The Little Things - or are they?

I’ve been thinking about the role of the arts in helping to heal traumatised communities this week and how little things like humour, sweeping the streets and free sandwiches or seemingly simple things like notice boards up on Poundland in Peckham on ‘Why we Love Peckham’, initiated by Peckham Shed are so vital and yet are all too often underestimated in  the debates on funding, parental guidance (or not) and whose fault it all is.

I’ve been thinking about the role of the arts in helping to heal traumatised communities this week and how little things like humour, sweeping the streets and free sandwiches or seemingly simple things like notice boards up on Poundland in Peckham on ‘Why we Love Peckham’, initiated by Peckham Shed are so vital and yet are all too often underestimated in  the debates on funding, parental guidance (or not) and whose fault it all is.

Dan Thompson, part of the ‘ filling of empty shops with arts’ movement initiated a clean-up in Hackney called Riot Wombles and a nation-wide domestic force was born that redefined what this last week was about. As the article in the  Evening Standard described on August 10th, the momentum continues to grow, helping to restore local shopkeepers’ faith in the human spirit.

 A notice board, hundreds of brooms, or things like street training that artists like Lottie Child  run that encourage an alternate experience of an urban landscape all contribute to a reimagining of what it means to live together in the 21^st century and how we can shift the mindsets of polarised opposition and violent reaction. And hugely important to associate communities like Tottenham, West Bromwich or Peckham with images of caring communities and active in local projects that are about art, creativity and collaboration. A few weeks ago, there was an RSA Fellowship network meeting in Peckham Space that did just that and Matthew wrote about it. But I get frustrated in knowing that these sorts of stories are often incidental, charming human interest anecdotes, rather than the very human and necessary resource to working out how on earth we are going to live together in these challenging times.