‘Green Peas’ - Creative Fun with Nature for Kids

Weekly classes in Muswell Hill and Crouch End

Following the success of our summer Art Picnics, ‘Green Peas’ are bringing exciting creative play activities to Muswell Hill and Crouch End. From 5th September you can join our weekly nature & eco crafts afterschool clubs for 5-10 years old and natural messy play for under 5’s.

 After School Clubs

Nature & eco crafts workshops are a unique opportunity for children to actively play and get creative with natural objects and Earth-friendly craft materials. The workshops reflect changing seasons, help to improve concentration and observation skills and boost your child’s creativity!

Variety of art activities; nature collages, grains and seeds mosaics, rock and mussels’ art, recycled art, modeling, and much more…

MUSWELL HILL - WEDNESDAY

3.50 pm - 4.50pm

The Friends Meeting House, Church Crescent, N10 3NE

CROUCH END – MONDAY &FRIDAY

4pm-5pm

Hornsey Vale Community Centre, 60 Mayfield Rd, N8 9LP

 Natural Messy Play for under 5’s

Come to one of our messy play classes and let your child play with seeds, grains, pasta shells and many more fascinating objects. Lot’s of glue and glitter, recycled paper and paint to create these memorable first masterpieces! Every week new activity; painting, drawing, collages, stencilling,modelling, simple and fun paper craft and many more. We also play with real bread playdough and toys made from wood and natural materials.

MUSWELL HILL - WEDNESDAY

2.30 pm – 3.20pm

The Friends Meeting House, Church Crescent, N10 3NE

About Us:

Green Peas offer a unique opportunity for children to play creatively with natural objects and engage with Nature in an urban environment.  We use natural materials foraged in local green spaces and recycled craft materials. Our classes in Muswell Hill will also include gardening! Nature crafts unlike ready made,’ instant effect’ crafts help to develop concentration, patience and observation skills. The activities promote a positive and respectful attitude towards Nature.  They support creative thinking, problem solving and they are great fun!

For further details please visit: www.greenpeasevents.co.uk or call Anna on: 0794 939 2708

Can we reopen Hornsey Baths to the Public?

Posted on behalf of Bethany Wells

INVITATION

Informal meeting over a drink in the 3 Compasses, 7pm, Saturday 24th September 2011

A couple of months ago I made some posters suggesting that we might find a way to open up Hornsey Public Baths to everyone in Haringey as a community design centre, www.fairgroundcollective.net. By the railway bridge, could it help bridge the West and East of the borough, a space to visit to be surrounded by challenges, practical ideas and skills for local resilience?

I will be back at the end of September and would like to see if anyone else in interested in adding ideas for this space, and coming up with a plan to take it to the council/developers more seriously.  See below for the ideas so far!
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IDEAS SO FAR:

• Design, sustainability, resource centre
• Studios and workshops available at cost price to hire for an hour (or a year) for artists, technicians, e.g. bike repair, consulting rooms, designers, music lessons
• Meeting space, music, educational and film space
• Non-profit locally sourced vegetarian catering for events
• A growing space - sister to FFTS project
• Linking with local schools, youth groups, residents
• Keep the character, raw, hints of its past uses, bare industrial surfaces contrasting with neat, new, low budget timber insertions
• Make it watertight, and add heated, insulated, small hireable studio spaces, with an open central event/reception space
• Refurbishment in a low energy, step-by-step way, with a blog and exhibition showing the processes
• Rainwater collection, reclaimed wool insulation, linking with the recycle depot to supply materials
• Workshops and volunteer sessions at all stages of refurbishment, providing opportunity to learn skills in making, and about an ecological approach to space
• Using reclaimed materials, a case study in permaculture retrofititting of existing buildings
• Research and test economic models for a community resource and education space 
• Set up Fairground Collective as a social enterprise
• Run as a co-operative or social enterprise business model

Green on the Screen September presents PLANEAT

Green on the Screen presents PLANEAT
Moors Bar, 57 Park Rd, Crouch End
Wed Sep 7, 7pm (film starts 8pm)

The inspiring story of three men's life-long search for a diet which is good for our health, good for the environment and good for the future of the planet.
The director of this recent release will attend.

