DOUGALD HINE

Category: Newsletters

  • When the House Is Built, the Scaffolding Can Be Taken Down

    I started my first blog in an internet cafe in Xinjiang. It was early 2004, I was teaching in a language school set up by a man named David, who was younger than I was, smoked a pipe and talked like he’d walked straight out of a 1930s movie version of England. (In fact, he came from one of the English port dynasties, grew up in Australia and went on to settle in China.) I was the first teacher he’d hired who wasn’t already a friend.

    Everything about the experience was intense, and early on I began sending out emails to a list of friends back home, telling stories as a way to stay sane. Then I found a site where you could keep an online journal, so I told my friends I’d spare their inboxes and post my stories there, in case they wanted to go on reading. After a couple of months, I found that I was getting comments from people I’d never met. It’s hard to explain how strange and exciting that felt in 2004.

    That memory came back to me as we were preparing the invitation to Homeward Bound, our first online offering from a school called HOME. This is an eight-part series which I’ll be teaching, starting on Thursday evening next week.

    Besides the obvious transfer of a significant proportion of all human interaction to Zoom, several recent experiences convinced me that it was time to make this invitation, one which Anna and I have been mulling for a while.

    First, in February I embarked on a six-month course led by my old friend Charlie Davies, entitled Clarity for Teachers. It made me realise what a charged word ‘teacher’ is, the power and the possibilities for confusion involved in claiming it.

    If someone asks what you do and you say you’re a teacher, they will assume you mean in a school. It’s hard work, being responsible for classrooms full of children and teenagers. I’ve seen people broken by it, and I’ve seen people come alive in it. If you don’t belong to the professional body of qualified classroom teachers, then to call yourself a teacher could verge on the shady, like passing yourself off as a surgeon or a lawyer.

    Among the group of us on Charlie’s course, there’s at least one with a classroom career behind him, but the others include the head of a national church, the head of a Buddhist monastery, a former naval officer and a ritual designer. It’s quite the crew.

    During the first part of the course, we worked with a set of forty-two cards, each carrying a line from A Teacher’s Advice on How to Be Clear. This is Charlie’s reworking of a thousand-year-old Buddhist text, Advice from Atisha’s Heart, rendered in fiercely commonsense, modern-day English.

    Because I absorb and process experience by writing – not much has changed since I was teaching in classrooms in Xinjiang – I began writing a more-or-less daily commentary as I worked my way through the forty-two lines. Since I started this in early March, it became my companion through the strange weeks in which the world slid sideways and so much else changed: one exercise I’d sit down to, usually at the start of a working day, that still seemed to make sense.

    There’s so much I could say about where this led me. Not least, it means I accidentally wrote a book in two months, though it remains to be seen whether anyone will want to publish it! For tonight, I want to pick out a passage from one of the later commentaries, where I’m reflecting on the difference between what I do and what my friends who teach in universities do:

    I work with words and thoughts, it’s a big part of what I bring to any stage on which I get asked to speak, and yet my favourite piece of feedback after a talk was the time my friend Ansuman told me, ‘What you said was great, but what mattered was the way you were.’ There is a song beneath the words, and if that song is not there or does not come through clearly, then it doesn’t matter how clever the words are, it’s all just noise.

    Having spent two months in the company of this gang of irregular teachers, and writing about these lines of A Teacher’s Advice, this has brought me to a place of claiming my role as a teacher – and getting clear about the kind of teaching that has been increasingly central to my work.

    In the way that sometimes happens when you reach a place of clarity and commitment, a series of messages then arrived in quick succession. First, when I shared that passage about Ansuman’s beautiful piece of feedback, I received an equally beautiful response from the artist and teacher Toni Spencer:

    I remember vividly your day at Dartington last year. And the talk the night before. I can be pretty reactive when talked at for too long. Especially by a man, especially a white educated man, especially with big words and academic and literary references in there. But none of that reactivity happened. We were all there in it together. I kind of didn’t notice. And you facilitated something so simple (which gave plenty of space for everyone’s voices too) and with a quiet magic. It made me smile how I couldn’t quite see how but didn’t care!

