This summer Boyle — who still lives locally but no longer in a tower
block — will curate Shuffle, a programme of films as part of a wider
community arts festival, the St Clement’s Social Club, on the site. The
events are being staged under the concept of “meanwhile use”, that
brings life to sites slated for development.
Conversion of the
hospital buildings into flats, and the building of community homes on
the site, begins in early 2014 under a pioneering scheme but the hope is
that there will be ongoing cultural activity on the site.
The
person who got Boyle involved is Kate MacTiernan, a 28-year-old
Australian with boundless energy, sudden convictions and impeccable
contacts. Five years ago, travelling in Europe after her architecture
degree in Melbourne, she met Rohan Silva, then a special adviser at
Downing Street, and decided on five days’ acquaintance to move to London
to be with him (they married this year).
A year later, while
studying at the Architectural Association, she was introduced by
Newsnight’s political editor Allegra Stratton to Maurice (now Lord)
Glasman of the community organisation London Citizens, which was eyeing
up St Clement’s for an experiment in land re-use.
“I do have a
tendency to fall in love with stuff,” says MacTiernan. “And I just fell
in love with the building. We came in the winter when it was covered in
snow and it felt so dark and mysterious and Victorian.” A security guard
showed her a curio: a small theatre with a stage at one end, originally
built in the Fifties, where “the patients — we’ve got to call them
service users now — held a Christmas pageant each year”. In the late
Sixties, the theatre was taken over by two pioneering occupational
therapists, Myra Garrett and Holocaust survivor Lotte Tendler, as an
everyday social club where artistic endeavour was encouraged as an
alternative to the zealous application of electro-convulsive therapy
elsewhere on the site. Both women are still alive at 85 and 92. “I was
swept away by the stories,” says MacTiernan. “There were lots of actors
and poets kept here, and there was a bar at the social club and people
from the outside world could come in. It was a very happy place.”
The
theatre would become the focus of the festival but first the wider
plans for St Clement’s had to be ratified. Over the course of four years
(during which MacTiernan worked for an East End architectural practice
designing mosques), London Citizens persuaded the Mayor’s office, which
has owned the empty hospital since 2005, to donate it to the specially
formed East London Community Land Trust (ELCLT), the first of its kind
in the UK.
“It’s a new housing model and Boris Johnson has been
very supportive,” says MacTiernan. “We have gone into partnership: us,
the developer Linden Homes and the Greater London Authority. The whole
of the land will be held in freehold by a foundation, which means ground
rents can be invested back into community activities: 250 commercial
residential properties will be developed in the listed hospital
buildings, and community land trust flats and three-bedroom houses will
be built on open ground [making up 10 per cent of the development]. The
prices of these are linked to wages rather than market price — they come
in at half the cost of a normal house, and when you sell one, you sell
it back to the trust. And 25 per cent [of the properties] will be
socially rented.”
When London Citizens met local groups —
schools, faith groups, housing associations — to drum up support for the
ELCLT, they heard the same thing over and over: “Everyone said there’s
no heart to Mile End. There are great transport links but nowhere to go.
People wanted community space, arts space, nursery space, a place to do
and see interesting things.”
MacTiernan came up with the festival
as a way to “cleanse the building of its dark history, and bring back
the good bits, like the social club” but also to show how cultural use
might inform the development in future. For his part, the Mayor says the
scheme has “huge potential to breathe new life into a neglected part of
the capital, combining quality housing developments with new cultural
spaces that will enable ambitious events such as Shuffle to happen”.
The
film programme came about almost by happenstance, though. At Christmas,
MacTiernan commissioned a huge bow for the front gate from a local
sculptor, to celebrate the hospital being brought back to life. “I
called it ‘a bow for Bow’, and asked my friend Steve Hilton [David
Cameron’s former director of strategy], who worked with Danny on the
Olympics, to ask Danny to come and launch it. When he saw the theatre,
he clapped his hands and said, ‘We can do something here. Let’s do a
film festival’. I said ‘All right, you curate, and I’ll do the rest’.
Once Danny’s on board, it opens lots of doors. He is very passionate,
very energetic and completely honourable: if he says he will do
something, he does it.”
Boyle also donated enough funds to make
the theatre functional. Lawyers, security firms and audiovisual
suppliers have donated time, expertise or equipment free, and the place
is abuzz with guerrilla gardeners and volunteers. MacTiernan has a
talent to enthuse.
The St Clement’s Social Club arts festival
starts on July 19, with some activities open to the public and others
just for local groups. Trendy east London architects MUF will organise
an art camp for children with Asperger’s from nearby Phoenix School
inside the listed hospital buildings, but the gardens, a bicycle
workshop and a café built by the homelessness charity Crisis and
upcyclers East London Furniture will be open to all.
The public
can also come to several events in the theatre, including an evening of
“Outsider Poetry” presented by former patients and staff at the
hospital, and a drama about mental health staged by local theatre
company Eyestrings. Then, from August 8, Shuffle will show not just a
selection of Boyle’s own films (Slumdog Millionaire, Shallow Grave and
the almost-unseen short Alien Love Triangle) but the likes of Attack the
Block, Julien Temple’s London: the Modern Babylon, and short films
programmed by former Labour MP Oona King’s husband, Tiberio Santomarco —
the couple also live locally.
There will be an outdoor screen as
well as the theatre, plus “bars, and dancing to cool bands, for 11
nights”, not to mention the chance to soak up the evocative Dickensian
surroundings of the place.
Throughout our conversation I’ve
assumed that MacTiernan and Silva, who is now a tech entrepreneur, must
also be East End locals, like all of London’s cool kids. She looks a bit
shamefaced when I ask. “Ro and I lived in Bethnal Green for three
years,” she says. “But we’ve just moved to Clerkenwell, which I love.
But this [St Clement’s and the ELCLT] is all about local people and
local things. So I feel a bit silly ...”
Shuffle runs at St Clement’s, Mile End Road, E3, August 8-18 (stclementssocialclub.com).