With an additional cast of pioneering chefs and some of the best cooking you have ever seen, the scientists and doctors in the film present a convincing case for the West to re-examine its love affair with meat and dairy. The film features the ground-breaking work of Dr. T Colin Campbell in China exploring the link between diet and disease, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's use of diet to treat heart disease patients, and Professor Gidon Eshel's investigations into how our food choices contribute to global warming, land use and oceanic deadzones.

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Green on the Screen is...
films-food-conversation

every first Wednesday of the month
7pm: Feeding you with delicious food
8pm: Showing inspiring, informative and empowering films on food and sustainability issues
After film: discussion around the theme of the film, with occasional guest speakers

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Cob building at the Meadow Orchard Project, Park Road

Meadow Orchard Project is launching an Eco-build Project in association with Cob in the Community, What is Architecture and Wood Works Wonders.

Come and take part in this exciting community project to help build a straw-bale and cob eco-hut together from start to finish.  Gain new skills, get fit and have lots of fun in a beautiful and inspiring natural setting in North London.

Series of workshops to learn skills and techniques in natural building: 

Cob building with Cob in the Community
1st/2nd, 15th/16th, 22nd/23rd Oct, 29th/30th Oct 10am - 4.30pm

The philosophy of earth building and art of mixing cob, tools and techniques for constructing cob walls, setting windows/door frames and bench supports.

 

8th/9th Oct, 10am - 4.30pm
Straw-bale building with Chug
Using straw-bales to construct walls, installing windows/door frames and lime rendering of walls.

Plus every Friday ongoing volunteer days to continue work on the building.

 

Course costs are £70 for w/e (£35 for one day)

 

£180 for a package of 6 days of courses

If you are interested in taking part in the eco-build project or to find out more please get in touch by email or phone. Course days can be attended as one off days, whole weekend or multiple days. Please note course dates advertised are subject to flexibility to take account of weather.
To register please contact: 

Email: meadoworchard@virginmedia.com
Phone: 07947 617563

Venue: Meadow Orchard Project, behind Hornsey Health Centre, 151 Park Rd, Crouch End N8 8JD

The Appeal of Pellereau

Congratulations to Tom Pellereau, winner of this year’s Apprentice and beneficiary of  £250,000 of Alan Sugar’s lolly to get his business idea up and running. On the aftermath programme You’ve been hired, Dara O’Brien joyously summed up Tom’s win as ‘a triumph of the nerd’.  But dyslexic specialists across the country knew it was really a heads up for the right-brained thinker. 

Tom talked openly and proudly about his dyslexia and how if he had an idea he could 'visualise it in my brain and spin it around'.  This kind of thinking goes beyond a strong visual-spatial awareness: dyslexics often have an insight into the way things (and people) relate to each other.  Hierarchies and logical progressions leave them cold. 

So we can add Tom to those other poster boys for dyslexia, Richard Branson and Albert Einstein, big personalities whose ability to think holistically led them to make creative connections in a startlingly original way. But I just wonder, might Tom not be a role model for transition as well?

Transition looks at the bigger picture, visualising a future and backcasting how to get there.  Its philosophy comes from permaculture, a design tool that emphasises whole systems thinking, rather than considering one element at a time.  Permaculture finds its inspiration in the natural world, and seeks to replicate the efficiency of its eco-systems, observing the way they interconnect to produce complex yields.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place in transition for left-brain thinking, that ability to process information in a linear, logical progression, a place for the head as well as the heart.  (How very left –brained to always be categorising things as this and that; heart and soul v head and hands!) Many of us need the step by step approach to feel we achieve, and a small act accomplished makes us feel good. Logical thinking is also the basis of speculation and reflection. We posit possibilities by considering, what if? -  if that? - then what?  We reflect on the success of our ventures by taking the three staged approach – what went well? - what didn’t? -what would I do differently? 