    Then it came time to deliver a guest lecture at the centre at Uppsala where I have been a frequent visitor in recent years, except that this time I was to give the lecture over Zoom. Now, because I live in a small city in Sweden and work with people around the world, I was an experienced Zoomer before most people had heard of it, but still I was unprepared for how rich and lively and intimate the experience of teaching to twenty students over this platform turned out to be. The course leaders let the session run half an hour over because the questions and discussion were flowing so beautifully.

    Afterwards, I was shaking my head. ‘That felt better than when I go there and teach in person,’ I said to Anna. Apart from anything else, this seems a pretty damning verdict on the physical and social construction of the spaces in which we usually gather for academic teaching, because in years of editorial meetings and family calls over Zoom or Skype or Hangouts, none of them ever felt better than it would have been to be together in person. ‘Maybe it’s time I made an invitation to that online course we’ve talked about.’

    Two nights later, in the kitchen, I brought up the subject again.

    ‘Well,’ Anna said, ‘are you going to do it?’

    So here we are.

    I’ve been reading Mark Boyle’s book, The Way Home, about his year of living ‘without technology’. When I say reading, I mean listening to it read by an Irishman with a lovely voice, on my headphones, using the Audible app, on the smartphone that is one of the great love-hate relationships of my life.

    I remember crossing paths with Mark a couple of times, around the time he became The Moneyless Man. I can see him bounding onstage at a new media awards ceremony where members of the Freeconomy Community had organised to vote themselves ‘the people’s choice’; there’s a photograph of him at the first Dark Mountain festival, delivering a speech to crowd on a mound outside the venue, in solidarity with those who objected to paying money for a ticket. It’s quite a messianic image.

    I’ll admit, back then his zeal set me on my guard. I’ll buy that money is the root of many of our evils, but not all of them. But there’s much in his writing and his example these days that I admire, and it seems a good book to spend time with, as we embark on the proposition of offering something of the heart’s work of this small school of ours through the unsettling miracles of instant global communications systems.

    In a conversation with William Wardlaw Rogers, not long ago, the pair of us landed on the thought that the technologies in which many of our lives are swathed just now might be used as scaffolding. It’s a humbler role than the one afforded them in the grand narratives of technological progress. Much of the best of what I’ve seen these technologies do over the years has been a kind of compensation for the damaged social and cultural landscape of our heavily-monetised societies. The danger is that such compensation numbs us to the accelerating damage that surrounds us. But sometimes, perhaps, we can turn them against their own logic. We can use them to build a house worth living in, a place worth calling home. And when the house is built, the scaffolding can be taken down.

    Meanwhile, perhaps the way to hold the contradiction is the one recommended by Ivan Illich: ‘Only the gratuitous commitment of friends can enable me to practice the asceticism required for modern near-paradoxes, such as renouncing systems analysis while typing on my Toshiba.’

    I can’t imagine how my six months in Xinjiang would have been, if I hadn’t had that online journal as a window to lean out of and throw words to friends and strangers, although part of the answer is that my Mandarin would have come a lot further. I can’t imagine how my life from that point onwards would have gone, without the friendships and connections that began in online spaces, and the ways that we used those tools to dream up projects and make them happen.

    This time last year, I spent a day in Doncaster with Warren Draper, first at Bentley Urban Farm, and then at the shop from which he and Rachel Horne have run Doncopolitan magazine. There aren’t many people whose work is as close to my heart as the work that Rachel and Warren have done over the years, and I’ve had glimpses of how much of a struggle it has been, how wearing it can be, the ground-level making of culture in and with and by communities that have borne the hard end of forty years of neoliberalism and deindustrialisation and the rest, where what funding there is rarely trickles down to the local culture-makers. But though I’ve only spent small handfuls of time with them over the years, every time I’ve come away inspired.

