Stories, Ideas, Connections
She was standing outside a laundrette in Pimlico, London, waiting for her wash to finish. I was on my way to visit a youth club project. “Can I take your photo?”
“Sure, what’s it for?”
“Nothing, just for my own purposes. Oh sorry, that sounds kind of creepy.”
“No worries,” she laughs.
I realise I’m lost. “Is there a youth club around here? Oh sorry, that sounds even more creepy.”
Us English, always apologising. #streetphotography
Henry and John are standing on Tooley Street, London Bridge. “Can I take your photo?”
Henry says yes. John says no.
“He doesn’t want to be in the photo because he used to be a professional photographer,” says Henry. “He worked at The Times for years.”
I ask John: “So don’t you like photos?”
“Yes, but I know what can happen to them.”
“Are you worried about being in a paper?”
“No,” says John, “I’m worried about wanted posters.”
Henry chips in: “That’s right, he’s wanted by the Old Bill all over London.”
I love street photography, especially portraiture. I’ve taken candid shots of people before and caught some interesting moments. But I’ve never gone up to a stranger and asked them if I can take their photo. The main obstacle was fear, I think. What if they said no? Plus there’s that innate English awkwardness: who am I to go around interrupting people?
Then last week I was killing some time in Canterbury, taking a few photos of not much in particular. I was standing next to a friendly looking guy with a beanie hat and a beard. I though to myself, ‘you know, if you don’t ask this friendly looking guy for a photo, I don’t think you’ll ever ask anyone.’ So I asked him: “Can I take your photo?”
He said, “Sure”, and went to take my camera; he thought I’d asked him to take a photo of me. “No, I want to take your photo,” I explained. He said ok again, and went back to what he was doing: looking out across the street.
I fired two quick shots, showed him one of them – he smiled and said “nice” – asked him his name – Andy – and then walked off.
It was exhilarating. Like reading a story to an audience for the first time or performing live-lit in the street.
Having overcome the fear of… well, of whatever I was scared of, I wandered around seeing who else might catch my eye. Pretty soon, I found Mavis. “Can I take your picture?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. No questions about why, or what would I do with it, or why her. She just seemed pleased that I’d shown an interest.
Then I went for lunch in the Boho Cafe – cheese and cauliflower soup. When I paid the bill, I asked the owner, who was working behind the counter, if I could take his photo. He said ok, and then his wife, who was waitressing, joined him. They are Kristian and Kate. I was too slow to catch it, but right after this frame he kissed her on the cheek, and they had a quick hug.
I went away reflecting on my first stranger photos. I’d like to be able to take photos that look better than this; improvement will come with practice. But what feels more important to me is that the request to take a photo created an opportunity for me to connect with new people. Without a camera in my hand, I wouldn’t have spoken to Mavis or Andy; Kristian and Kate wouldn’t have had that mid-afternoon kiss.
A couple of days later I was back in Canterbury for a writing workshop. I met Deke, a performance poet. Asking for his photo seemed like a normal thing to do now.
Then walking around town I saw Carol. She was standing outside the Cath Kidston shop, waiting for her husband. Again, I don’t make any claims for the artistic or technical quality of these photos. For me they are reminders; visual mementoes of brief, unexpected encounters.
I walked around a while longer after photographing Carol. I asked one other person if I could take her photo and she said no: my first rejection. But it didn’t feel so bad.
This is Mick. He runs a South London charity called the Furzedown Project. Its mission is to prevent loneliness among the elderly. Mick organises activities like singing groups, knitting circles and exercise classes.
He’s 56 and has been at Furzedown for the last seven years. “It’s a nice place to work,” he says. “I come here with the purpose of adding a little bit of happiness to the world.”
Before Furzedown, he worked in residential care, sheltered housing and community development. “There was never much of a career plan,” he says. “But I’ve been lucky enough to work with some interesting people.”
“So is it fair to sum you up as a do-gooder?” I ask. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” says Mick.
This is Betty. I met her recently at an old folks club in Tooting, run by a charity that tackles isolation among the elderly. She was singing music hall songs. I told her I live in Kent.
