DIY FESTIVAL OF USEFUL OPENINGS

Wednesday, 4th – Saturday 21st November

A group has recently begun occupying a building in Hackney. Part of the building contains a hall / stage area and offers the potential for some amazing events. We are in communication with the owner and although they plan to demolish this part of the building soon they have given us confirmation that we can definitely use it up until Monday 23rd November!

So, this is a callout to all those who want to be involved in creating a temporary autonomous space to come and create, inspire, conspire and get organised! This week we will be cleaning up ready to start events from next week. We want to make the most of the space while we have it with workshops, discussions and general shinanigans. So if you always wanted to organise a day of circus training but never quite had enough space here’s your chance!

DIY Festival

**Wednesday 4th and Thursday 5th November**: Workdays: Come and help fix up the place

**Saturday 7th**: creARTion day: give the walls a lick of paint and bring out your creative side with a day of art

**Thursday 12th**: Art Opening: explore the building and the new exhibition

**Friday 13th**: The Haunted Herstory: An evening of story-telling & performance relating to the building’s past.

**Saturday 14th**: PantoPractice: developing a pantomime to perform on the stage at next Fridays event. Anti-Militarist / NATO gathering: an evening of discussion

**Friday 20th**: Who Can Do What?: bringing you an open stage for all of your performance needs: fancy having a sing-song, playing the fiddle or reading a poem? Make the most of the stage or come along for the Pantomime!

**Saturday 21st**: Gardening: clearing has already begun so let’s start growing things

Other ideas
- prison society info night: food, films and discussion relating to prison(er), death in custody & detention centre campaigns
- Permaculture Discussion Group
- An Evening of Poetry / Spoken Word
- already mentioned but seriously considered, Circus Training
- roller disco / roller ping-pong

Come get involved to help ensure that all of this and more happens in the space.

For exact location please email boardsofhackney@safe-mail.net. Also drop us a line if you have any ideas for stuff to do, want to help out or just keep updated on the goings on.

And another one…

So the FreeShop didn’t get evicted then.

Yesterday at about 5 o’clock in the evening the FreeShop guys got an ‘advanced notice of possession of land’ with 12 hours notice. This meant that the big, bad-ass high court bailiffs were meant to be turning up at 8 o’clock in the morning. Again, too early!

So a bunch of people went down there last night, and after making an awesome banner…

…everyone barricaded themselves indoors with some nifty hardcore barricading.

A few bailiffs were spied around, but it was kind of hard to tell what they were doing. I’m not too sure if they knew really. They had a walk around with some drills, accompanied by a child at one point (!), then they managed to find some ladders from somewhere. Kind of surprisingly though they didn’t actually try to do anything with them.

After a sleepless night, we finally got word that they’d gone, and took apart the painstakingly constructed barricades to go and celebrate in the open air.

The FreeShop is still open. Go down and help keep it open!

Eviction stopped!

Last Friday (9th) Belgrade Road Social Centre was schedualed to get an early morning visit from baliffs at 9.20 am. They know what they’re doing these baliffs with their early morning apointments!

Still it didn’t stop about 40 of us dragging ourselves out of bed and going down to show our support and generally get in the way. Much to our disgust (after all, we managed to get there in time to set up tea, coffee and skipped sushi) the baliffs and their cohorts were late and turned up around 10ish all blury-eyed and confused.

After a while standing around on the phone and looking at their clipboards, they came over to us all to say that the eviction wouldn’t be happening that day and that they’d be back in 2 weeks. One of them also mentioned to someone that they’d tried to call the police to come and help them as they weren’t prepared to deal with us all on their own, but the police had said they were too busy harrassing black people and that they’d have to make an appointment for the future.

It was a slight anticlimax, but hey! it worked and there aren’t enough excuses to stand around in the cold street in the morning eating blueberries anyway…

Planning meeting for North-East London mass-squatting action

This is a call out for a meeting to plan a mass squatting action. Come along if you’re interested.

Sunday August 2nd

2pm at the Brownswood Library, Brownswood Rd. N4

Map Link

This coming autumn we want to help homeless people provide their own alternative to over-crowded shelters, unhelpful councils and inadequate social housing.

Its fucking ridiculous that councils refuse to house thousands of people, whilst they leave an equal number of homes to rot. We want to work with people so that they can take housing back into their own hands.

We aim to get a large scale project off the ground in the next couple of months. Bring your ideas, skills, energy and experience to get involved.

P.s.  This is a really good idea. Think about the implications…?! See! It’s gonna be awesome! Come and help and then you’ll be able to tell your nieces and nephews all about it when you’re old.. and pretend you were part of the revolution.  See you at the barricades, oh, i mean the meeting.

Sucessful Practical Squatter Evening

Last night was the second Practical Squatting meeting that we held, and we got a fair few more people than last months two!
Even though we’d publicised it pretty badly, forgetting to get flyers to ASS even, lots of people came. It looked like almost everyone that came along got together with others to open a place with.
Next month we’re gonna have a tool bank set up. We’re not sure how borrowing things is going to work yet, but we’ll work something out… We’ll also make sure to put the word out better so loads of people will probably be along.
We’re planing on going on another empties hunt to update our list, so bring a bike if you can!

Practical Squatters Evening tonight

Come to 76a Clarence Road, E5, to get your squatting questions answered, to meet others people looking for homes and squat-mates, and maybe to do an empties search afterwards!