    As I walked back to the station with Warren that afternoon, I felt a touch of sadness. I said something like this: ‘I’ve seen you put the last ten years into building the magazine and the shop and the farm, in a place you can call home, and the work matters to so many people here. I’ve put ten years into building Dark Mountain and the rest of it, and it matters to a lot of people, but they are scattered across the world.’

    Someday soon, all being well, this school called HOME will have a place to call home, and Anna and I will enter a time when there is more possibility for rooting in our lives than there has been.

    All will not be well, of course – except in the mysterious sense of those old words that Julian of Norwich heard in her vision: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ These days, I am surprised at how directly I feel old words speaking to my heart.

    Yet even with all the things that will not be well, in any ordinary sense, we will go on making a home that offers what shelter and hospitality it can, as long as we are able.

    My hope for those of you who are able to join me, a week from now, in the strange in-between space of these online encounters, is that it’s possible to offer you something of that hospitality, in the words we share with each other and the song that runs beneath them.

    For details of future Homeward Bound series and other courses and events, visit the website for a school called HOME. 

    If you’d like to learn more about Charlie Davies’s work around clarity and teaching, visit his How To Be Clear website. 

    You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

    Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.

    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.

  • The Moment When the White Rabbit Goes Past

    This letter comes to you from a hotel room in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle. The hotel is called the Arctic Eden. From the window, I can see the mine buildings that crown what’s left of Gironvarri, the mountain the city came here to devour.

    The way I was told it, the Swedes knew there was a mountain full of iron ore, somewhere in this landscape, but the mountain was sacred to the Sami and they had no intention of letting the Swedes find it and tear it apart. Until eventually some prospectors got an old Sami man so drunk that he let out the secret.

    The history section of the website of the company that owns the mine that tore apart the mountain is headlined: ‘Faith in the Future since 1890’.

    In the foyer of the Folkets Hus is a scale model of the city. A red line loops across from the mine, taking in the whole downtown and chunks of the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the underside of the model, a reef of ore slants downwards more than two kilometres into the ground. As they keep following it, digging it out, the city itself will be undermined. The red line marks the zone in danger of subsidence. The answer is to take down the city and rebuild it three kilometres to the east.

    You can take a bus from the current city centre that drives straight into the side of the mountain, the road spiralling down into the mine to a depth of five hundred metres, but that will have to wait for next time, because this time I came here to see a play.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån is a story about what it means to come from a small place, to grow up with the idea that everything exciting in life is waiting for you somewhere else, somewhere bigger and brighter and more open-minded. Watching it, I was back in Darlington, twenty years ago, full of the desire to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, it seems to me now, but there is a problem when it hardens into a claim about the objective superiority of life in the big city, held to be an obvious truth by people old enough to know better. This is the attitude I think of as ‘urban supremacism’ – what Anders Duus, who wrote Jag Kommer Härifrån, calls ‘metronormativity’.

    The train from Stockholm to Kiruna takes seventeen hours. That’s a lot of time for talking – and the other reason I am on this trip is for the luxury of that time together with Anders and my new boss, Måns Lagerlöf, the director of theatre for Riksteatern. I still struggle to get my mouth round words like ‘boss’ and ‘job’, but for the first time in a decade or so, I have both of these things. Since January, I have spent much of my time in an office in a tower block in the concrete surroundings of outer Stockholm, trying to work out what it means that I am now the Artistic and Audience Development Lead for Sweden’s national theatre. If this job had been advertised in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to me to apply, but it came to me by one of those chains of coincidence which I have learned to trust.

    I guess if you grew up in Sweden it probably seems normal to have a national theatre that is also a grassroots movement, a network of over two hundred volunteer-run local associations that own the national organisation and arrange performances in smaller and larger places, up and down the country. To me, this sounds like the start of some extraordinary story: the moment when the White Rabbit goes past, staring at his pocket-watch, muttering to himself, and you know that you have left behind reality as you knew it.

    So, when the laughter and the applause have died away, the staging for Jag Kommer Härifrån is packed and loaded onto the tour bus, ready to head on down the road to the next town on a forty-date tour that stretches the length of the country. And having seen one of our productions out on the road for the first time, the organisation I’m working with just got a little more real to me.

