NEWS FROM NOWHERE CLUB Patron: Peter Hennessy
Founded in 1996, the club challenges the commercialisation and isolation of modern life and meets monthly on Saturdays.
‘Fellowship is heaven and the lack of fellowship is hell. Fellowship is life and the lack of fellowship is death’. William Morris
‘The club is a real beacon of light.’ Peter Cormack, former Keeper, William Morris Gallery
PROGRAMME 2022
St John’s Church Hall, next to the church opposite Matalan,
High Road, Leytonstone, London E11 1HH
Free entry. Donations/Raffle/Voluntary Membership £5pa
7.30pm Buffet (please bring an item if you can: vegetarian or vegan only.)
No entry before 7.30pm please.
8.00pm Talk and discussion till about 10pm
Leytonstone tube, exit left, two minute walk / Overground: Leytonstone High Road, turn left, ten minute walk / Buses 66, 145, 257, W13, W14, W15, W19 / Disabled access / car park in front of church / bikes can be brought in / Quiet children welcome / You can phone to confirm the talk will be as shown / Open to all; no booking, just turn up
We are on Facebook Twitter @Nowhere_Club / Enquiries 0208 555 5248 / Email: williammorrisnews@outlook.com / Web: newsfromnowhereweb.wordpress.com / Talks are recorded and put on our website
Saturday 8th January 2022
The labour of Sisyphus: Can the Labour Party ever be a vehicle for socialism? Speaker: Richard Price
Richard Price has been active in socialist politics since the mid-1970s. He was a trade union activist for thirty years and is an honorary life member of the PCS union. During that period, he has published over five hundred articles. Over the last fifteen years he has mainly written for the Labour Briefing Co-operative, and is currently working on a book covering the social and political history of Leyton from 1851-1951. He is Political Education Officer of Leyton and Wanstead Constituency Labour Party.
Saturday 12th February 2022
Alfred Hitchcock Presents…Friends of Alfred Speakers: Friends of Alfred Group
Three new illustrated talks from Friends of Alfred, a group dedicated to promoting and preserving the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock in his hometown of Leytonstone. The hugely popular television programme Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran from 1955 to 1965 in parallel to the most acclaimed period of Hitchcock’s film-directing career. Filmmaker Dominic Stinton traces the story of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show and how it influenced Hitchcock’s public persona, his relationship with collaborators such as actress Vera Miles and his filmic output, culminating in his greatest critical and commercial success: Psycho. Throughout his long career, Alfred Hitchcock engaged with Freudian themes in his films, none more so than in his celebrated late trio of psychological thrillers: Psycho, Vertigo and Marnie. In The Convergence of Psycho, Vertigo and Marnie: You Freud, Me Jane?, artist Rebecca Asghar takes a closer look at these three key Hitchcock films, examining Freudian motifs such as The Mother, The Uncanny, The House, The Male Gaze and Voyeurism. Finally, in Psycho at 60, guest speaker local historian Gary Lewis tells the story of Hitchcock's best known film, its conception, casting, influences and aftermath.
Saturday 12th March 2022
Hackney Downs: The School that Dared to Fight and Didn’t Deserve to Die
Speakers: Betty Hales and Jeff Davies, the last Head and Deputy Head of Hackney Downs School
In July 1995, Hackney Downs School won a prolonged battle to stay open, against a corrupt, incompetent Local Education Authority, convincing the full council to vote against the recommendation of its own Chief Education Officer: an amazing victory, yet just ten days later it was taken over by the East London Education Association, a quango set up by the then failing Tory government, desperate to put the blame for all social ills on anyone but itself. The school was closed with unseemly haste & callous cruelty to pupils, parents & staff. This is a story of loyalty and passion against injustice which set the scene for the negative blame culture of bureaucracy, target setting & over-testing that has plagued education for the past 25 years. The book by Betty, Jeff, Sally Tomlinson and Maureen O’Connor describes what happened: Hackney Downs: The School that Dared to Fight.
Saturday April 9th 2022
Muse from Nowhere: The Magic of ELLSO Speaker: Chris Shurety MBE
What would constitute a music-making utopia? And if such a thing could be described, at least in part, how could it arise? And once established, how would it survive and, indeed, thrive? Chris Shurety, founding member of the East London Late Starters Orchestra, will describe how this ‘open door’ initiative came about and the vision and practice that has maintained its course and served as a beacon for others who have themselves established community-based music-making projects based on similar principles. And he asks, is there anything such organisations can share with those tackling wider cultural, social and political issues? ELLSO has meant an enormous amount to many hundreds of East Enders. Chris, an East London resident, is now Director of CoMA, Contemporary Music for All.
Saturday 14th May 2022
J B Priestley: A Good Companion? Speaker: Kevin Davey
Priestley, distinguished novelist, playwright (some fascinating ‘time’ plays), screenwriter, essayist, influential broadcaster in 1940 and founding member of CND, deserves huge celebration. ‘He flipped and flopped over the question of European unity in a way very familiar to us all today. He was also a libertarian socialist, with little time for top down state intervention, and a populist who would recoil from those claiming that title in our time.’ Kevin is the author of Radio Joan (2020), an encounter with an elderly former Blackshirt and lover of William Joyce; and Playing Possum (2017) in which T S Eliot is tracked through Kent in the 1920s and today. He was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2017. Tonight includes a reading from They Came to a City, a utopian play by Priestley, by members of the Leytonstone Library Playreading Group.
