"Post-COVID, we'll need to be able to explain why grassroots venues, basements, skateparks, co-ops and community centres matter." So document their culture
Photo by Petra Eujane, from Emma Warren’s Vinyl Factory piece on Hackney’s Total Refreshment Centre
This is a compelling piece (run on the London Social website) from the pamphleteer Emma Warren, whose Make Your Space book recorded the impact of the Hackney music/arts venue Total Refreshment Centre - all the cultures and characters that enchant such a place.
Emma’s new pamphlet, Document Your Culture: A Manual (also an audiobook) is an attempt to turn this kind of story-telling into a tool. “Why? Because we'll need to be able to explain why grassroots venues, basements, skateparks, co-ops and community centres matter, so that we can contribute to how they're reshaped or rebuilt post-COVID.”
This extract from the book makes some powerful arguments about how the recording of stories about a place gives it staying power:
Humans are communal. We need places where we can meet like-minded souls, where we can gather to do things that make us happy and keep us well. We will still need this despite Covid-19 and the effect it will have on existing spaces.
Fear is a virus too, and the pandemic has dented our confidence about proximity. We might carry this fear with us for longer than we anticipate. Masks, shower curtain dividers, drive-ins and socialising outdoors? We’ll have to adapt, safely, step by step.
We will still need space, even if it’s different to the space we needed before. Those of us who care about community and culture will need to do a better job of explaining the value of our locally-influential places before we address how they’ll be saved, reshaped or rebuilt.
State systems behind austerity and gentrification had zero interest in supporting affordable communal space, even before Covid or the new ramped-up nationalism. We’ll have to do it ourselves.
Stories create a long view. We lack this because most people find themselves in these spaces during a very specific period of their life, usually in youth. These places are often made or maximised by young, Black and queer communities, groups that lack structural power and are therefore easily, and conveniently, overlooked. Stories can act as blue plaques.
I’m not just talking about history or nostalgia. I want to create a living archive of examples that we can use to inform and educate ourselves. Stories about basements, venues, community centres, youth clubs, co-ops, cafes, squats or roller skate spots can create an evolving blueprint. We can use that blueprint to open up possibility: to hang out together and dance, protest, make music, or just spend time in the resurfacing art of dossing.
It’s hard to know our histories, and to quote Carl Cattermole, who told the story of his time behind bars in Prison: A Survival Guide “we need more accessible and open formats so we don’t get fucked over by the same techniques as yesterday”. His book began life as stapled- together sheets of paper that he photocopied and took to record shops like Rough Trade in the late 2010s. Now it’s published by Penguin Books.
We need historic stories but we especially need real-time documentation. In an essay about the structural racism underpinning music journalism titled ‘A Letter to RA and the Rest of the UK Press’ Roshan Chauhan, aka R.O.S.H. makes a good point: that middle-class white DJs benefit from coverage.
Photo by Scottie McNiece, from Emma Warren’s Vinyl Factory piece
“Longer careers, higher fees, greater exposure to a wider audience. None of these missed opportunities can be gained by being mentioned in a fan-corrective history book. These opportunities are lost forever.” The same is true of spaces and communities.
There’s also a language gap. I know how to describe my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my best friend, but I don’t have language to describe a place I love.
Many of you reading this will know that it’s possible to love bricks and mortar, and that a building can break your heart. People who have run spaces will also tell you that a building can break your back, your relationships and your bank balance, but that on balance it was worth it.
Document Your Culture aims to help people tell stories of space, but we’ll also need new spaces to tell stories about. The pandemic will empty thousands of offices, pubs, shops and developments that will either move to remote working or stop working entirely.
Find the keys to these spaces by talking to the council, landlords, developers and agencies that deal with what’s called ‘meanwhile space’, and get them open again, however you can.
Then tell the story (unless the story gets a place shut down. If that’s the case, you might want to hold on for a while). Make space in car parks, warehouses, street corners, parks and basketball courts. Do it yourself and don’t let megacorps take control of emerging space – and the culture that inevitably happens within it. Read Sarah Pinsker’s post-pandemic novel A Song For a New Day for ideas on what we might want to swerve.
We all need somewhere safe and welcoming where we’re left alone to get on with it. These spaces are the bedrock of a creative life and are the foundation for the broader cultural life of towns, cities and whole countries. Positive spaces also mitigate against serious youth violence. We don’t need more stop and search or more police powers. We need an army of youth workers, and we need them now.
It’s also worth mentioning that some of these valuable spaces can exist without physical buildings; a crew or a collective can create the kind of spaces we need psychologically. The Y-Stop app, which was built by youth to support young people being disproportionately stopped and searched, is a space too. It creates a pause and the pause makes it possible for something else to happen. Tell all these stories.
Stories offer support. They create networks of possibility, and they offer a set of practical blueprints. They’re also funny, relatable and inspiring. The stories you will make offer hope and permission through example. They may help us repair and rebuild.
Build your own myths, as Sun Ra said.
Make the space you need.