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The Lime Green Mystery: Rosa Schling The Lime Green Mystery: an oral history of the C e n t e r p r i s e co-operative On the Record For the people of Hackney, past and present. In memory of Athaliah Durrant, Howard Mingham, Lotte and Siege Moos, Bridget O’Connor, Ann Taylor, Glenn Thompson, Vivian Usherwood, and the many other people who contributed their time, energy and ideas to Centerprise who are no longer with us. First published by On the Record, 2017 On the Record 1 2 3 P a u l e t R o a d London SE5 9HW Copyright © On the Record, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo- copying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-9927393-1-7 This book was designed, typeset and made into pages in Adobe InDesign by Peter Brawne, Matter, London. The text was set in the typefaces Rockwell (various weights), Egyptian 710 and Egyptienne Condensed Bold (headings). The book was printed and bound by L&S Printing, Worthing and London This publication was published with financial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund Cover images credits Front, clockwise from top left: Copyright © Doffy Weir, Sherlee Mitchell, Brian Longman, Courtesy of London Borough of Hackney Archives. Back, clockwise from top left: Copyright © Hackney Photos, Sherlee Mitchell, Alan Denney, Unknown. on-the-record.org.uk Contents Preface ⁄ 9 1: Making the idea real ⁄ 15 2: In search of the people ⁄ 23 2.1 Schools, strikes and newspapers ⁄ 24 2.2 On Dalston Lane ⁄ 31 3: Buildings have history ⁄ 41 3.1 On the frontline ⁄ 41 3.2 Behind the shopfronts ⁄ 52 The bookshop ⁄ 55 The coffee bar ⁄ 63 The basement ⁄ 71 The 136 playgroup ⁄ 71 Yo u t h ⁄ 71 The first floor ⁄ 79 Offices and meeting rooms ⁄ 79 The advice centre ⁄ 81 Hackney Reading Centre ⁄ 89 The publishing project ⁄ 103 4: An attempted jail break ⁄ 123 4.1 We not I ⁄ 125 4.2 Just writing it down ⁄ 130 4.3 We should be grateful ⁄ 134 5: The collective ⁄ 143 5.1 The only way to work ⁄ 143 5.2 The collective ends ⁄ 155 5.3 The closure ⁄ 158 6: Conclusion ⁄ 161 Centerprise, c. 1992. Photograph courtesy of Tom Woodin. 8 Preface When it opened in 1971 Centerprise was the only bookshop in Hackney, east London, then one of the most deprived parts of England. Centerprise’s radi- cal founders believed this was a deliberate omission by arbiters of culture like the large publishers and booksellers, who thought that working class people had no interest in, or need for, literature. Opening a bookshop was therefore a political act, meant to assert access to books for all as a “cultural right”. The bookshop was swiftly complemented by a publishing project that “made public” the writing, poetry and life stories of hundreds of local people, selling many thousands of their books. It proved that not only did the people of Hackney read, they wrote too. More than just a bookshop, Centerprise was once described as a “lime green mystery, trading ambiguously in an otherwise strictly commercial high 1 street.”1 A coffee bar offered cheap teas, meals and a welcoming and socia- Centerprise Trust Ltd, ‘Centerprise Annual ble atmosphere. Behind the shopfronts the building housed youth projects Report 1978’, 1978, A Hackney Autobiog- and children’s activities, cultural events and exhibitions, office facilities and raphy, Bishopsgate meeting rooms, an advice centre, a playgroup, adult education classes, writ- Institute. ers’ and local history groups, a publishing project and a reading centre that 2 Centerprise Trust Ltd, taught adult students literacy. This combination of services provided within ‘Press Release: 10th one place was meant to open doors to experiences that may otherwise have Anniversary, 20 April 1981, Arts Council of been out of reach, and it was hoped Centerprise would have a transforma- Great Britain Archive. tive impact on the lives it touched. Someone might come in for some advice 3 Centerprise Trust Ltd, and leave having been inspired to write a book, or at least having bought ‘Centerprise Annual one. Report 1978’. Centerprise hoped to distinguish itself from charitable or philanthropic social work projects that may have provided similar services, but which seemed to reinforce divisions between the “do-gooders” who ran them and those who were “done to”. In 1981, on its tenth anniversary, they wrote: if there has been one constant theme in Centerprise’s philosophy … [it] has been the continuing attempt to break down the very fixed categories of people’s roles which so many other established social forms and institutions have handed down to us: teacher/ taught, writer/reader, producer/consumer, artist/audience, men’s work/women’s work, mental/manual.2 