London Rising

Ever feel like there’s something rumbling deep beneath London’s chewing gum-spotted pavements? Nope, it’s not the tube or the city’s antiquated Victorian sewers. It’s a mini-earthquake of change, as this ever-evolving city remakes itself after two punishing years of Covid. A new wave of activists are campaigning to make the city a fairer place to live. The city’s queer nightlife is evolving to cater to groups it has historically neglected. Fresh, community-focused spaces are popping up to fight the tide of corporatisation. The hospitality business is becoming a better place to work. Digital art is breaking into physical spaces. And Londoners are finding more eco-conscious ways to live in a fast-changing city. Here are London’s game-changing people and movements, plus some inspo on how to join them.

The queer nightlife gamechangers: Nadine Artois and Naeem Davis

Naeem: As black or brown queer neurodivergent people, the club was always somewhere where we could be all of ourselves. Somewhere where we could be messy, learn about the world – school was never it. I grew up going to Heaven: they had an RnB and bashment night and it was the only place I’d ever seen that many black and brown queer people in one space. But it felt very binary. Queerness came into my consciousness, not just lesbian, gay and bisexual: another space needed to be formed where I could find that kind of communion. 

Nadine: I saw that Naeem was doing [queer club night] BBZ. I wanted to go down because I was running [queer club night] Pxssy Palace and it felt so important to connect with other people who were doing the same kinds of things – there’s no blueprint, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. Then I spoke with Naeem and they had the biggest smile on their face the whole entire time.

Naeem: There were so many parallels in our lives and in our work. We both wanted to be community leaders, organisers who create something new and leave something behind. Babes and Pxssy Palace ended up doing a joint party at Southbank Centre and there were over 20,000 people there, it was huge! Now we’re running Overflo Festival together which felt like a natural progression: it’s a chance to create a space that’s curated by and for our community, with pay-it-forward ticketing to allow people in different socioeconomic positions to come.

Nadine: There’s definitely a fight happening to make sure that we keep our queer spaces. It does feel a little do or die right now, I’m not gonna lie. From 2006 to 2017 we went from having 121 LGBTQ+ spaces to 51. But there are also amazing people that are on the ground trying to make sure we survive. 

Naeem: The future of queer nightlife is going to be so creative. Queer people have always done everything from nothing. Everything’s been birthed from the underground from day dot. Increased queer visibility will evolve nightlife in ways we didn’t expect. It’ll create whole new communities and scenes of artists, producers and organisers that will inform the future and do things differently, and hopefully more sustainably. 

The chef creating a kinder hospitality industry: Chantelle Nicholson

Hospitality is an industry where traditionally, people haven’t been looked after very well. So when the pandemic happened, a lot of workers said ‘hold on, I can get paid the same or even more working in another industry, doing something I don’t have to exert myself as much for’.

Now, there’s a massive hiring crisis. So at my restaurant Apricity, it was a chance to do things differently, and put the team first. Service charge never really made sense to me. Why should the customer dictate what we get paid? So I got rid of it, and made sure people were paid well for what they do. We only open five days a week, so everyone can have two days off in a row. And we close early, so people can take public transport and get home safely.

Obviously, we’re in it because we love the adrenaline, but there's a line between aggression and adrenaline that shouldn't be crossed. We’re 75% female kitchen, and aggression towards people is just not something we tolerate here.

TV programmes and movies like ‘Boiling Point’ aren’t helpful. It’s the same white male voices that are represented in the media over and over again. We need more diverse voices to be represented so we can start changing peoples’ views of the industry.

I had a group of 15 year olds come in and I said ‘right, who wants to be a chef?’ One girl said ‘I don’t want to, the hours are really unsocial’. I told her there were restaurants where you get three days off a week, and she said ‘oh’. And now one of the girls from that group is working for me. We need to get it into children’s minds that this is a really good, accessible career path.

For me, dining out is about joy. And if you get that joy from MacDonalds versus, you know, a mushroom dish here at Apricity, that’s good. But these big chains have a huge, huge opportunity to change how they operate and reduce waste, and it’s only consumer demand that’ll make that happen.

The pioneer in ‘living small’: Jeremie Cometto-Lingenheim

When my son Dagobert was two years old, I suddenly realised we were living in a way that had no connection with the land. Then we spent the weekend on a farm in a little cabin where if you wanted to have a bath, you had to get a bucket of water and build a fire. It really awakened his curiosity in the world around him.

So I devised a plan. We bought an old 1984 horsebox which we spent six months designing and doing up with the help of some very good builders: it comes complete with solar power and a rain harvester. And then we moved in. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, it could have been a disaster. But for me it’s an effective form of protest

Getting rid of our possessions wasn’t hard. We sold all our furniture and gave away our books. It was very easy and very freeing. I recommend it.

If you flush your toilet twice, that uses 40 litres of water. That’s the amount of water my son and I use in a week, from brushing your teeth, to washing to drinking to making tea to cooking. It’s about managing your resources.

The everyday choices of the everyday consumer are vital. In my restaurants Primeur, Westerns Laundry and Jolene, I work with producers who are rearing animals and farming correctly. I’m all about regenerative farming, which is one step beyond organic farming: it’s about making your land as fertile and alive as possible.

