community/cultural
William Curtis Green, 1908
The Adult School Hall, 60 Park Lane, CR0 1ER
Opening the doors of Croydon Quaker's Adult School Hall, built in an Arts & Crafts style in the 1900's as an educational community facility in the then rural borough centre. Archive materials on the history and design of the building will be present alongside a drop-in mixed media mapping and zine making workshop.
East Croydon, West Croydon
166, 405, 407, 412, 119, 312, 403, 455, 466, 468
Also accessible by Tram. Wellesley Road tram stop is an 11 minute walk away from the venue.
Parking on site is limited, we would suggest this is for Blue Badges passes only.
A spacious and cool building with optional workshop offerings, light refreshments, lots of seating and much quiet space.
11:00–16:00
A mapping, image, text, and drawing workshop to unfold and weave ideas and spaces around informal learning spaces in our communities.
A Grade II listed building the Adult School Hall was built in the 1900's to offer space for continuing literacy education to the working classes, at a time when the school leaving age was 13 years old. The building has since been holding a generous multitude of activities, supporting the community through a listening ear. Croydon’s Quaker Meeting House and its historical context in many ways serves as a metaphor for the borough’s tumultuous re-staging and potential radical imaginaries. Formed in parallel to extreme poverty, social deprivation and lack of accessible educational spaces that defined Croydon, the nonconformist church built the Adult Learning Hall to house Saturday Schools; young people; families; workers; conscientious objectors; space for shelter, gathering, worship and learning. The building in itself embodied total absence of applied finishes or set functionality, embracing the fluidity and ‘honesty of expression’ in of all its components, prioritising equity and good living of its tenants. The building was erected in once rural Croydon using brick, timber, and iron. It’s only embellishment, the flowing wooden stage trimming.
Nowadays the building is accessed according to local need from hosting the local steel pan youth orchestra, a gamelan orchestra, night food services for local houseless communities, and plethora of other community and educational activities.
14:00 - 16:00 A drop-in mapping, drawing, image and zine making workshop in collaboration with local artists (tbc). There will be text, image, and drawing tools to guide us. All ages and abilities are welcomed.
“Rituals, Routines & Improvisations” is a research-based project exploring spaces of care, learning, resistance and solidarity in the Borough of Croydon. Looking at where education, activism and gathering happens in its more informal occurrences, fleeting and transitory, our second iteration of the programme will reflect upon alternative modes of learning that forge cultural cooperation and self-governance. Drawing on individual and collective experiences, we will support participants in archiving, mapping, preserving and mobilising spaces of learning, conviviality, resistance and dreaming, threading disparate imaginaries and experiences onto new surfaces to stand on.
We are particularly interested in precarious solidarities, improvised interventions and communal pedagogies that sit outside the institutional realms, situated in the ‘meanwhile’ fractures of the borough, beyond the performative, beyond the orthodoxy,” beyond the school (!) of thought”. This can be alternative Saturday schools, local cinemas, shopping centres, chicken shops, hardware stores, or someone’s living room – spaces of refuge for different diasporas, learning hubs that allow people to process and imagine through the challenges and hostility that come with being in London and its prevailing neo-colonial conditions. Croydon in itself is a multifaceted living archive where cinemas become spaces of refuge for different diasporas; shopping centres become foundations for organising, music and memorial; spaces of worship become spaces of learning and care.
Located in Croydon Quaker's Adult School Hall and assembled in the format and spirit of a Saturday School, the programme and its activities will pay homage to the rich legacies of self-organised educational and alternative community-building interventions in the school hall and the borough as a whole. Formed in parallel to extreme poverty, social deprivation and lack of accessible educational spaces that defined Croydon, the nonconformist church built the Adult Learning Hall to house Saturday Schools; young people; families; workers; conscientious objectors; space for shelter, gathering, worship and learning.
In recent years, the school hall remained a listening ear within the borough, extending itself into the social fabric of Croydon and rethinking its functionality to accommodate different modes of being – from hosting summer schools and educational programmes for children with learning difficulties to providing a nighttime kitchen and distribution locus for the charity Nightwatch.
The highlighted spaces, objects, rituals and place-based cosmologies will form an abstractive, imaginative and nurturing educational space, broadening our understanding of what education is and the diverse space where it can happen.
The building will be open from 11 - 4pm for people to wander the inside of the atmospheric Arts & Crafts style building that is the Adult School Hall. The building hosts a plethora of educational and community activities and although it is busy it is not often open to the general public.
