Column: May 2018

Exciting times lie ahead here on Golden Lane. We have a new estate manager, Michelle Warman, formerly in charge of the Middlesex Street Estate. Our newly refurbished community centre is about to finally open its door, and residents are asking what kind of tempting events are likely to take place there. Live music is on the wishlist, but that comes tangled up in a lot of red tape about insurance, performance rights, public conduct and nuisance, so it’s always easier said than done. Still, the demand is there and there isn’t much of a gig scene around here, not even a half-decent local pub band to turn up for. The best venue we have nearby is at the Slaughtered Lamb in Great Sutton Street, a magnet for indie-folk, roots and Americana fans. And right on cue, a very cool guitar shop has opened around the corner on Old Street. PMT (Professional Music Technology), occupies a space previously occupied by Cesar’s Janitorial Supplies. We are not short of musical talent here on the estate, so with the smell of cleaning fluid and floor polish gone, the start of our very own Tin Pan Alley is imminent. 

Theatre is another contender for our community centre. The first wave of Golden Lane residents back in the 1960s enjoyed a good show. Grown men dressed in women’s clothing could be seen regularly on the community centre’s stage. Last year we were visited by the Off The Wall Players doing Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. The play climaxed with a lovers’ tiff, a lot of spilt wine and a body on the floor. Our neighbourhood is famous for its theatrical history. Fortune Theatre, in Fortune Street, was one of London’s earliest. More recently, Shoreditch Town Hall has dusted itself down and now hosts a wide range of performances. And Theatre Delicatessen in Broadgate – a hip young space devoted to eating, drinking, incubation workshops for budding talent, rehearsals and full-on shows – is blazing a trail for innovation.

All the signs are right for Golden Lane to grab the limelight. There is even a secret plan afoot to get some of our senior residents involved in making plays about how the neighbourhood has changed in their lifetimes. So don’t be surprised if one day your TV listings include ‘The Only Way Is Golden Lane’ or ‘Made in Cripplegate’.

The film crews are already primed for action, because every so often they turn up on the estate to shoot scenes that require the hard edges of realism softened by the warm heartbeat of the big city. Just recently we saw an advert for Puma sportswear being made. We have in the past been visited by top stars.  Brad Pitt is said to have done something unspeakably wicked in a Crescent House flat above the Shakespeare pub, and I swear I once spotted Idris Elba in an episode of the TV series Luther prowling menacingly around a flat in Great Arthur House. 

Most residents are happy to rub along with this type of glamour, but sometimes the shooting gets out of hand. This is what happened with Puma. They stand accused of bossiness and a lack of respect for residents. The City Corporation Film Team is not short of guidelines, policies and contracts for those asking to use the estate for location shooting, but sometimes fails to supervise properly. This is when film crews and residents clash and a drama becomes a crisis.

Far less exciting are the looming challenges of Brexit. The future impact on jobs, families, health and wellbeing will inevitably fall to the children and young people of today. They will need help. We’ve heard City Corporation policy chief Catherine McGuinness extolling the virtues of apprenticeships – despite some companies reportedly using the scheme to dodge paying a living wage. And City University’s Micro-Placement programme aims to toughen up those about to enter the jobs market. But Brexit does not appear in a draft of the City Corporation’s Children and Young People’s Plan (CYPP).

This is a rolling three-year project  (2018-21), and its latest mission statement names five priorities: safety, potential, involvement, health and community. There then follows a dull narrative on what those words mean and concludes by saying there will be another plan along shortly on how this plan will be put into action. It wasn’t exactly inspiring, unlike the sound of a robust panel discussion on 15 May at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, about the soaring numbers of children and young people suffering from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harming and attempted suicide. As if Brexit wasn't enough to deal with.

Billy Mann has lived in Basterfield House on the Golden Lane Estate for more than 20 years. He is a City of London Community Builder and writes a blog about neighbourhood happenings at basterfieldbilly.blogspot.com. Write to him at goldenlanegazette@gmail.com.

A version of this column appeared in the City Matters newspaper, issue 073

Diary: April 2018

7 April, 2018, London

Dear Sue

Jane says she saw a portable rabbit hutch on Hatfield lawn tonight and a ginger rabbit making free with the long grass. The estate is teetering on the brink of revolution.

Billy

8 April 2018, London

There is a new Agatha Christie drama on TV, Ordeal by Innocence, starring Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor as his murdered wife. What I like is that it is textbook AC apart from the detective. In turn, each of the suspects acts as detective, which thickens the plot no end. The viewer becomes ‘complicit’ in the puzzle, which I like. It's a nice new twist on an old but faithful formula.

11 April 2018, London

12 April 2018, London

Juventas beaten by Real Madrid in Champions League quarter final. A controversial penalty and Cristiano Ronaldo had something to do with it. Juve goalie Gianluigi Buffon was not happy.

13 April 2018, London

I wrote this turgid essay below ages ago, parked it and forgot about it. They put it on the Headway website and Cris Vidal said she liked it. I hate it.

It started with a blink. That’s how Chippy says yes or no. A day-service volunteer in the art studio was showing him pictures from a magazine, and the lady with the crown caught his eye. If I could say the rest was history, I would. But that would be a lie. Chippy’s pictures begin pretty much in the way described above, but their journey from start to finish is a story all by itself, a slow, rocky road from eye to hand to board and back the way you travelled last time, or maybe via a different route, with different sights to see with different travelling companions and a whole new set of bag-carriers.