Tom was very good at reflecting on past failures and bad decisions.  Although often accused of being very wise in hindsight, he consistently displayed common sense. He found the laddishness of Venture’s magazine repugnant, saw the potential of the rucksack car seat, and wanted to sell, sell, sell the nodding bulldog. Apart from gaping holes in his knowledge of British History, perhaps too linear a discipline for him, his judgement was sound.

But ultimately his strength was his vision of business. This is not the business of marketing, where words and content are crafted to please the hearer (sorry, Jim – sorry, Helen) and the message is a premise whose only substance is promise. No, this is about product, and passion for product. Many of the Apprentice candidates were passionate, although it was not always clear about what. Tom had ideas, many ideas, some better than others, but he believed in them. His First Class degree fittingly was in Mechanical Engineering and Innovation.

Evan Davis in his most recent BBC programme Made in Britain reminded us of Britain’s reputation as a leader in innovation. There are still instances, as the success of McLaren racing cars, Brompton bicycles, BAE Systems, ARM and Inmarsat (tops for satellite-phone technology) can testify. True innovation is not about tinkering with a defective model. It is about creating elegant design solutions and it takes courage.

We are supposed to be in an economic climate that fosters innovation, the 'Big (whisper it) Society'.  Yet as a recent blog in Guardian Society pointed out, ‘90% of the prime contracts have gone to big corporates, the only organisations with the financial muscle to bid low for contracts and bankroll services under the payment-by-results scheme’.  Despite the promise of greater involvement, charities just do not have the money or staffing to compete. The article concludes, ‘There is a case for innovation and reform, but it is beginning to feel as though this government no longer has the authority to make it.’

If the old system does not work, then here is an opportunity for transitioners to step in. Mark Lynas, an environmental author who has written about climate change, would welcome a new breed of market-friendly environmentalists, part of 'a movement that is happy with capitalism, which goes out there and says yes rather than no and is rigorous about the way it treats science.

Rob Hopkins in his reflections on the Transition Network conference challenges Lynas’ cynical view of the future. But he does endorse a more mature attitude towards social enterprise.  Martin Grimshaw who led a workshop on this subject encourages transition activists to consider, ‘What do I care about? What do I value? How do I align myself and my livelihood towards that?’

Transition is now a world-wide concern but its business model does not have to be global. In Crouch End alone there are many examples of small scale entrepreneurship: pop-up shops selling books and craft, a vintage market that has spread virally across shops, a community stall outside the local supermarket, a buyers’ group for solar panels.  There will be more about these ventures in future blogs.

Let’s go back to Tom, who is probably cooking something up this very moment.  As he conceded, under the old system he would have probably been out of the competition after the third week.  But this is the new order and his creative, innovative, maybe just a little wacky, right-brained, left-field thinking won him the prize.

STALL4ALL – an opportunity for local growers, makers and producers!

If you  have surplus fruit or veg from your allotment/garden, produce small quantities of food at home - pots of jam, cakes etc. or are a local producer of  arts and crafts, read on!   From June 30th, you’ll be able to sell these direct to the public on the Thornton's Budgens Stall4All outside both stores in Belsize Park and Crouch End!
stall4allcrouchend@thorntonsbudgens.comor Sarah at Belsize Park:  stall4allbelsize@thorntonsbudgens.comThornton’s Budgen’s, in collaboration with Stall4All, are launching a brand new  Community Market Stall at their store in Crouch End on Thursday 30th June 2011, and at their store in Belsize Park on Wednesday 6th July.  The stall is for hire by local producers, artisans or makers, from within 20 miles of Camden and Haringey, who have made, grown, produced or created their products.