    I’ll be writing more about what I’m actually doing, as these newsletters get going again, and as I get further into the process of figuring it out. I should say that I’m working 70% (as we say in this part of the world) which means I still have 30% of my time available for writing, speaking and other freelance projects. Most importantly, I’ve wound up here because the things I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about seem to resonate with what they want to do over the next few years, so this is a chance to put some of my ideas into action.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån has fun at the expense of the hipsters of Södermalm, buying their organic groceries at Urban Deli on Nytorget. That bit reminded me of Venkatesh Rao’s essay, ‘The American Cloud’, where he suggests that today’s America consists of a Jeffersonian simulation, an imagined version of small-town life, running on a Hamiltonian platform of mechanised processes the scale of which is uncomfortable to think about. He starts with the example of a Whole Foods store, its pre-distressed wooden fittings connoting authenticity, while behind them is the concrete and steel of which the building is actually made. Steel that came out of a mountain like the one outside my hotel window.

    The deposit of iron ore under Gironvarri is one of the largest and richest ever found. When mining began, there were 1.8bn tonnes of it down there. As part of the project of moving the city, the municipality held an architectural competition. The winning design was called ‘Kiruna 4-ever’. Today, less than half of the original ore remains to be mined. It seems that Kiruna has accepted the need to dismantle and re-mantle itself with little complaint. I imagine that only a city whose existence was this bound up with a single industry could be so accepting. The current rate of extraction of iron ore is over 25m tonnes a year. The new city hall will open next year and by 2021 the beautiful wooden church will have been rebuilt on its new site. The full project of moving the city will be complete sometime in the mid-2030s. By my reckoning, that is about when the ore will run out. I suppose that’s what they mean by faith in the future. Still, ‘4-ever’ seems an ambitious timescale.

    Sent as Issue 5 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.

  • How I Became a Cyber-Womble

    This is James Wallbank’s story of founding Access Space, based on an interview I did with him for the ‘Steel City’ special issue of PICK ME UP zine, 28 October 2005

    James and his friends wanted to make art with computers. But they didn’t have any money. So they decided to see what they could do with PCs other people were throwing away. Now they run a free “media lab” where anyone can come and learn.

    One day I sent an email to some friends saying, look, I’ve got a great idea for an arts organisation. We’ll only work with technology that costs nothing. We’ll have exhibitions and all sorts of exciting events where we show people the creative things that we do. And that will inspire people to give us more computers.

    A friend of mine, without telling me, rewrote the top of this email to say “You should hear about this great thing that James Wallbank is running in Sheffield…” and forwarded it to all these mailing lists. Within a few days I had emails coming from all over the world saying, “Hey, what you’re doing is absolutely great!”

    There was one in particular, from California. The guy said, “We had an idea like that, for being creative with old computers in Silicon Valley. We tried it and we just couldn’t get it to work. I’m so happy to hear that you’re actually doing that successfully in Sheffield now!”

    And I didn’t have the bottle to say to him, it’s just an idea, I haven’t really got started. So instead, like an idiot, I sent back emails to everyone saying, “Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? People are giving us computers from all over the place and we’re having exhibitions and activities and what have you…”

    After that, I had to make it happen.

    I thought the hard thing would be getting access to technology – but it turned out we could get as many machines as we wanted.  People started writing back saying, I’ve got this friend and his firm are throwing out sixty PCs – do you want them?

    So I went racing round the country collecting computers in a tiny little van that ended up completely knackered. We started making them work and doing exhibitions – and still more computers kept arriving. A year later, we had a warehouse with 2000 old PCs sitting there. We just didn’t know what to do with them all.

    That was when we had the idea for Access Space.

    Anyone can walk in, but it’s not a free cybercafe. We’re asking everyone to get actively involved in developing content, doing things. 

    The one thing we can’t provide is motivation. So we ask everyone to propose to us a project that they really want to do, something they’re excited about.

