Tag: london

The Slaughterhouse Club

Posted on by tim.lightfactory@googlemail.com

For the last 5 years I have been working with Artists Robin Whitmore and Mark Whitelaw on Duckie’s The Slaughterhouse Club.

The Slaughterhouse Club was a participatory arts project with homeless vulnerable Londoners struggling with booze and addiction issues. The project ran for forty weeks per year until 2020.

The participants – about 45 hostel residents regularly working throughout the year – were treated as artists and encouraged to make creative work. Together they make songs, poems, stories, short plays, animations, puppet shows, slide shows, paintings, films and videos. The Slaughterhouse Club engaged residents of the hostels to connect with themselves and their community through the creation of these arts activities – to aid harm minimisation and personal growth.

The work was very delicate and the hostel environment is very unpredictable. Our participants lead chaotic lives, and struggle with entrenched alcohol and drug addictions, fragile mental health and often run-ins with the authorities. Most of the work was one-to-one, drawing out creativity through personal conversations and developing inventive exercises. The Slaughterhouse Club was produced by Duckie in association with Thames Reach Hostels and funded by the Big Lottery Fund and Vauxhall One.

The Old Steam

Posted on by tim.lightfactory@googlemail.com

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with Duckie on The Slaughterhouse Club, a workshop project with Thames Reach Hostels for homeless vulnerable Londoners struggling with booze and addiction issues.

The project is running for five years from 2015 until 2020, forty weeks per year. Every Thursday we are at Robertson Street Hostel in Battersea, and every Friday we are at Graham House in Vauxhall.

I collaborated with one of the residents Chris Argent on this film, which explores his passion for steam trains.

Save The Tavern

Posted on by tim.lightfactory@googlemail.com


Worrying times in London at the moment, and to me, it feels like it’s been coming for a while. Living in Liverpool, but often working in London, and having previously lived in London for 15 years, it’s sad to see it become other worldly. Looking back London was a place of excitement, somewhere where you went that was accessible, diverse and full of life. Now it just feels corporate and unobtainable.

An offshoot of this is a project I was working on with Re-Dock last year, Happy Birthday RVT, celebrating 150 years of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The RVT is the UK’s oldest LGBTQ pub and iconic performance space, Towards the end of the project, the venue was sold to Immovate, a re-development company with a history of turning turning places into luxury flats and hotels.

The result is the launch of a campaign to look out for the Future of the RVT. You can sign up at RVT.community The campaign officially launches tomorrow at the Cinema Museum in Elephant and Castle with a screening of the film that came out of the Happy Birthday RVT project, now called Save The Tavern. Here’s the trailer. With some many cultural spaces closing down and people being forced to move due to high rents, it feels like it’s time to make a stand.

A day in the life of St Paul’s Church, West Hackney

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I filmed this earlier this month over the course of a day at St Paul’s Church West Hackney. Hopefully, the film demonstrates how the building is in constant use throughout the day. For me, it was really interesting to see how much cross-over from the different groups, showing how essential the space is to the local community.