Saying "Yes" To Everyone

It's that time of year again when the evenings get darker. Two years ago I was just getting started on a project to help revitalise a High Street location in South-East England. Workshop34 was supposed to be a year-long project but it got squeezed into five months. I worked on behalf of Kent County Council with Dan Thompson although because of the time shenanigans and therefore other commitments, Dan wasn’t able to join in very much until the last month or so. It was part of a bigger EU-funded project called Recreate which was supposed to drive regeneration through spaces for the creative industries.

The workshop was a pop-up shop and coworking space in the High Street in Sittingbourne. Sittingbourne is a typical English market town. It has known more prosperous times. Its High Street was once part of the main Roman road from London to Canterbury and Dover but they built the A2 bypass to relieve the High Street and then they built the M2 to bypass the bypass. Being near to the coast, Sittingbourne was a good place to bring in raw materials and add some value before sending them off to London and the rest of the country. There used to be a lot going on. Now it’s tired and a bit depressed. People jokingly call it Shittingbourne. It’s not an arty place like Faversham or Whitstable. People there have gotten used to being told “No. You can’t do that.”

But it does have artists. Lots of lovely artists. Like Dean Tweedy whose bread and butter is murals in children’s bedrooms, but who also organised the Chalk it Up festival giving people chalk and finding odd bits of wall and pavement for them to beautify. Or Jo Eden and Julie Bradshaw who live over on the Isle of Sheppey (The Island). Jo’s a singer and photographer and painter who hadn’t sold much of her painting until Workshop34. Julie is another muralist, but she also does amazing things with stuff that other people would throw away (or bury in the garden...). Together, this summer they invited their local community to build a lighthouse on the beach at Warden Bay out of found wood and other materials.

But when I arrived in Sittingbourne at the beginning of November, just as the chill of winter was approaching, I didn’t know any of these people or the others I’d soon be friends with. I just went to open the shop and wait to see who would come.

It took me a week to get the keys from the landlord and then another week to get the water turned on. We cleaned the windows and washed the floors. Once the water was on, it turned out that the boiler didn’t work very well. The upstairs rooms that were supposed to be for coworking were very cold and bare. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the High St to the Shopping Centre manager who represented the landlord (one of the big supermarkets) to negotiate stuff.

Most of the time, I sat in the shop and talked to the people who came past. “What’s this going to be?” was the usual question. It would have to be something, wouldn’t it? I told people it was up to them, what we made. I was there to support “the creative industries”, whatever that means, but I didn’t want to press my own view of what it should be on them. So word started to get around. And at the end of the first month a couple of things happened. First I decided to do a Tuttle meet up on Thursday mornings for anyone interested in the space - that brought Dean and Jo and Julie and many others along to nose around and check me out. And it just happened that Phil Campbell and CJ Lyon had been invited to speak at a conference in Sittingbourne the day before that first Tuttle. So Phil made a video of me, in the empty shop and zapped it up online so that we had something to show people.

Dean asked if he could bring some of his and other people’s art in to sell. I asked him how it would work. He said “No hanging fees and 20% commission for the shop.” I said "yes".

I went away that weekend and had an early family Christmas do in Cornwall. When I got back, the shop was full of art. Loads of paintings on the walls. And that’s how it began and how it continued for another four months till the end of March. Karen Crosby asked if she could make one room into a Camera Obscura. “Yes” I said. “Brilliant!” More people came, and they asked if they could run a workshop or a class. And I invariably said “Yes. Yes. Yes. Thankyou.” Dean and his work-partner Jaime made us a big bright sign to hang outside. They organised a Christmas party. Then they wanted to do an exhibition, and another one. Jo and Julie wanted to host a performance evening with responses to the building and the space. I said “Yes, of course!” Julie’s husband Dave (who had until then just been Julie’s husband Dave) wrote a poem which he read out that evening and made me cry. The shop was staffed by volunteers most days. Tony & Lorraine live just down the road and became key holders and the foundation stone for keeping things going. Jenni found furniture galore and all sorts of decorative stuff that brightened that place up. As part of the wider project, Ian Elwick and Martin Bouette came and gave business support while creating a pop-up cinema.

We sold people’s art in a town where people don’t buy art. We turned over a few thousand pounds in a bit of the High Street where people mostly buy cake and day-to-day staples from the Pound Shop. We shared the space - it wasn’t me and them, like so many of these “community” things are. I wasn’t there to do stuff for them, I did it with them and they did most of it themselves. We plotted together ways of either keeping the shop open after the funding ended or else using other temporary spaces. We had a hilarious day blagging our way into the other empty shops on the High St and in the shopping centre.

When it came to the end of March, people were very disappointed to see the place empty out and shut up. But they’d had someone say yes to them, again and again. And so they just started again, in one of the empty units in the Forum centre. And each of them have continued to do more and more by themselves and they haven’t got a Lloyd anymore, but I bet they’re saying “Yes” a lot.