The Stall4All is available for hire, seven days a week, from 9am - 8pm Monday - Saturday and 12 - 6pm on Sunday.  It is also possible to hire the stall for half day sessions from 9am - 2pm or 3pm - 8pm.  The stall can also be hired for multiple and repeat bookings.
The cost for hire of the stall is £30 per day (or £25 per day for members of Capital Growth, London Food Link, Camden Good Food Partnership, ‘Growing in Haringey’ and local Transition groups.) A covered market stall, a pair of scales and two chairs are included in the hire of the stall.

For further information or to make a booking please
e-mail Anna at Crouch End;

Steering Group Meeting, 13 June 2011, 8.00pm at The Maynard Pub

Present:  Steering Gp: Pamela (Chair), Gillian (minutes), Tilly, Jacki,

Minutes from last meeting (15-05-11) agreed. 

Matters Arising

·       Ed Compton has been in touch re website.  The next stage is to discuss content but this was left over to a later meeting.

·       There will be a meeting about the Crouch Hill Community Park on Wednesday 22 June, 7pm at Crouch Hill Park, entrance from Crouch Hill.

Agenda Items

1) Reporting back

Gillian reported that the North London Bike Power Workshop held on 11 June was a great success.  Magnificent Revolution had found previous courses difficult to fill but this one attracted 15 people. The outcome will be greater collaboration between TCE, Magnificent Revolution and the Green Lens Studios, and a joint venture with other North London Transition Groups to produce a bike-powered generator.

Pamela gave a brief summary of Haringey Council’s 40:20 Conference held on the same day.  There were three presentations from Councillor Jo Goldberg, Cara Jenkins from the 100 Homes Project and a representative of Brent Green zones. This last initiative was very inspiring, a volunteer-run project which involved local activists going round houses and encouraging residents to be responsible for their locality.  Despite the project’s success, funding has been cut due to the change in government.

Pamela has arranged a meeting with her local Councillor Paul Strange to discuss a similar project.  She would like to replicate Muswell Hill Sustainablity Group’s 100 houses project and start a solar panel buying group in Crouch End.  She also proposed a green hub, where people could find out about energy saving, etc.  Gillian suggested HVCC which could also be a centre for recycling.

Tilly reported back that Green on the Screen’s showing of No Impact Man attracted over 40 people; the film was a complex and sometimes challenging view of how to follow a sustainable lifestyle.

There was also information on the two Capital Growth sites: the Harold Road Community Garden and HVCC Kitchen Garden.  Concern was expressed about David’s leaving since he has played a considerable role in organising and overseeing the budget.  There will be a meeting on Wednesday 15 June at 7pm to discuss the future of the site and a farewell celebration for David.  Some suggestions were greater involvement of MORSSH in the project and leafleting local residents.

Richard has been in contact with the Selby Centre to make raised beds for HVCC.  It might be cheaper to collect the beds and assemble on-site and Richard is looking into this.

2 Up and Coming Events

a)Sustainable Haringey Summer Gathering – Sunday 26 June at Railway Fields.

Lunch at 1pm followed by discussion on waste from 2pm onwards.  The three main talking points will be:

·       Veolia’s contract with Haringey Council

·       theproposed incinerator at Pinkham Way

·       increased use of supermarkets plastic bags in Muswell Hill and Crouch End

b)Meadow Orchard Open Day – Saturday 9 July 2011

c)HVCC/TCE Reuse/ Recycle/ Tabletop Sale event 24 September 2011

d)HVCC/TCE  Apple Day 15 October 2011

Note for the last two events,forward planning will be necessary to ensure tables are allocated beforehand.  There is an HVCC Events Meeting on Thursday 15 June at 7.30pm in Meeting Room 2, HVCC to discuss these and other events.

There are two more opportunities to collaborate with other groups:

Transition Finsbury Park’s Well Oiled Festival on Saturday 17 September and the Urban Green Fair in Brockwell Park on Sunday 4 September.

3 Any Other Business

Andrew Thornton has requested a representative from TCE to attend a photoshoot on Wednesday pm to promote the Pennies for Plastic Fund at Budgens.  Pamela will check if Kate or Gemma are free then.  Gillian will find out how the images are to be used and in what context.