Category Archives: buildings

Deadname @ Gasworks Gallery

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If you visit us regularly here on the Runoff you’re aware that when a new show arrives at Gasworks Gallery in Vauxhall we like to check it out for you. If you’ve never been to Gasworks it’s located at the Oval end of Vauxhall St. and is perfect if what you demand from a gallery involves Styrofoam coffins or dolls that talk to you. 

The new exhibition at Gasworks is called ‘Earth is a Deadname’ by Rotterdam based artist Lou Lou Sainsbury. This show was commissioned by Gasworks and is an exploration of transgender life outside the limiting language of medicalisation. The exhibition revolves around a performance film which touches on aspects of intimacy, feelings of difference, chance encounters, and evolution. A giant cymbal also features on screen and over your head but were going to leave that interpretation up to you. There is also a bedroom cabinet in the room with a range of items telling us that the trans experience is a collective one of unmaking and making the body. 

The larger gallery is dominated by a large scale glass installation with fluctuating levels of transparency, again alluding to the trans journey. As the journey is rarely straightforward, imbedded in the glass are trapped cigarette butts, dried flowers and other debris. The exhibition is punctuated by flesh like texts on the walls which swell like scars or stigmata. All very thought provoking for a little gallery in Vauxhall, and time well spent. 

Earth is a Deadname is on now until 18 September and is totally free. Gasworks is only open in the second half of the week so have a look at their website. The amber resin on the floor is part of the exhibit, so in your leaving comments please don’t write ‘Sainsbury, clean up in aisle one’!!!!!  (we couldn’t help ourselves). 

The Treehouse and a Handy Website for Us All

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Over the past few months we’ve watched with curious excitement as a stylish but seemingly unnecessary structure has emerged in the middle of the Millennial playground that is Elephant Park. It’s called ‘The Treehouse’ and we’ve just checked it out. Let us tell you reader, we’re now more perplexed than ever. 

The Treehouse is constructed from sustainable timber and looks quite striking with its Constructivist sharp angles and stylish benches. When we climbed to the top we found ourselves, well, only slightly higher than people’s heads. It has some nice plantings and places to sit up top, but what we were hoping for was more along the lines of a giant slide or at least a small outpost of ‘Greggs’. 

The Treehouse is open now and is a quiet and shady spot during these hot days, and once mounted it rewards you with sweeping views of people eating their lunch in Sayer Street. If you want to go to the official opening party it’s on 22 July from 12 to 8 and features, err, yoga!  We can’t see any mention of free cakes or cocktails on their website but we might just pitch up anyway. 

Moving on, our slightly eccentric colleagues over at the Kennington Association have created a very handy website for new arrivals into Greater Kennington, which is also great for people seeking a bit of inspiration about things to do.  The very nice group of volunteers at KA run Lollard Street playground and do many other great things for our community such as a Secret Santa. So if you have any feedback for their growing website please be nice, as we know what you lot are like. 

Bee Urban

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If you’ve ever seen people at the back of Kennington Park who appear to be cleaning up following a small nuclear accident, they are in fact beekeepers tending to their buzzy brood at social enterprise Bee Urban, and we’re here to tell you about them. 

Bee Urban is a secret garden and bee sanctuary located behind the pavilion in Kennington Park. We recently totted over to have a conversation with manager Barnaby to find out more about their good deeds. Bee Urban has at its core a goal of promoting positive, ecologically sound gardening and greening with a focus on farming and the preservation of our buzzy friends. They are particularly skilled in offering courses and training for vulnerable people and kids, but also for the larger community (on our visit they were having a honey beer tasting). 

Bee Urban is not only a free lovely refuge from our urban lives but also a place to stroll, contemplate, and to purchase honey and other accessories associated with bees. It’s also a place to get stung by a bee but we’re sure you can avoid that. There are also many ways to get involved on their website. And if you don’t like dirty hands, you can get involved by making (and buying) honey or courses dedicated community gardening and biodiversity.  On our visit we saw on sale honey candles, soaps, moisturisers and honey comb. And in a few days it will be high season to buy Kennington branded honey (yes, it’s a thing). The best way to find out about these is via their Insta or Facebook feeds

Apologies for the slight delay in posting but we recently had our annual team building long weekend at Glastonbury. It went off without a hitch other than Phil from accounts who, after grabbing ciders during Diana Ross, claims to have been lost for five hours. We also flew this flag our our MD’s head but we don’t think he was buying it. 

North Lambeth Parish Fete

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The North Lambeth Parish Fete is coming up on Saturday and if we weren’t on a team building retreat (more on that later) we wouldn’t miss it. It’s  the new incarnation of the dearly departed Cleaver Square Festival. Fortunately it’s now much larger thanks to the intervention of Daniel Cobb and none other than Jesus Christ himself. 