Poo is an amazing, magical thing that we have a very strange relationship with. We think we just need to flush it away. But actually you can build a relationship with your excrement where you see it as something that gives life. I compost my waste for six months, then use it as a fertiliser to grow vegetables.

When I went down the climate change research rabbit hole I got massively depressed. We’re bombarded with messages of doom and gloom. But actually, we have the tools to change things. If we change the way we farm and we’re halfway towards a better, healthier, more sustainable world. So there’s hope. Massive, massive amounts of hope.

The digital artist: Gaika

I look at screens just like they’re a piece of paper. They’re tools, a means of communicating something, otherwise it just is spectacle. My thing is: how do you make digital art that has meaning, rather than getting lost in the technical wizardry of it all? In my installation at Future Shock, I use a chatbot to explore ethics in artificial intelligence, which is a conversation I’m both fascinated by and recoiling from.

I’m not afraid of science. A future of technologically-assisted individualism is what scares me. Art has the ability to hold power to account, and give an alternative, emotional view, whereas technology is more objective. As we move towards a more technological society, it’s vital to have that balance.

I definitely think digital art can bring in new audiences. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I think the younger generation responds to the multisensory stimulation it provides. Some traditional artforms just don’t include a lot of people. If you go to an old blue chip gallery and you’re a 20 year old kid and you’re not super wealthy, there’s so much elitism and barriers to access that it’s hard to engage with anything that’s there.

In culture I see everything as being on an equal footing. I don’t listen to Wu-Tang Clan and then go and read some ancient poetry and think that one of those things is better than another just because. It’s all happening at once.

I was a visual artist before I was a musician, so it was natural to combine the two. I’ve ended up with a practice that’s part music, part architecture, part film, part installation, and I love it. I’m always striving to make my work smoother and more like itself, like I’m perfecting a formula.

Digital art is a newer artform, so people are just starting to take it a bit more seriously. I’m not locked on to the holiness of paintings. Things change, people change, and we move forward. I don’t really understand why anyone would be against that.

The online activist: Kwajo

My journey as an activist began nearly exactly a year ago. I was living in social housing with my Dad when he was diagnosed with stage four oesophagal cancer. He was bed bound and receiving medical treatment surrounded by cockroaches, damp, mould, you name it. We complained to the housing association but they didn’t come down. 

I was so frustrated that I turned to social media, taking photos and videos of my home that were shared thousands of times on Twitter. Then I started being contacted by social housing tenants around London, and visited them to draw attention to the conditions they were living in. 

After losing my Dad, keeping busy has been really important. Campaigning has been almost like therapy. It’s also brought us closer as a community on the estate, we realised like ‘Damn, everyone’s having the same issues’. Now, I get stopped all the time by people saying hello, it’s really nice.

Social media is so powerful. Just one click of a button, and before you know it, millions of people are sharing it across the country, not just in your local area. Bad PR is an incredibly costly thing for a brand, and that’s exactly what I do: I give them negative press so they have to start putting things right. 

Change is happening. It’s going to take intervention at governmental level for social housing conditions to really improve, but I think it will come. I’m very determined and I’ve achieved everything I wanted to, up until now. 

I think the generation that’s coming through is more motivated to change things. There’s been a perception that young people, particularly young people of colour, are disengaged with politics. But actually, they’re very much engaged with politics, they discuss it on social media all the time. What they are is disappointed, and that’s why they don’t get involved with mainstream parties. I’ve just graduated from uni and I’m still working out what I want to do, but I’m going to keep campaigning and see where it takes me.

 

The curator of DIY community spaces: Paul McGann

I started up Grow London as a social enterprise that sets up new temporary projects – they call them meanwhile projects – on sites awaiting development in the city, basically as a response to how unaffordable space is here. Currently we’re running a community garden on the old Aylesbury Estate in Elephant & Castle and operating a cultural space called Avalon Cafe, which opened last summer. It’s a way of looking at what you can do in the cracks while things are changing.

The pace of change in London is insane. But the good thing about the city is that there is always a way - it’s hard but it’s not impossible. People figure things out. You get forced out of one area but hopefully you can figure something out in another.

There are so many scraps of land in London that could be turned into community gardens. Some people might say that gardening in a temporary space is a pointless endeavour but actually you can achieve a lot, even without a permanent site.

I’ve always gardened. My Grandad grew spring onions and brussels sprouts for local shops, so when I was a kid, I used to help him. But if you grow up in a flat and no one ever shows you how to garden, you’re not really going to think it’s part of your world. That’s why you need to have community gardens in cities - they’re a way in.

There’s a physicality to the work that is really satisfying and grounding, especially for people who don’t have enough of that sort of physical work in their lives. And working together with other people to improve something is just massively psychologically helpful.

A lot of people can’t afford spaces. At Avalon Cafe, we work with bands and artists who are just starting out and don’t have much money. There’s such a range of different moods through the week - poetry nights, live music, exhibitions, talks - it’s a place that’s open, rather than curated. People often say they’re surprised to find a space like this in London. But actually, this is a city where it’s possible to do what you want: the trade off is having a more risky and less comfortable life.