“We used to go down to Kent a lot,” she said. “My mother loved it when the apple trees were in blossom. Daddy always took us in the car. We had a Ford 8. A year old it was. He was very proud of it. My sister and I used to sit in the back, giving a queenly wave to all the people we passed.”
When was this? “Well, I’m 87, so it must have been 80 odd years ago.” I show her the photo I’ve taken. “I look like an old granny,” she laughs. “I haven’t had my hair done in a week.”
With Alan the pianist playing the opening bars of the next song, she leans over to whisper: “You know, they’ve got nothing like this in Morden.”
On a visit to the Imperial War Museum with another tiny charity, South London Cares, I met Oun. He arrived in London from India in 1962 with £5 in his pocket and a selection of his mum’s jewels around his neck. “They called me the Maharaja,” he said.
Walking around the museum and eating a sausage roll in its café, Oun told me about his career in advertising (“I was creative director for Miss World”), the time he met the Pope (“but that was years ago”), his 22-minute audience with Mother Theresa (“she insisted I sit with her”), and how he came to own paintings by the Bloomsbury Set (“I have a Turner sketch, also”).
I asked if I could take his photo. “Why?” he said. “So I can remember you,” I replied. “Then no,” he said. “You’ll just have to remember me.”
They were singing Christmas Carols down at the old folks’ drop-in centre in Tooting on Wednesday afternoon. Quality variable. Then Bob, 81, who’d just been mumbling along until that point, steps up and offers to sing a solo. Oh, gawd. This will be awkward. But he opens his mouth and out comes a beautiful music hall ballad, sung in a powerful tenor. The room was in tears. “You’ve done a bit of singing then?” I say to him afterwards. “Yes,” he says. “1965. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.”
The woman in this photo is Sheila Melzak, a psychotherapist. She runs the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile, a charity that helps child refugees. Specifically, her organisation works with children who have fled violence abroad, dreamed of finding sanctuary here in Britain, and somehow made it into the country on their own.
These children are all officially classified as “unaccompanied”. That means they entered Britain illegally, often hidden in the back of a lorry, with no family or adults to help them or to protect them.
They include people like Mimi from Eritrea, who escaped to England aged 12 when her father disappeared and her sister was killed. And Fakirzai, smuggled out of Afghanistan when the Taliban murdered his father. Many of them have been raped and tortured. Some have been forced to kill, or watch the murder of their parents. Others have been trafficked into the sex industry.
Increasingly, they come from Syria. Since I met Sheila back in May, the Europe-wide refugee crisis has seen the number of unaccompanied children arriving in Britain and seeking asylum soar. Thankfully, sole children account for less than 10% of the refugees seeking asylum here. But the figure for last year was a record anyway, at 1,861. In only the three months to July the number of lone children making it to my home county of Kent had doubled to 605. Admittedly, Kent includes the port of Dover, which is a major point of entry. But even so.
The beuaucratic asylum process these vulnerable children encounter when they finally make it to Britain is a huge shock to them, says Sheila. One of its most damaging aspects is that they find their stories are not believed. “It makes them feel crazy, completely crazy,” she says.
“It would be hard enough if you were an adult. But they are children. They don’t leap off a boat or jump out the back of a van and say yippee, I’m in England. They are exhausted, often ill and unprepared for the suspicion they experience.”
As they navigate the system, their credibility is challenged time and again. And the threat of deportation is always there. Last year, only about half the children under 17 who asked for refugee status received it. The rest were given some form of temporary leave to remain or had their application rejected, leaving them facing a forced return to their country of origin.
“You may feel safe to stay once you get asylum, but these young people are expected to live with a level of uncertainty that at their age they can’t manage. It’s very hard for them,” Sheila says.
Not only do they children feel isolated and helpless; they are often consumed by guilt and shame about why they left home in the first place and what’s happened to them on their journey. The effects include depression and other forms of mental illness. To help, Baobab offers psychotherapy and therapeutic activities like music making, arts-based workshops, social outings and philosophy discussions – “is it ever right to kill someone?” is a question they are especially keen to debate.
Sheila thinks of Baobab and its base just off a busy road in Holloway as a community, not a clinic. “That’s very important for people who have been forced to leave their own communities,” she says. “One of our aims is for them to find ways of living in a community again.”
