(A talk I planned to give at Newham Citizen Science Fair 2026. Bit of a work in progress – which is one reason I didn’t give it then. Check it out anyway 🙂– Lia)
I’m Lia Rees – Newham Radical History. Often I look at things in this borough and think we’ve been here before. This place has a turbulent past, and our people many times have had our backs against the wall. We’re facing serious threats from multiple flanks right now – the climate emergency, the rise of the far right – so it makes sense to look to local history for insights and strategy. We’ve seen these problems before, and (sometimes) dealt with them.
Sometimes the words “climate emergency” are hard for new people to take on board, because an ongoing emergency feels like a bit of a paradox. But protecting and sustaining the community is something anyone can understand.
I’ll be linking this to Gavin Sealey’s idea of a borough brain. The “borough brain” is our analogy for Newham’s collective consciousness — and conscience. (Those words are similar for a reason.) The ongoing app and LLM projects are in the same family of ideas, and they’re an intriguing and welcome new take on the concept. The phrase was coined during the “Negotiating AI as a Community” workshops, but I see it as an idea with much deeper roots.
Whatever we call it, it resonates with me, because there are so many parallels with local history and how this borough naturally operates. You might say Newham has distributed intelligence. We can see ourselves as individual “neurons”, and over time we’ve joined up into “modules” to carry out the various functions of a community brain.
So how did we get here – what was the push? Before “Newham”, there was East Ham and West Ham, just outside the official boundary of London. Which wasn’t a good place to be. The city at the time was exporting its problems to “London over the border” (that was us, right here). There were brutal, dangerous work conditions in the new industries, towns built without proper roads, the south of the borough regularly flooded by a poisonously polluted Thames. And no-one seemed to care. The law permitted it, and there were people making money out of the situation as it was. And tradition said working-class people weren’t allowed a say in the system.
Survival intelligence: that’s how it started, the first sparks of awareness in a developing “borough brain”. People here had to defend their homes, their land, sometimes their lives. So Newham learned self-organisation, practical skills, problem-solving at grassroots level. Community action saved Wanstead Flats and Epping Forest from being carved up and sold off by profiteering landowners.
The modern conservation movement began with the campaign for Epping Forest
Meanwhile, other landlords were building slum housing, bribing the inspectors to look the other way, and charging rip-off rents. The situation inspired the first housing co-ops, such as Tenant Cooperators in Upton Park. (The housing battle continues, carried on today by groups like Focus E15 and London Renters Union.) Community intelligence evolved under extreme pressure — and it became seriously sophisticated.
Let’s analyse some of the structures that were built, and how they worked to keep the community functioning. Co-ops, volunteer groups, trade unions, mutual aid networks: these were just some of the building blocks. The borough brain developed what I call maintenance modules. They deal in persistence work – the “safe/boring” background processes to support local life. Quiet, ongoing activity to keep things ticking over.
Then we had what I call response modules – they swing into action in a crisis. Campaign groups, activists, so-called “troublemakers”, our collective conscience and alert system. I think the real start of local resistance was the Quakers (Society of Friends). They were influential in East Ham since the seventeenth century. They campaigned against slavery, the death penalty and the Victorian prison system, and faced fines and imprisonment themselves. Today they’re still active in peace and human rights work, and the battles with authority remain.
And there are hybrid modules doing both types of work, like charities and trade unions. The mutual aid groups that flourished in Newham during Covid are a recent example. (One reason they sprang up so fast is because mutual aid is a long-established thing that reactivated to meet the crisis).
Co-ops are another example. 2025 was International Year of Cooperatives, and the United Nations has just decided to repeat that on a ten-yearly basis. That’s how important co-ops are around the globe. The idea of a cooperative is: a collectively-owned, democratic and participative project. They operate in different spheres (such as retail, work and housing), and adopt various legal structures, but the culture is the key to it all. Everyone gets a say in a co-op.
The retail co-op model started in Rochdale, Lancashire (the movement still uses the Rochdale Principles, now updated by the International Cooperative Alliance). Stratford picked up the idea in 1861 and ran with it, eventually merging into the London Co-operative Society which became the Co-op supermarket.
Co-ops are built for community persistence, but they can also support resistance. Newham’s co-operative housing and culture in the 1980s was a safe base for anti-racist and green activism: the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah was deeply involved in the community.
So many of the ideas that feel exciting and new — co-operative culture, environmental justice — are actually rooted in local stories going back generations. That’s a knowledge base we should reclaim and expand. If sustainability means anything, it’s not just saving a bit of carbon or using less plastic. It’s about sustaining the local community, the most vital and human parts of it, the things that make you proud to live in this place. Where I’m based in Forest Gate, we’ve got the amazing Clapton Community Football Club. They do everything — sport, social inclusion, community organising — at the Old Spotted Dog Ground, collectively owned and run by its members.
We also have Newham Woodcraft Folk, the cooperative youth movement, and festivals like the upcoming Green Fair where it all comes together. (Sunday 7 June 2026, Stratford Park E15 – be there!). All the current technology is kinda fun, but I still say: beware of distractions. We don’t want to be sitting talking to bots while our planet burns. Our history, purpose and humanity is really what it’s about. That’s community intelligence.
Peace out ☮️