    The philosophy is simple: share what you know, learn what you don’t. 

    If you get stuck with something, you can ask anyone in the space and they’ll try and help you – the only catch is, when someone asks you for help, you’ve got to give them a few minutes.

    In the future, everyone’s going to need to acquire new skills over and over and over again. How are we going to do this in Britain, in every neighbourhood, for free, forever, in a sustainable way, that isn’t going to cost us all a fortune?

    The answer is to have local, community-based organisations where anyone can walk in and do creative activity that they’re excited by, that helps them to learn skills. I think Access Space is an unbelievably great model for that – because it also solves another question, which is that businesses all over the UK are throwing out computers hand over fist.

    Now should we, at Access Space, go all over the country collecting computers, taking them back to “Access Space Central” and then distributing them to people like you? No, that’s stupid – and it’s also a complete waste of diesel.

    Instead, we should give you the skills to find computers in your local area, revivify them in your local area and make them available to people in your local area. Not only so that people can come to you and learn skills and do exciting creative things – but so that you can learn skills from them.

    www.access-space.org.uk

  • How To Bring a Building Back to Life

    Published in the ‘Steel City’ special issue of Pick Me Up zine, 28 October 2005

    I’m not sure quite how it started. There was a huge empty building in the middle of the city, an old cutlery works. One guy with a recording studio on the second floor, and the rest of it just mouldering away.

    Then the G8 Justice ministers came to Sheffield. Lots of people who didn’t really know each other met because they wanted to protest against the G8. There were artists and doctors, school kids and single mums. DJs and journalists, economists and clowns.

    Afterwards, we agreed that it wasn’t enough to protest against things – you have to show people what you’re for. So we decided to bring the building back to life. Once the idea got round, everyone wanted to get organised. It wasn’t always fun – sometimes it was really hard work – but no one minded, because we knew what we were working for.

    Down in the mouldy cellars under the building, Helene and her friends got stuck in with paint scrapers. In six weeks, they transformed them into a gig space for bands and fundraising parties for all kinds of campaigns.

    “There’s nothing more inspiring than working together with your friends, starting with a roomful of rubble and ending up with this fantastic space. Before, I’d been struggling to get out of bed in the morning, but suddenly I was in the office at seven every morning, so I could be out and scraping walls by two.

    “We put the word out that we needed wood, and it just started turning up. People were finding it lying around or in skips, pulling it out of the crumbling urban environment. We were a bit nervous when it came to making the stage, because we didn’t think we had the skills. But people came out of the woodwork – handy friends who could borrow tools and teach the rest of us. In the end, it was built in a weekend.”

    Up on the first floor, we took out the partition between two empty rooms and built a new kitchen. All the surfaces, the table, the appliances were donated by people who wanted to help.

    On Thursdays, we have a work day when anyone can come along and help with doing up the building. There are always plenty of jobs to do, like glazing the broken windows before winter arrives… And if you don’t know how to glaze, someone will teach you.

    At the end of the day, people get together to cook a meal, and we open a few bottles of wine.

    Yiannis turned the room next to the kitchen into a film set.

    “Our film is called Get Lost. It’s a fantasy story, like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and the surrealists – you have to be lost in order to be found.

    “I found out about the building because a friend brought me to a party here. The look of the place is ideal for the atmosphere of the film.”

    The craft collective meets on Sunday nights, with knitting needles and wool and button boxes. And, most importantly, cake.

    Eric is curating an exhibition in three rooms at the front of the building. It’s a fringe event for the Art 05 festival.

    “I’d heard about the building because it used to be the old Yorkshire Arts Space. It had been big in Sheffield since the ’70s, but YAS moved out just before I arrived here. I used to walk past the building and wonder what it was like inside. Then I met this guy called Mozaz at a Sheffield Independent Film event. He said I should come along one Monday night.

    “When I stepped inside the building it was just, like, wow! Sitting in the weekly meeting, listening to people talk, I got an idea for an event I wanted to do there. The next week I came back with a proposal – people asked lots of questions, but they gave it the go ahead.