When we met, Baobab was helping about 120 people, of whom 60 or so were regularly involved in weekly activities. Most of them were teenagers. The youngest was just six years old.
Working with these brave children is completely absorbing, Sheila says. “You learn so much about survival and resilience. Every day I hear about extraordinary ways that people survive.”
Today, these children are on the margins of British society, trying to get by on £36.95 a week, hoping they won’t get kicked out and sent “home”. But Sheila has high hopes for their future. “Our aim is that they will find a place in the wider community and contribute to this country,” she says. “And I believe that given the right support, they will.”
And it’s worth noting, Baobab gets not a penny of government funding.
The guy in the photo above is Mohammed Mamdani. He runs a community food bank on the St Raphael’s Estate in Brent, North West London. It’s called Sufra, a Persian word. The literal definition is of a tablecloth or rug – one you spread on the ground when people eat together. But the word also connotes hospitality, generosity and shared humanity.
On the day I visited Sufra, Mohammed had spent the morning helping a man called Steve. Steve has a good work history and decent qualifications. But he also has mental health problems. When he was discharged from a care unit, he had nowhere to go, so ended up living under a nearby road bridge. He turned up at Sufra looking for a meal.
This is why a group of Muslim charities founded Sufra in 2013: to give free food to people like Steve; people in desperate need. Last year its food parcels helped 3,858 hungry Londoners – double the year before. They included 827 children aged under 18 and 200 younger than five.
Most of the people Sufra helps are going hungry because they’re waiting to get statutory benefits (35%) or their benefits have been disrupted (25%), usually because of a sanction. One in every six recipients is a family that is in work but not earning enough to eat.
“The people who come here have literally got nowhere else to go,” says Mohammed. “They have fallen through the cracks in the system.” Sufra gives them enough food and basic supplies for up to seven days. The size of the pack they get depends on the size of their household. For about two-thirds of the people who come for help, that one parcel is enough. They don’t ask again. They don’t become dependent on charity handouts.
If you can’t feed yourself and your family, that’s often just a symptom of a deeper social failure, says Mohammed. “It would be naive of us to think we can just give someone food and close the door on them. Our aim is to deal with the short, medium and long-term causes of deprivation. The food bank is a mechanism to engage with the most vulnerable. But it’s also a way to regenerate the local community.”
So Sufra teaches people to cook, provides free advice on housing, employment and financial issues. It helps people start their own businesses. It finds creative ways for them to buy cheap food, to grow their own produce, to access preventative health care.
I meet a lot of business people who like to talk about “innovation” and “entrepreneurialism”. But it’s often just talk. They’ve got nothing on Mohammed. “Because we are small, we can experiment and try new ideas,” he says. “We can do things really cheaply. We are a lot more agile than some larger charities. I don’t have to jump through 100 hoops to get something done.”
Sufra is sometimes called a Muslim food bank, but it’s not a label Mohammed uses. Generosity, kindness, humanity – this is his religion. “I meet so many different characters. And I meet these people face to face,” he says. “I see their problems. The homeless guy, Steve. I spoke to him, I learned his story, so I became part of his story. His suffering is now my duty. I don’t have any other reason to live, apart from this work.”
I met Mohammed as part of my work with The London Community Foundation, where I’m writer in residence. It was an honour.
[A story of mine for The London Community Foundation]
The closure of their local library shocked the St James Street community. But out of the ashes they are building something incredible…
In April 1997 Alison Griffin, three-months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, took a two-week holiday in Libya. When she got home, she went straight to the local library, five doors along from her house on St James Street, Walthamstow, to return her borrowed guidebooks. A sign on the door said the library was closed. Permanently.
“I felt disbelief, and anger,” she says now. “How can you just take that public facility away? We hadn’t only lost the library, we’d lost our community space.”
Other local people felt the same way: Alison’s lounge quickly became the headquarters of a campaign to get the library reopened. But Waltham Forest council wouldn’t budge. In 2010 it decided to sell the building to a property developer.
Yet all was not lost. A sympathetic local councillor – Clare Coghill – negotiated an eleventh-hour chance for the campaign group to find a viable community use for the building. A contact suggested they apply to Nesta for funding under its Neighbourhood Challenge scheme.