While we may have never been to this Fete, we have been to the gardens of Lambeth Palace and they are stunning, extensive and almost never open to the public. The price of the ticket itself (£4) justifies a wander around.   According to our sources, the Fete is more kid friendly than its Cleaver processor and is known for its dog show and features prizes, including fastest sausage eater and least obedient (we assume these prizes are for the dogs and not humans). There is also face painting, live music, and races for the kids. And if you don’t like kids there’s a Pimms tent to keep you sane. And if you do have kids there’s a Pimms tent to keep you sane. And there are a number of local food stalls available looking pretty delish to us. 

The Fete is this Saturday, (25 June) from 12-5. To whet your appetite we found this totally manic video on YouTube. Did somebody say ‘free coffee mugs’?

And we would be absolutely thrilled to join you for this event but, alas, we will be on a team building long weekend at Glastonbury which will prove memorable. Or perhaps unrememberable. Look out for our pics on social media and please don’t hate us. *drops mic and leaves the room*

Getting Crafty @ City&Guilds

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Another high point on the Greater Kennington cultural calendar takes place this weekend and we’re here to tell you about it. City and Guilds in Kennington Park Road are taking part in London Craft week on Friday and Saturday and it looks as if they are hosting a number of free (and we love free) events and demonstrations. 

Various studios around C&GLAS will be open exhibiting a range of crafts and showing how stuff is made. In the paper studio students and tutors will be on hand to show paper related demonstrations and discuss paper conservation. In the printmaking studio, the head of printmaking will be hosting several (sadly now booked) workshops but others will be on hand giving demonstrations of different kinds of printing such as intaglio. We’ve been in this studio, and it is a fascinating space. Outside, students will be giving demonstrations of wood and stone carving and you can even have a go at carving yourself! Apparently there is a carving competition among students as well. This sounds frighteningly dangerous, but somebody losing a half a finger could be interesting nevertheless. 

The press release enticingly mentions a free talk and tasting event sponsored by Fabal Lager (we’ve never heard of them either) on Saturday afternoon which sounds fun. Indeed, we reached out to City and Guilds to see if they were having a launch event featuring free wine and canapés which might just influence our review. Their response was ‘no’, but we’ve picked up the pieces of our shattered dream and moved on with our lives. 

No ticket is required for this event, just turn up. 

Lambeth Palace Library

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Located at the very pinnacle of the Runoff catchment area, you might not know about Lambeth Palace Library. You’re probably thinking ‘say WHAT, there’s a nine storey library in Greater Kennington’ and you can be forgiven for the oversight. The massive structure has been carved out of just 3% of the archbishop’s garden and lies next to Archbishop’s Park, although it’s easy to miss. The structure is a victory of understatement with ponds and tweedy looking brick crosses. This belies the gravity of a building created as a protector of manuscripts and designed as a fortress against the pesky factors that threaten them such as light, water, and Greater Kennoingtonians. However, it is also a museum with rotating exhibits and the current offering is the fascinating and free ‘From Popish Plot to Civil Rights: Themes in Religious Archives’.

The current pop up exhibition highlights a range of subjects covered by the Library’s diverse collections of religious archives. To mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee, items on display relate to her coronation in 1953. Other material relates to the Church and other denominations and faiths, with exhibits illustrating relations with Roman Catholicism, such as the anti-Catholic agitator Titus Oates. Items on Jewish history include Hebrew manuscripts. A further theme covers the Church and race, including material relating to the civil rights movement, and to the first British Black Bishop, Wilfred Wood.

The areas open to the public are very small, and in fact the current exhibit only extends to four glass cases on the first floor. But fear not, as there are fun interactive boards on the ground floor. Also,  with a bit of planning you can nab tickets on a free tour. Failing that, the reading room is available if you obtain a free pass in advance. And failing that, the Lambeth Palace website is a handy and interesting resource. We were particularly interested in learning more about the ‘London Apocalypse’ but saddened to learn that it does not, in fact, relate to Vauxhall at 6am of a Sunday when the nightclubs have just closed. 

Edward Hollamby, the Architect of Greater Kennington

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A great deal of the built environment around us in Greater Kennington can be linked directly to architect and visionary Edward Hollamby (1921 – 1999). Like many architects of his generation, Hollamby was profoundly influenced by the values of William Morris. Namely, those relating to equitable living conditions and the universal right for people to work and live in places which allow them to flourish. There was no better way to execute these values that by working for local government, and Hollamby worked for both the LCC and Lambeth Council. 

Locally,  Hollamby is known primarily for being the lead architect of the Brandon Estate in Walworth (behind Kennington Park), which we wrote about last summer. His vision for the estate was to build a community which addressed the individual and changing needs of its residents, make shopping easier, while also creating large green spaces to allow people to relax and children to play. And to make the area more aesthetically pleasing he even convinced Lambeth to commission a sculpture by Henry Moore, which is very much still there.

As lead architect in Lambeth Hollamby hired Peter Finch, who designed the Cotton Gardens Estate in Kennington Lane (we are aware that these buildings remain a tad controversial). Hollamby/Finch’s thinking is that they wanted buildings which ‘danced around in different directions’ depending on how one looked at them. It’s often overlooked that at ground level they created green spaces in addition to bungalows and maisonettes for people who didn’t fancy  living in a high rise. A walk around Knight’s Walk around the foot of the buildings is a bit like a stroll in a park. And if the towers look very familiar to others in South London, that’s because they were all made from complex interlocking panels which were massed produced. 

