Thorntons Budgens Community Hub

[Sarah Moore]

Hi everyone, first post here! *waves*

I don't live in Crouch End, but I wish I did!  I do work here, at Thornton's Budgens where I'm helping them get ready for the relaunch of the store next week.  I also spend a lot of my spare time here as my favourite knitting shop is in Crouch End - Nest on Weston Park.  I'll be teaching classes there too.

 

I love the sense of community in Crouch End and that's what I wanted to write about today - one of my jobs is to coordinate the new Community Hub in Budgens.

 

The Community Hub will be right in the middle of the store (you may have noticed them clearing space today).  It's an area for local projects and organisations to ‘tell their story’ to our customers. Robin from the Portable Bookshop has a regular booking every Thursday and we're looking for more projects to take part.  The second tenant of the Hub will be Lynne Featherstone, who will be doing a "supermarket surgery" next Friday, 1 July from 4-5:30 pm.

 

If you'd like to make a booking, email [e-mail]

 

You can also check out the Community Hub page here.

[CrouchEnd Cupcake]

What a great idea, I look forward to seeing how that works.  I'm a Nest lover too - your post has reminded me that I ought to get another knitting project on the go.

 

Welcome to the forum Sarah! *waves back*

[Adrian Essex]

As Sarah says Crouch End has a sense of community, so highly developed in fact that it risks having something of a glut of community hubs. 

Claire Kober (she's the leader of Haringey Council) has suggested in this article that libraries in Haringey are community hubs. I'm not sure that's either true or desirable. Mostly what people do in Hornsey library is borrow books and films, study and look things up on the internet. I fear the threat is that, now that the Haringey outpost on the Town Hall Square next to Spiazzo is closed, the library will soon be where you go to get your parking permit and claim your housing benefit. To the detriment of the other activities, I fear. I don't share Ms Kober's vision. I hope this is a community hub that will never happen.

Another "vibrant community hub" is planned for the Town Hall square. When I say planned it's actually more a sort of pious hope, as expressed here. It's a strictly time limited offer all set about with restrictions. Once again I'm not optimistic. And I will bite my thumb at Cll Canver's condescending hope to "bring a vibrancy to the area" - as though an area which already boasts CEFC, Konk, Crouch End Open Studios, Portable Books, etc, etc,  . . . isn't already vibrating like a rampant Duracell Bunny.

So my money is on Thornton's Budgens offering for a whole list of reasons:

1. It's happening next week
2. It already has bookings
3. It doesn't need planning permission and a license
4. "There is no charge for this space"
5. Making the space available is generous, philanthropic and far sighted
6. The community hub webpage has revealed to me that one can embed a Google calendar (thanks for that)
7. Sarah has replaced the green fag packet with a charming picture of herself(?) in a hand made hat(?)

[Sarah Moore]

Not being a smoker I couldn't bring myself to post with the fag packet!  That is me and I made the hat myself ;)

 

I don't want to derail the thread but I think the Hornsey Library is a great "community hub" too, and the unlibrary is a really pioneering concept other libraries should pick up.  Being a postgrad student I still believe books to be the most important thing a library can offer (and I'm very grateful for Hornsey's basement store!), but the book itself is under threat and libraries need to keep up.  I'm not sure about parking permits and housing benefits, maybe accessing those services through the library would be a good thing as it would get people through the door.*

 

I hope they end up doing something fantastic with the Town Hall Square too.  Yes, the area is vibrant but that part of it feels a little depressing!

 

Anyway, I think a community can support multiple hubs that all complement each other (I'm picturing one of those nifty network graphs with all of the spokes radiating out) - and don't forget the local pubs too!  The Food from the Sky garden is another hub.  Yesterday a group had a meeting up there, and was able to escape to the unlibrary when it started raining - I thought that was a great example of hubs interconnecting.**  It goes without saying that opinion8 is another hub.

 

 

 

* views expressed are my own, yada yada

** my MSc is NOT in network theory

[Adrian Essex]

Thank you for changing your profile picture - here is the story of the fag packet.

When I think of hubs I think of wheels, and a wheel with many hubs would be both eccentric and give a bumpy ride. Network theory is a much better suggestion - I have changed the profile picture to match, and my mindset to assimilate the multiplicity.

Multiple hubs it is then, and perhaps OpinioN8 could book a slot in the Budgens instance.

[andrew thornton]

Tks for the thumbs up on our community hub ...I am really looking forward to seeing all sorts of groups telling thier stories....variety is so much the spice of life!! You have sarah to thank for embedded google calenders!!!

 

Opinion8, we await your booking!!