(Picture above by Richard Lyons)
VoX WeB: Proposal for a not-for-profit, decentralised learning web in Vauxhall, south London
COMMUNIQUE FROM TOAD OF VOX HALL
Please come to Vauxhall. Please help create the Vauxhall Renaissance. There is a lot of work to do. There is a lot of litter on the streets and empty and abandoned buildings. There are several people without homes and several people waiting for homes. Yesterday when I tried to use a public lavatory I inserted 10p and it ate my 10p without letting me into the lavatory. There are, therefore, plenty of local problems to solve along with the mountainous national and international ones.
There are in Vox Hall, on the
other hand, some wonderful people from variegated backgrounds,
extraordinary independent shops, petanque circles, streets paved with
gold leaf, emporia, galleries, chess networks, museums, railway
stations, theatres, comedia del arte comissariats, cinemas, guitar hero
academias, hotels, hostels, boarding-houses, rooted and greenshooted jardineries, markets, street performers, cyber rabbit warrens, tumbledown
and tumbleup houses, architectural oddities, parks, libraries,
eccentricities, notes and queries and street mosaics. And, of course,
some incredibly deep history - as deep as the marshes that give Lower Marsh
Street its name (a street festooned with everything from William Prophet's furniture to
the remarkable and beautifully titled Secondhand Bookshop; from the
Scooterworks Cafe to the new Environmental Charity Shop; from Marie's Cafe
to the Inshoku Japanese restaurant; from Radio Days to the new Greensmiths
minisupermarket; from I Knit London to Cooper's Natural Foods; from the Waterloo Library to Cubana; from Christian Aid to Solar Century; from street marketeers to the Waterloo Health Centre which should not be
pillaged into becoming a polyclinic but is fine just as it is; and from the Top Wind flute-ologists to the brilliantly and bathetically titled Olympic Sandwich).
Please come and join us and help us build a beautiful area over the forthcoming decades where the uniqueness of individuals and the importance of community are the most vital values along with mutual respect, co-operation, generosity, kindness, integrity, decency, peace, democracy and creativity - and where we also design a local economy that protects people against unregualted corporatocracy and its various serfdoms and against the brutalising vicissitudes of its unstable and bipolar economic cycles.
WELCOME IN. WE WILL TAKE YOUR SHOES, COAT, AND HAT. PLEASE TAKE A SEAT. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME. DID YOU HAVE A SAFE JOURNEY? WOULD YOU LIKE SOMETHING TO EAT OR DRINK?
DEPENDING ON THE HOURS, WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE, DESIGN AND RUN ONE OF OUR MANY DELIGHTFUL CHAPEAU SHOPS AND WORKERS' CO-OPERATIVES?
Image below: a rare and out of print book entitled "Age of the Renaissance" edited by Denys Hay, published by Thames and Hudson (1967):
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