Conversations with the Gardener

We caught up last week with Dan Hudson, gardener with the community garden learning project Greenshoots on Besson Street and Edmund Waller School, to hear about his work with on the collective 1,000 Sunflowers project in New Cross. Dan has been nurturing about 100 seedlings with the afterschool gardening club at Edmund Waller Primary and about 50 seedlings at Greenshoots’ community garden. More sunflower seedlings being nurtured in private gardens, at schools and in community gardens are being transplanted during June and July, with hopes they will be in full bloom in September. He’s also helped scatter seeds in the scrubby piece of land behind the billboard at the entrance to Sainsbury’s carpark and in the beds at St James. He warns though that planting in public areas mean the plants are under “all the pressures,” listing foot traffic and hungry rodents as a few. The scattered seeds are obviously also at the mercy of the elements: they need six hours of daylight (maybe a struggle in the unpredictable British summer?) and a fair amount of rain (slightly easier to guarantee). Given his caution about the seeds’ success, he said they had decided to “attack on all fronts”, and also scattered wildflower seeds, specifically corn flowers, corn cockles, and poppies, to brighten up some of those less-than-welcoming bits of New Cross in the months ahead. If you’re looking after any sunflowers, send us some pictures (#newxing). If you’re interested in volunteering during the summer to keep the sunflowers going, email us at artmongers.studio@gmail.com.

New-Cross-ifying Goldsmiths

What do you say to New Cross-ifying Goldsmiths? Recently we had a chance to do just that: get more of New Cross into Goldsmiths.

As you may remember from this post, Goldsmiths is working on a new masterplan, and the college’s imposing presence on the high street means their plans will affect our community. We have ideas to get our community to affect their plans.

So it was great when we heard that Goldsmiths had asked James Dixon, of the architecture and urban design firm John McAslan and Partners (contracted to develop the masterplan) to meet with us earlier this spring to discuss New XING’s many ideas for the area.

High-priority plans we discussed include encouraging Goldsmiths to open up Deptford Town Hall (including us helping them to provide disabled access) for community concerts, performances and meetings. Another simple step to a better relationship will be making the college’s nature reserve open to the community as well as students.

The college has ambitions to build a new building at the corner of St James and New Cross Road. We proposed designing a structure with an open-air ground floor (ie a building on stilts) to give New Cross a much needed town square where citizens and students can gather for conversation, exchange and performances. Of course we also talked about the light projections on Goldsmiths buildings and the great X pedestrian crossing across the A2.

Our proposed creative interventions could make a big impact on the New Cross community and the synergy bewtween the college and the community so we were glad that James was enthusiastic about the ideas. When the college presented their Masterplan in a public consultation during April, they included a board showing our ideas (see below).

Getting our ideas in front of the planners gets us a bit closer to getting our ideas put into practice.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas about how Goldsmiths can impact New Cross? Feel free to comment on this article and join the debate.

1459 CONSULTATION BOARDS A1 community-1

Shared Histories

The Lewisham Local History Society has had a chance to showcase a few choice pieces from its fascinating trove of treasures stored at New Cross Learning. They have been working in partnership with the Goldsmiths Collection during the Shared Histories exhibition in April/May.

We were excited to introduce the exhibition’s curator Jenny Doussan to the society so that artefacts of New Cross’s manufacturing past (including Twinings tea, a box of Turkish Delight and the air meter pictured above) could reach a wider audience.

A small kitchen table laid for tea suggested daily life in Lewisham in years past while an iPad detailing the history of the items at all four exhibition spaces reminded viewers of more modern technologies. With Goldsmiths contributing a range of art pieces, including 19^th century etchings, early 20^th century paintings of local activists, and contemporary art from its graduates alongside Lewisham Local History Society highlighting the area’s more practical creativity, the exhibition connected Lewisham’s rich and varied histories.

Image: Vane Type Air Meter, model C.4, circa 1980, Lowne Instruments, Ltd., Lewisham