Every ‘Chippy’ is a tactical leap of faith. Only good communication, a lot of love, and a masters degree in patience can pull it off. Each finished piece is actually a dialogue rather than a single voice. Watching studio boss Michelle coax Chippy in collaboration through a picture is one of my favourite pastimes. They have evolved a relationship in fondness akin to a longtime comedy duo, where a cutting look is forgiven in an instant and an easy adaptation to each other’s irritating quirks becomes effortless.

To then partner Chippy with one of the studio’s most commanding artists would, in most cases, be dismissed as one small step from insanity. Stephen Staunton – sometimes just ‘Staunton’, like Picasso or Rembrandt – always brings a massive presence to any room. Most people take a step back, wondering whether the correct response is fear or amazement. He is profoundly deaf, so his world is aggressively delimited but fine-tuned by all his other senses. There is a brutality about him that stops you in your tracks.

Separate and individual Chippy and Stephen may be, but what brought them together for this project are two primal elements of art: shape and pattern. A studio chat between manager Michelle Carlile and coordinator Alex Brady saw both of them flirting with ideas around pattern and brain injury. They noticed that many of the Submit to Love studio’s artists use pattern and shape by instinct, no professional prompting required. It is as if pattern and shape offer some kind of psychological anchor to a troubled and struggling mind. It sounded like a cliché waiting to be born, but it was worth exploring.

Stephen’s work, with its powerful geometry, fits this idea no problem. All the expression is in the colour and stroke. The pattern is the skeleton that holds the whole thing together. Chippy's work doesn't fit the pattern/shape idea so easily. Until you watch him at it. Chippy is unable to look straight ahead in a conventional way, so his peripheral vision has become acutely trained in compensation. It’s actually more like an extra sense. This is the sense with which he picks out shape and line.

There is a mountain of documentation behind this joint work. Its progress has been photographed at every stage and from every angle and a fearsome inventory of accreditation and consent compiled. Not only have both artists suffered brain injuries, they have been isolated further: Stephen with his deafness and Chippy, unable to speak and confined to a wheelchair. The task of making this happen was an ethical and logistical tightrope walk.

To complicate the project further would have amounted to an act of extreme self-punishment. But this is the hard-nose part. Because when you decide to exhibit a piece of art, to put it out there for the world to see, someone has to decide on context. This image was destined to appear in a shop window space in Dalston, east London, so how would it fit, and who are the passing viewers likely to be? What should the background look like? These are what I call 'engineering' decisions. They can make or break a project, but rarely is enough quality attention given to the preparation of the ‘environment’ in which the finished image will be displayed. Smelly pubs are full of great art that nobody pays any attention to.

When Matt Chappel agreed to join the project I was excited. Like Chippy and Stephen, Matt is severely limited physically, but I am fascinated by the intensity of thought he pours into his work. In action he looks like he is using art to work existentially through the trauma of his brain injury. I watch the line of his jaw tighten and I see his hand respond, sometimes gentle and sweeping, sometimes recklessly squirty and plunging. Matt’s paintings push you into switching from a comfortable position to one of high alert. This can be quite nerve-wracking.

Complex colour is a big part of Matt’s strength as an artist, so the decision to go for a leopard print background, with its typical abrupt contrasts of black/yellow/white/black could have failed badly. The background unit would comprise 12 rectangles pieced together to create a wall of pattern. Anything could happen between Phase 1 and Phase 12.

It wasn't until Matt had finished the first 'tile’ of 12 and had started on the second that I could envisage how brilliantly this was going to pan out. The speed with which he started fluently mixing the colours with his brush got faster and faster. Sometimes he was stroking the paint in a carefree manner, then he would poke agitatedly. Both methods succeeded in merging his chosen shades in the yellow/orange/beige/brown spectrum so that, when dry, a whole new tone formed itself. How the hell did he do that, I was asking myself continually. The addition of the black at the end was more an act of composition. Those spots form the eye-grabbers that move you around the whole space. They are points on a map.

Now set these two finished elements together, the queen’s head and the skin of a killer animal, and a flood of metaphor erupts in front of you. It’s hard not to attach the word KITSCH because that is exactly what it is, and shamelessly so. I can see the art of the three characters I sit with week after week. There they are: Chippy ambling and scratching, Stephen stabbing his kaleidoscope of colour and Matt putting in enough energy to power a rocket to Mars and back. It’s a classic case of the result being more than the sum of the individual parts, so you end up asking how can something so audacious possibly succeed? I stopped trying to answer that question after about five minutes and just stood back in amazement. It should never have worked, but it did. Leave it at that and just give thanks.

15 April 2018, London

Did this flyer for an exhibition in Enfield featuring Sam and Errol. The sqiggly line around their names is an outline of the borough of Enfield.

19 April 2018, Hackney

Pictogram based on Japanese script.

20 April 2018, London

It is a warm evening and some nutcase in a straw hat is sitting on his balcony in Stanley Cohen House playing a violin, badly. The suspected cause is drink and maybe drugs.

21 April 2018, London

To the Natural History Museum with Séan.

23 April 2018, London

Bumped into Crazy Sue, who was on her way home to lie down and ingest a large quantity of dark chocolate, which, she swears, is the best relief for severe migraine.