The Together Culture collective have a new project coming up. They are asking you to imagine what you’d build ‘if you had a million pounds to invest in community-owned infrastructure here.’
- The Kite Heritage Project: The Imaginary
- Saturday 18 July, 12 – 5pm
- Prospect Row (by the Free Press pub)
More details are at https://www.togetherculture.com/events
“Given Cambridge’s housing and land prices, that might get you a small lock-up and a micro-forecourt if you’re lucky”
Which reflects the scale of the challenge in our grossly unequal society where land prices speculatively inflated become a drain on community projects as successive owners seek to sweat the assets as much as possible. Which also in part explains the continued miserable state of the Hobson Street Cinema building which for whatever reason the property owner still won’t restore or make available to community groups despite over a decade of people asking.
Above – can someone who is not me ask Cambridge City Council or the Cambridge Growth Company about this building? (Please)
Alternatively, drop an email to your city councillor and ask them for a progress update
“Why can’t you do it?”
Because councillors generally know what I think about this and I’ve got nothing new to add. (Here’s a video I made a decade ago. The building *is still out of use*.) However, if something comes from a resident who has never had a conversation with their local councillors before and indicates an interest in the future of the city, that’s a new conversation and potentially a new person to help inform and familiarise others – even if it’s only at a passive level.
Rebuilding the co-operative collective in Cambridge
The quotations at the start of the post on LI here come from a very rare book on the once mighty Cambridge and District Co-operative Society published in the late 1930s. I digitised my copy here.
Above – Co-operation in a University Town, by WB Brown
I’m still gutted about the ultimate implosion of the old Cambridge and District Co-op in 1990, which led to the takeover of the society by the wholesale society.
It used to be a huge civic presence and then suddenly it was gone as a social institution. The vanishing of its presence in the Cambridge newspapers after 1990 speaks volumes.
Know any teenagers who would like to do an extended research project on this? There may be some things that smaller co-ops of today can learn from – especially community engagement in the past.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 