    “The theme of the event is ‘Urban Decay – The Invasion of Space’. With the exhibitions I’ve put on before, the space has been just a background – something to fill. Here, the space is the starting point, the whole event is a response to it.

    “Putting on an exhibition without any funding is hard. I’ve been stressed a lot of the time, but everyone’s helped out – cleaning the space, getting it safe for visitors, making food for the opening. Now I’m just hoping lots of people will come.”

    We don’t own Matilda. But before we came along, it had been sitting empty for years. 

    Everyone who’s been involved feels proud because we’ve made it happen for ourselves. We didn’t wait for anyone else to organise it. We didn’t even have any money. We’ve had to learn new skills – and work out ways of running this huge building. Already, hundreds of people have visited the space in just a few months and everyone seems to go away inspired.

    The building is owned by the Regional Development Agency. We don’t know what plans they have for it. But we do know that, one way or another, what we’ve started is going to keep going – because it’s as exciting as anything any of us have ever been part of.

  • How to Get 800 People to Come to a Protest Picnic

    (and get it in the papers and on the radio and telly)

    Published in the Pick Me Up zine, 24 June 2005

    1. START WITH A GOOD IDEA.

    Try it out on a few people. It’s got to catch their imagination or it won’t work, whatever you do.

    2. CLEAR YOUR DIARY.

    A lot of work in a short time generates more energy than a little over a long time. 

    With a good idea, lots of people are going to help you out – but mostly in between their other commitments. Someone needs to be committed to it 24/7. That’s you.

    3. FIND YOUR ALLIES.

    Your idea should be big enough to catch the imaginations of people who don’t think they have much in common. In our case, middle-aged Methodists, militant anti-capitalists and a Dutch entrepreneur.

    You don’t have to get them to trust each other – you just have to get them to trust you. And they need to find the story you’re inviting them to take part in more interesting than the things they disagree over.

    4. RAISE THE STAKES.

    Make sure you can’t afford for it not to happen. Talk to everyone about it – telling people what you’re going to do ties you in.

    So does spending your own money on printing 10,000 fliers. When I lugged those back from the printers, I knew there was no escape.

    5. HAVE A LAUNCH.

    Ten days beforehand, six of us turned up outside the town hall with a giant invitation and some bowls of rice. This got us our first hit of media coverage – all the local and regional papers, radio and TV.

    6. WRITE GOOD PRESS RELEASES.

    Read the last article your target newspaper ran on the subject and use similar phrases. Write it so a lazy journalist can cut and paste it – they probably will.

    Try and find a headline that makes them do a double-take. Keep the rest short and include lots of soundbites.

    7. MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG.

    Keep checking what you’ve forgotten to do and listing where you need to be when, but don’t map it out like you’re invading Normandy.

    When someone comes to you with a problem, get them to solve it themselves. If the idea’s good and you’re throwing all your energy at it, everything else will be OK.

    8. STOP AND LOOK AROUND.

    When it’s all going crazy and you’ve got two bands arguing over who should go on stage, three hundred people queuing for a bowl of rice and a group of anarchist clowns having a party in the ‘VIP area’, stop for ten seconds and remind yourself where all this started.

    Then rush off to locate the silver candlesticks you borrowed from the landlord of the Rutland Arms.

    9. REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN.

    Some days in those three weeks I didn’t want to get out of bed. I just wanted the whole thing to go away. But it was worth it when I heard someone say about an idea I came out with the other night, “If Dougald says it’ll happen, he’ll make it happen.”

    And the party afterwards was good, too…

    Pick Me Up was an email zine that ran for two years between 2004-6. It came out on a Friday afternoon and it was meant to inspire you to do something more interesting than looking at your inbox. The zine was written and edited by its readers, anyone could come to the editorial meetings and lots of the stories were sent in to us. The whole thing started with my friend Charlie and his friends Dan and Jenny sending out the first issue, and I ended up being one of the dozen or so core editors. I learned a huge amount from those two years.