Hollamby was also the brains behind the unusual and rather playful Lambeth Towers in Kennington Road, with the lead architect again being Finch. The building was started in 1964 with the intention of being mixed use, which it is to this day, and the box like design intended to allow each maisonette to be double aspect and have its own balcony. These buildings are classed as being ‘Brutalist’ but that name seems to stick to every 20thCentury building with a bit of exposed brick. Figuring out when a building becomes ‘brutal’ therefore becomes rather like an architectural game of Wordle. You may or may not find these estates to be beautiful, but Hollamby always made the needs and wishes of the residents paramount.

Keith Cunningham at Newport St. Gallery

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The latest offering over at the Newport Street Gallery is the work of little known and exceptionally gifted artist Keith Cunningham, who mysteriously gave up painting just a few years after he started. Cunningham was on the periphery of the London Group of artists who among their number included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kosoff and the Group were intrigued by Cunningham’s powerful, if not at times gruesome and sinister, subject matter. 

At least there’s no queue for the toilet

Cunningham was certainly a man with something to say, but not very interested who heard him, as many of these 70 works accumulated in his studio as opposed to being seen. He used a very dark and tightly controlled palette of colours with think coats of impasto, giving the works that are not under glass a 3D element, with the added drama of huge brushstrokes. In this manner he captures commuters, rabbits, and even squid. 

At the moment there is an epic retrospective of Francis Bacon’s work at the Royal Academy (north of the river if you dare) and in way Cunningham’s depictions of blood crazed dogs, skulls, and angst is an interesting counterpoint to the great man’s work. It’s possibly not a coincidence that they’re being staged at the same time. 

As you move through the well organised exhibit Cunningham’s  work begins to tilt more towards abstraction and huge blocks of colour. The painting below is a still life. However, it rather reminded us of Phil from the accounts team when he fell over outside the Tommyfield pub after downing eight pints of cider at our Christmas party. 

‘Keith Cunningham, the Cloud of Witness’ is on now until 21 August at Newport Street Gallery and is totally free. 

The Electric Elephant in the Room

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We recently made a long overdue visit to the very quirky and oft overlooked ‘Electric Café’ in Walworth. For those who have never been or only peeked through their eclectic windows, you might confuse it with a charity shop. Or it could remind you of your great aunt Edna’s loft just after she made her way to heaven. Either way, it’s a great spot to meet up with friends or to work for a few hours.  

Electric café is run by friendly and chatty owner Louisa, who on a daily basis serves homemade, meat free sandwiches, soups and pastries. On the board during our visit was falafel and hummus toasties, goats cheese salad, luscious looking brownies, and meat free pasties. Louisa also makes her own jellies, marmalades and chutneys, which are for sale on the counter. As if Louisa doesn’t have enough on her plate, she also does catering and the place can be hired out in the evening. Electric also has a rooted social conscience, and during our visit signs were being put up designating it as  a safe space for people escaping domestic trouble. 

Electric café is in the very interesting artists commune of Pullens Yard, (below) and well worth gander or a nosey peek around there in the daytime. So if you ever wake up thinking that what’s really missing in your life is a café with a glitter ball, repurposed cocktail bar and an old sewing machine, then look no further. And if your trip requires WiFi, then the router can be found teetering atop a stack of used books on the right, which are for sale. Have fun! 

Expiring at Gasworks

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If you follow art historical debates as fervently as our snooty ‘Culture’ department here at the Runoff does, then you’ll be aware that there are big debates afoot about the repatriation of objects that have been, lets say, ‘liberated’ from other cultures. Examples are the Elgin Marbles and Benin sculptures at the British Museum. The current exhibit at the Gasworks Gallery in Vauxhall takes a different approach to this question by asking museums to assess their relationship with life and death….Stick with us…..

The show is called ‘out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing’ and is by LA based artist Gala Porras-Kim. In addition to raising questions about the use of capital letters, the artist raises questions about the conservation of human remains and if sacred objects meant for the afterlife are devoid of meaning if extracted from a tomb and put on display, and to get her point across there’s even a giant sarcophagus in the main room. Next to the works are letters to museums asking about their curatorial practice and in one curious note she asks a curator if a mummy had been consulted before he was put on display.

As you walk through the works in the small space, the content of what is being asked becomes more apparent. How do we understand and respect items associated with death and how do institutions respect and deal with items in their collections which are still living (eg in an afterlife)? And if you prefer your art exhibits to involve mould spores and the contents of vacuum cleaner bags then this exhibit doesn’t disappoint. I mean this is Gasworks, after all. 

As you know, we love free stuff and on Tuesday, 8 March at 7pm Gasworks will have a free talk about Pharaonic music and how the ancient Egyptians made instruments.  Admittedly when we first saw this we thought it said Pharrell, but at least there’s still music involved. 

Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing is on now until 27 March and, like all good stuff, free. Look at website for opening hours.