Born in the 80s, grew up in Forest Gate, my background a hodgepodge of “arts, activism & alternatives”. I’ve been here over 25 years off and on, with involvement across a wide range of local stuff. An early highlight was the original Newham Young People Online (1998) – a pioneering project involving several current Mosaic members. It was featured on the BBC and in a PhD thesis. As young people we weren’t just building websites but communities, well before social media hit the scene. This was also the heyday of youth groups, which meant it was our space, not imitation-school.
You age out of “youth” groups, you get bored beyond belief with social media, but the ideas we were all kicking around – self-expression, empowerment, open knowledge and dialogue, civil liberties – those living ideals remain. One familiar problem was lack of topic filtering on the collective mailing list. We never solved that one, but has any platform ever?
Moving on: my recent-ish projects include designing the original artwork for Newham Green Fair, and making the huge patchwork banner displayed there each year (still proud of that one).
I’ve been part of the Citizen Science Fair, kept some local planters going during Covid, and was involved for a few years in Forest Gate Festival (the highlight of the calendar). Several radical history booklets about Newham are in the pipeline, starting with Radical E7 (2026). I’d love to see some more local booklets published. Don’t wait for me, just start.
My current project, Newham Permaknowledge, aims to tackle some accidental gaps and distortions in the local picture. One example being the community competition cycle, which floods social media with a subset of groups and maybe-projects. As residents, we really want to see “who’s doing what around here”, maybe join a nice group or an interesting project, and know the annual pattern of regular events (garden and jumble trails, craft markets…). Simple stuff, you know.
Newham Permaknowledge: local, interdisciplinary, reality-based. The project aims to connect, open up and future-proof the knowledge of our borough, from historic archives to big data, from community newsletters to one-off event talks. It’s a resident initiative which operates as an autonomous node in the Newham Citizen Science and Newham Mosaic networks.
“Permathoughts” is an informal blog of thinkpieces, linkpieces and resources related to the above. “Roots of Resilience” is already published, and others in the works include:
Community-Led Festivals: an example of social permastructure
What A Mesh: how local networks “work”, what helps them and what breaks them
Future-proof Federations: how groups manage to scale up and stay autonomous. (Contains examples and Star Trek references.)
The Great Displacement: local disempowerment and the far-right problem
I’m also looking into London housing co-op history, which my dad was involved with in the 80s (here’s his Benjamin Zephaniah story).
Some musings from me to end.
This borough needs regeneration – at grassroots level. A kind of “asset based community development”. Identify the skills and needs of our groups, attempt some direct matchmaking, see what can be done unfunded. Then investigate the “funding landscape” and see what fits. Bigger/more credible groups should give references to help the smaller ones. There’s always people applying for room hire costs, so a “space mission” would help too.
One thing that happens: groups can get tied up with box-ticking, treading-water novelty projects. We need a loose alliance and collective strategy to step off the hamster wheel together. The aim is to sustain *all* our valuable groups and projects, on our terms and timescale, as far as possible. Turn competition into cooperation, pool some ideas and resources, and I genuinely believe we have a chance. 20 years ago, Newham’s collective intelligence forced a major police climbdown. If we can do that, we’re capable of an easier mission like this.