Nursery Row Park goes rural - Re-imagine Your Elephant workshop

Re-imagine Your Elephant took place again last weekend at Nursery Row Park for their 'Nursery Row Park goes Rural' Annual Festival. Again it went down well, despite the vegetables withering (along with everyone else) in the heat. 

Peppers became palaces, Elephant's 'castle' was made with a cabbage leave roof and carrot turrets, and cucumbers, cauliflowers and leeks were sculpted into an alternative South London skyline.

Eleanor Shipman

PLAY SWAP

Re-imagining our Elephant at The Elephant and the Nun Festival, Nursery Row Park

The Elephant and the Nun Festival took hold across Southwark today for some end of summer shenanigans... Ida Barr aka Chris Green lead his Mash Up with Home Live Art in Nursery Row Park, while local dance groups took to the stage throughout the afternoon. 

Home Live Art invited me to run a workshop as part of the event which I ran as Re-imagine your Elephant. Asking participants to think about their local area, particularly the drastic changes being made through the multitude of regeneration schemes happening across the borough, and providing a platform with which to re-imagine and re-design the buildings of Elephant and Castle using fruit and vegetables from East Street market. 

The workshop went down very well with the local children, and was a busy day of cutting, chopping and sticking fruit and veg together to create some fantastical buildings. From tower blocks to UFOs, monsters to caverns, the brief was slightly veered from but with some brilliant results. With music blaring, dancers dancing the afternoon away and a lot of cake it turned out to be a great festival. 

PLAY SWAP behind the scenes: Day 2 of filming

Second day of filming the upcoming PLAY SWAP film as Michael and I wandered Walworth again absorbing the wealth of knowledge and stories from local people as well as stocking up on a bit of visual context...

Today we spoke to East Street shop owners from Pakistan who told us about playing football and cricket from behind their butcher's counter and between the upside-down chicken heads then Luis, a local boy we met playing in the park with the soon-to-be-cut Southwark Play Team. Luis was a brilliant interviewee, keenly telling us about games he plays in the local area including the well-known Run Outs, as well as Family It and Camouflage as well as highlighting his love for the local park. 

We also had a fascinating chat with Ricky, a member of staff with the Southwark Play Team which sets up a bouncy castle as well as art activities in Nursery Row Park every Monday and Wednesday. Ricky has grown up on the Aylesbury Estate and spoke to us about the effect the architecture of the space has on its participants, most notably the council's removal of bridges linking the blocks together to prevent easy escape for burglars, but also severing the communal pathways between blocks, now creating hostility and very separate residential islands. 

Thursday is our last day of filming where we have some more exciting interviews lined up, ready to culminate over the next month in the production of PLAY SWAP's first short film. We will be screening the film at Pembroke House early September. Watch this space. 

Eleanor Shipman

PLAY SWAP

PLAY SWAP at East Street Market

PLAY SWAP faced the early (8am!) morning rain on East Street today for the first incarnation of the PLAY SWAP market stall: selling nothing, and instead collecting street games from passers by. These games are added to the collection so far creating a vast array of 'local games from around the world' - from Iraq to Nigeria, Antigua to Germany. 

Having had a stall rolled over for me to set up the PLAY SWAP pitch just next to the entrance to Nursery Row Park, I dreaded the day to come as the rain poured down and I was left tarpaulin-less, knowing my main materials of felt tip pens and paper would not survive. Luckily, the market opened for trading, and with it exchanged the heavy clouds for stunning sunshine.

I displayed a book of some games collected so far - from 5 year olds playing Hide and Seek and Mums and Dads, to 71 year olds remembering Kiss Chase and Alleygobs. But we needed more. Aided by my trusty assistant Nick, we were soon collecting games from East Street customers and learning about local and world history in the process. 

Bringing people together through play is the aim of this project, and today certainly proved it can be done. As I was gathering a huge list of games from one local man, he encouraged another man passing by to share his memories with us as they were of a similar age. Indeed, they had played the same games which they reminisced about with great joy, between stories of one's time in the Falklands and the other's path to becoming a born-again Christian.

Local women shared hopping and grid games they learnt as children on the streets of Nigeria, to the point where others coming to talk to us could be shown the previous person's diagrams to explain the game. Two new versions of Hopscotch were also revealed - one called Eye-Die (as you throw the stone onto the grid behind you with your eyes closed) from Antigua, and the other known as Heaven and Hell (as you work your way up to 'heaven' at the top of the grid, and go back down to 'hell' if you get 'out') from Germany.

Charlie Chaplin was making his way in and out of the stalls, happily dancing to the reggae being blasted out of the stall next to ours. He too shared a game from his childhood, called 'Blockey 1, 2, 3', one which I too learnt as a child and had not heard anyone use the same name for it until now. He revealed that he grew up in my home town of St. Albans - a lovely feeling for me to find my own game matched!

I hope to continue using PLAY SWAP to create links between people, giving them an instant common ground and talking point, building up trust and prompting exchange between local people. Perhaps a regular PLAY SWAP stall would encourage and support this. Food for thought.

Eleanor Shipman

Pembroke People