In advance of the building opening, artist Lucy Harrison engaged local communities to record and celebrate the ways in which people come together to share their common passions and personal commitments.
Lucy collated leaflets, posters, badges, membership cards, photographs and other visual material related to specialist clubs and societies past and present, based in the London boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. This material was collated into a newspaper publication which was launched at Timberlodge in September 2013 and distributed to other local community spaces in the area. The newspaper also included texts by Ros Kane of local club News from Nowhere and local historian Roger Huddle.
Lucy also worked with artist Ashley McCormick and local communities including students from Colegrave School, to speculate on fictional or desired clubs and group activities, some fantastic and some which might really come into existence under the auspices of the new hub building in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the future. This was developed with members of Hackney Quest at the London Centre for Book Arts and a series of letterpress posters for the imagined clubs were produced. These were posted around east London as part of a ‘poster challenge’ where people were invited to take photos of the posters in different community spaces and to send them in to be added to a Google map showing all the locations.
The project was part of the community engagement project Finding North, a commission for the London Legacy Development Corporation.