This work was “permanently unfinished”3, as Centerprise itself acknowl- edged, and always complicated by dynamics of class, gender and race. Differences between those who ran the project as workers or co-operative members and those who used the project as customers, writers and group members, were not, perhaps could not, be obliterated. Issues of representa- tion, power and participation in the centre’s work continued to be the subject 9 The Lime Green Mystery of discussion, debate and challenge from within and without, evolving as Centerprise, and the world around it, changed. Centerprise was part of a broader movement that sought to democratise culture in multiple arenas: youth work, education, people’s history, communi- ty publishing. It was conceived of as a pre-figurative project, foreshadowing in its processes a more equal future society. One important way it tried to do this was through its collective management structure whereby the workers ran the centre, overseen by a larger co-operative of local people. This could only ever have been an imperfect attempt, the demands of the outside world intruded, and the collective itself was far from ideal. In 1984, a Centerprise worker described the idea of Centerprise being pre-figurative as seeming like “an absolute bloody joke” in the context of Thatcherite Britain, when everything hard fought for in the previous decade seemed about to be un- 4 done by cuts and closures.4 Betsy Brewer, Interview with Betsy However, it is the attempt Centerprise made to put these radical ideas into Brewer by Maggie Hewitt, 19 October practice, while providing a range of useful activities and services over sev- 1984. eral decades, that makes it especially interesting today. Throughout this book 5 excerpts of interviews with those involved with the co-operative are used Quotes from the oral history interviews to provide insight into the fine detail of what worked and what didn’t, the recorded as part of A Hackney Autobiog- lessons learnt, in hindsight what would have been done differently and what raphy: Remembering those involved got out of it, to form a collectively sourced body of knowledge Centerprise and archived at Bishop- meant to inspire and inform those engaged in similar work today. sgate Institute. are This book has been produced as part of the oral history project A Hack- attributed to the inter- viewee in the text but ney Autobiography: Remembering Centerprise, run by On the Record and are not referenced separately. funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project spent from December 2014 to December 2016 collecting an archive of documents, photographs and ephemera at the Bishopsgate Institute’s library in east London, and recording interviews with over forty people: former workers, customers and local residents who remember Centerprise.5 There were many people we wanted to interview but couldn’t get to or did not locate in time. Given the number of projects housed within Cen- terprise we would have needed more time to have collected a fully repre- sentative set of interviews. Interview quotes have been edited for brevity and clarity from verbatim transcripts in consultation with interviewees. They retain a sense of their origins as speech, not writing. Where possible, every effort has been made to discuss quotes with interviewees, and around fifty people, including most interviewees, have given feedback on drafts of this book. As one interviewee remarked, and as applies elsewhere, every person involved thinks that the period of Centerprise they remember was the “real” Centerprise. One of the most significant ways in which it changed over the years was that by the early 1990s most of the people who worked at and used Centerprise were from ethnic minority communities, which was not the case in its first two decades. Judy Joseph, for instance, who used to visit Cen- terprise in the 1990s and 2000s remembered it as a black organisation. She 10 Preface recounts her surprise at the project’s launch event when she “encountered visually” a crowd of mainly older white people “because my expectations were to find older, black people.” Centerprise was open from 1971 until 2012, but this book focuses its atten- tion on its era of co-operative management, which came to an end in 1993. This partly reflects the material we have recorded, which is heavily weighted towards the earlier period. Chapters 1 and 2 give a detailed account of how the idea of Centerprise arose, was “made real” and what the project did in its experimental first few years. The beginnings of Centerprise are set in the broader context of Hackney at the time, wider developments in education and the youth-led counter culture.