Saturday 11th June 2022
Terraformed Speaker: Joy White
‘Forty years of neoliberalism on either side of the Atlantic have embedded nihilistic, consumerist values as though that’s the only way for society to move forward. In this landscape, Black lives have been rendered as troublesome, perceived as having little value. Young people’s lives are increasingly informed by what it means to be poor in an affluent world, of feeling trapped and stuck in a system that appears to offer few routes out, on, or up. Terraformed is my attempt to connect the dots, locate the struggles, the wins and the losses of young Black lives within a structural, institutional and historical context. In the UK, simmering below the surface of luxury new builds and technological advance, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, haves and have nots, is revealed via the sonic landscape, rising levels of violence and increasingly punitive measures to contain it. I will discuss the process of writing Terraformed; a ‘messy ethnography’ that uses a framework of hyper-local demarcation to analyse the impact of austerity, neoliberalism and racism in a specific neighbourhood [part of Forest Gate.] While there’s little doubt that young Black lives are lived with and through levels of disadvantage, we can’t underestimate the hope that comes from creativity in all its forms. I therefore consider how hope for the future & a better world isn’t just desirable: it is essential to our survival.’ Joy’s book will be on sale tonight.
Saturday 9th July 2022 *** Vi Gostling Memorial Lecture ***
The Overlooked Palestinians Speaker: Andy Simons
Although the exiled Palestinian diaspora is worldwide, most of the refugees are in a dozen camps throughout Lebanon, a failing state like no other. This talk situates these Palestinians caught in this dysfunctional country. Andy, retired British Library curator, is the DJ of Palestinian history. While not a historian, he helps researchers get the materials they seek. He has worked in African-American archives and presented jazz on FM radio in Chicago and New Orleans.
Saturday 13th August 2022
Quirky Songs with Humour and Mischief / Punchy Poetry: Life in Anglo-Saxon England
Speakers/Performers: Kath Tait and Andrew Rea
Tonight features two very talented, original performers. Kath, a singer songwriter from New Zealand, lives in London and writes about her life as a carer, hippy, itinerant bard and wholefood freak. Described as ‘wonky and eccentric’, she’s an empathetic, intelligent lyricist who has performed at folk music and poetry venues from Dunedin to Edinburgh with her outrageous fib-telling, wacky introductions and songs combining charm and insight with melodic guitar/vocals. Andrew, retired architect and pagan poet, is well known for impassioned performances. He investigates the lives and beliefs of the common people in Anglo-Saxon England and will reveal what we know of elves in those times and how they changed in later Saxon times, with reference to towns named after them, spells and charms referenced to them, as well as words and names based on them. His talk will be enlivened with his delightful poems.
Saturday 10thh September 2022
Food is … More Than What You Eat! Speaker: Leslie Barson
Most of us don’t know where our food comes from. This well suits 'Big Food', the corporate industrial producers and retailers. We need to reclaim our food systems by taking back control in our own communities: eating seasonally, collecting seed, producing more locally, building fair economic relationships with farmers and food producers locally and abroad. It requires us to embrace agroecology and rethink our relationship with food whilst challenging land use and corporate power. We have to change what we eat, where, how and who we get it from, and organise ourselves to create new food systems.
Saturday 8th October 2022
‘We Live and Breathe Film’: SANDS Films Studio Speaker: Olivier Stockman
SANDS Films Studio must be unique in the world. Within its c18th listed building in Rotherhithe, it has, since 1975, housed an international period costume workshop, a weekly film club (free, donations invited), film-making studio for hire, music performances, book launches, political debates, theatre productions, such as the anti-war The Good Soldier Schwejk, and made its own films featuring top actors. The Rotherhithe Picture Research Library (non-digital) is, as an educational trust, open to all at no cost. Every inch of the substantial interior is full of colour and interest. SANDS is committed to the non-commercial provision of the best in film and performance. Olivier, one of its directors, who has worked there since 1980, will tell us what it’s like to be closely involved, and show excerpts of some of their productions and events.
Saturday 12th November 2022
Brightening from the East Speaker: Ken Worpole
In March 1943 a group of radical Christian pacifists took possession of a vacant farm in Frating, a hamlet on the Essex Tendring Peninsula. There they established a working community, inspired by their association with The Adelphi journal, where D H Lawrence, John Middleton Murry, Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and others shared ideas for the future with European radical intellectuals and philosophers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Simone Weil. In his talk, Brightening from the East, based on his new book, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen, writer and social historian Ken Worpole reconstructs a ‘lost’ history of Frating: a kaleidoscopic history of a farm during its eleven year occupation, and an enquiry into the passionate religious and political ideals of the back-to-the-land movement in wartime and post-war rural Essex, a county with a long tradition of alternative settlements. Ken is the author of books on architecture, landscape and social history from a radical perspective. The Independent described him as ‘One of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the English social landscape,’ and the New Statesman wrote of his new book, ‘Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition.’
Saturday 10th December 2022
Losing control of the school system in England in 2022 Speaker: Carl Parsons
How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps (Edwards & Parsons, 2020), a satirical account of the commercialising of English schools, argues that there are strategies for passing responsibility from LEAs to independent Multi Academy Trusts which will have and are having negative effects. The ten steps: 1 Embrace the 3rd Way. 2 Rubbish LAs. 3 Cut LA budgets and broadcast that 4 Schools were/are failing. 5 Standards are what count (whatever they are). 6 Screw the vocational curriculum. 7 Pay top executives highly (as in private sector). 8 Outsource contracts for support services to friends/relatives. 9 Minimal national oversight by government agencies. 10 Forget utterly democracy and local responsibility for schools. This is edubusiness pressing forward, ever expanding as neoliberal modernity requires. Ways to resist have to be seen in the wider context of what services and agencies we think it proper for the state to control: health, transport, prisons, social care. We seek the key to revealing all the ills of privatisation across the education sector in England (not Scotland/Wales/NI) and the benefits of a national, democratically controlled service, locally managed, inclusive and responsive.