“I filled in the Nesta forms as best as I could, in the hope that if we got on the shortlist, we could at least delay the sale of the building,” says Alison. “But that was all I could realistically hope for.” Much to her surprise, the application was successful. Nesta promised the group £150,000.
Surreal start
So it was that in April 2011, four years after she returned from holiday to find the library closed, Alison and others from the campaign team were standing on its doorstep, holding a Tupperware box full of keys.
“It was an eyesore,” she says. “A boarded-up, sorry building. The roof was leaking, there was water seeping everywhere, the boiler had long since gone. But it was very nice to get in, very exciting. If a bit surreal.”
Through the spring and into the summer local people worked to refurbish the building and get it open. Along the way, they constituted themselves as a charitable body, The Mill, with Alison as the first chair of trustees.
“None of us had done anything like this in our lives before,” says Mo Gallaccio, arts coordinator at The Mill. “We were constantly making it up on the spot. Problems would crop up, we’d have a bit of debate, and get on with it.”
Opening day in September 2011 was complete chaos, says Alison. “It was amazing, exciting, with a lot of people involved – but I think we were all pretty much exhausted by that point as well.”
Making stuff happen
The Mill’s purpose today is the same as it was when it first opened: to be a place where “people can come together and make things happen.” It has a children’s room full of books and toys; a large open space where people can meet; two smaller rooms for events and workshops; upstairs office space that provides some rental income; and a small honesty library – a touching and well-used nod to the building’s history.
Anyone can drop in for a cup of tea and a chat with friends or with the volunteers who are always on hand. There are events and classes in everything from yoga to baby massage, from gardening to chess. Most of these sessions are organised and led by local people themselves.
“The good thing about the Mill is it is so bottom up,” says Mo. “It’s not about us telling people what to do, it’s the community – everything that happens is because of people coming in with ideas.”
Growing ideas
Indeed, The Mill acts as a kind of incubator for micro-businesses. It makes small grants – often just £50 – so people can try things out on a small scale. One group of elderly residents formed Waltham Forest Community Radio, to celebrate and archive the lives and experiences of older people in the community. Another created the Asian Women’s Support Group.
The radio station secured funding under The Mill’s “Older People’s Pop Ups” scheme, which encouraged people to offer activities for older residents. The women’s group came from the “Grow Your Idea” scheme, which backed ideas that could connect people, help them to share their skills and experience, and build their self-confidence. Another project, “Mill Mentors”, recruited and trained volunteers who would then help local people set up groups and activities of their own.
“These schemes are an important part of our ethos,” says Alison. Dipping a toe into self-employment, trying to start something new, takes money, confidence and resources, she argues, even if you are doing it unpaid to start with. “If you can take away those barriers, people can try things.”
Some of the ideas piloted at The Mill have gone on to become very well established – the women’s group, for example. Others haven’t worked as well as everyone hoped. “But if you can experiment at low risk, people can learn from the experience.”
Bright future
Despite its early success, at the end of The Mill’s first year the outlook was darkening. The initial funding was about to run out. It wasn’t clear how long the centre could stay open, or whether it would have to slash the services on offer. “It looked like it was going to be extremely difficult,” says Alison.
The Mill turned to The London Community Foundation for help. It applied successfully for a small grant that provided enough money to employ an admin officer for a year. “That grant from The Foundation was essential. It gave us the time we needed to find more income,” says Alison.
The part-time admin officer has since become a full-time centre manager, with an assistant working under her. They make sure The Mill’s office tenants are properly looked after, and keep the centre running smoothly.
Looking to the future, there are plans to create more office space for rental income and to build a kitchen. Then people would be able to eat together, teach each other to cook, and experiment with pop-up restaurants. That could create new business ventures, while giving people skills to combat food poverty.
Many of the people who’ve benefited from The Mill are coping with big structural problems, like social isolation, discrimination, and poverty. “But as a small community project, maybe we can take the edge off that?” says Alison. “People have got somewhere to come now, somewhere friendly where they know people – where they are more likely to ask for help, if they need it. As a community, we are a lot more empowered.”
