the allotment, but it was early enough in the year that we had to rug up in as many layers as we could work in. His dad needed help getting his plot into shape, clearing a mountain of weeds and rocks from the back corner, and anyone who’s thought about getting an allotment lately knows they’re hard to come by. Digging away our cares in the frozen earth, we counted ourselves very lucky little bears indeed.
A few green shoots spurred us on over the months, until the big surprise came a few weeks ago: seemingly overnight our little plants had grown up and we all became the swooning parents of sprawling courgette plants, runner beans taller than me, broad beans (delicious roasted, we’ve discovered), irrepressible rhubarb, raspberries and potatoes. Every so often I find myself gazing across the allotment, chuffed not only with the corner of land we’ve cleared, or the patch that belongs to Luke’s dad, but proud as punch of the whole little community, somebody’s artichokes and sunflowers beaming from where months ago there was just frost.
While I’ve long tried to eat seasonally, I’ve never brought home so many beans or had to find as many ways of cooking courgettes. I’ve realised that buying seasonal produce is very different from using up your own harvest, where the only option is letting the food invent its own recipes. Inspired by the joy of freshly picked produce, Luke and I went foraging for blackberries last weekend (and were amazed at how many people stopped to chat about pie!). Perhaps accustomed to the volume of our allotment hauls, we collected far too many – surely about £30 worth! – and decided to make blackberry jam, which has been bringing me joy all week as I spread it on my toast and give it away by the jar.
The tomatoes in our little back garden at home are likewise proving you don’t need much space to enjoy the satisfaction; and yet with each one I pluck from the vine, the pace of city life recedes and my gardening ambitions grow. So as we’ve approached the end of our job clearing the mountain, I’ve done a little research and discovered that Sutton Community Farm is within cycling distance, a lovely new project where everyone chips in as they can and takes home their share of the harvest. I’ve been following the progress of Transition Town Tooting; peeking across the city to Growing Communities in Hackney; and keeping my eyes peeled for disused local plots that they could help me turn into a community garden.
But here’s the extra lucky bit: it turns out our welcome at the allotment won’t end with the mountain after all. Luke’s dad has offered us his back corner – the very bit we’ve been clearing all summer – to cultivate for our own. Cycling home, the obligatory sticks of rhubarb poking out the top of my canvas bag, I find myself planning the little rows of parsnips and purple-flowering broccoli already.
Hayley
Small wonder
‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour…’
From Auguries of Innocence by William Blake
Though they’re usually the ones racing around – and at least perceived to be the cause of much of our own acceleration – children have a wonderful knack for simplifying life and dragging us over into the slow lane. Remember what it was like to be three feet tall, enthralled by the most commonplace sights? Walls at eye-level beg to be climbed, and keyholes peered through. Upon inspecting a petal, one might discover a ladybird or ant – and weave a whole story around it. You’ll be performing a mundane task like putting out the bins, while your kids will be admiring the moon.
Seeing things as a child does goes to the heart of the slow philosophy. Feeling pure and uncomplicated joy, delighting in the small things, being quick to wonder and slow to lose our innocence are all things to which we can aspire. So whether or not you have little ones of your own, follow their lead and change your pace, even your objectives these holidays. Play more, work less, indulge your curiosity and make the messiest blackberry pie you can. Rather than overanalysing everything, surrender to instinct and imagination, pick a few flowers on the way home from the shops and admire the ‘wiggly worms’ as you go.
‘So why Dalston?’
‘Because it’s a mixture of everything, isn’t it?’ comes the answer from Hamid, of Hamid for Fabrics on Ridley Road. ‘Like a cooking pot, where all the different mixtures go and they will come nice. Look at this little market: about 500m, you can find food from all the world. I love these people, this market. We live together… Sometimes people get aggravated for the little things, but not very much.’
The local Reverend – despite fighting a constant battle with people shooting his stained glass windows – describes a similar neighbourliness: ‘There’s a sense of life, vitality, it sort of buzzes… It’s like the world meets here.’
So why Dalston? Turning the question back on Nick Aldridge and Matt Franks, organisers of the Dalston Project, their reason for living here is the same: community. But how will it hold up as new arrivals pour in from the East London Line? Squeezed between Stoke Newington and Shoreditch, and with a shiny new station to head up the gentrification, it’s little wonder the E8 locals are anxious. Rather than railing against any changes, however, Nick and Matt are taking a quiet approach, a photography exhibition to remind the community of the people at its heart.
The people in these photographs are the community: they are shopkeepers, market traders, restauranteurs and residents, young and old. Most seem optimistic about the changes, if wary; hopeful they will bring a boost in custom and help keep them from the fate of neighbours whose shops have been squeezed out by the high street. ‘Hackney’s got to be brought up… can’t go on as it is’ says another interviewee, John of Dalston Lane stalwart Sound and Music, ‘but you can’t do it at the expense of the people that have been working here.’
‘Dalston is a funny one to describe,’ Matt tells me. ‘It’s kind of a layering up of lots of different demographics and social groups. A lot of people perceive it in a negative light, as its dirty high street often overshadows a lot of the other places in the area. I think the area is a perfect inner-City microcosm, an incredible nugget of how society and community exists in a very urban, culturally diverse place.’
Housed in a candlelit WW2 bunker – part of the Print House arts space – the exhibition aims to show a side of the area that can be missed when just passing through. There’s a sense that the interviews only tell part of the story; that the photos are more an invitation to seek out these people than an attempt to lay open their lives. ‘The exhibition is about allowing people to ‘explore’ another side to Dalston,’ says Matt; ‘for this reason we’re asking people to really take in their surroundings and go around with a torch, exploring the bunker and finding new things as they go. Hopefully they’ll take this perspective into the street of Dalston once they’re done with the exhibition.’
Emerging from the candlelit depths of this strange space, Ridley Road market seems brighter than ever. Saturday shoppers mingle with their neighbours, haggling over strawberries, three punnets for a pound. Somehow, filling my bag with groceries, I can’t see this community ever letting go.
The Dalston Project is a free exhibition showing at The Bunker, Ashwin Street until 25 July, 12pm to 6-ish. Interview by Hayley Cull.
