From the 11th-13th January, Walthamstow hosted the opening event for the first London Borough of Culture and it was a feast of art, culture and fun for everyone. For one year, Waltham Forest will be the centre of the universe for people that get a kick out of culture. For us that live here, it already is the centre of the universe and we’re more than happy to share our home with you.
Seeing the light show at Lloyd Park being tested throughout the week got me excited for the event itself and after a queue that wasn’t as gruesome as I’d feared, we were in Lloyd Park and headed for Nest, a shimmering light installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast with music by Erland Cooper, using the voices of over 1000 local school children and choir members. The lights from Nest could be seen from afar but up close is where the magic happens; people were lying down in the centre of the space, looking up at the sky as the lights danced around the park and up into the clouds. It was a beautiful moment of peace and contemplation in the midst of the town.
After Nest, we travelled down Forest Road and encountered a carnivalesque atmosphere, with a man playing a mobile piano and another man riding a bike while playing a double bass. Das Brass, an 8-piece brass band blasted out Michael Jackson songs as well as other classics from Toto and The White Stripes. Further on, bright white figures march past while giant tree monsters give limb bumps to kids. Before joining the queue for the Town Hall installation, we get to admire the ever-brilliant neon from God’s Own Junkyard slung up in the trees. A fitting end to the Borough of Culture would be for these neon beauties to be distributed among residents of the borough in a raffle. We can but dream! One day, I’d love a giant neon pair of lips in my living room.
The final piece of the launch event was video work projected onto the Town Hall, kicking off with Addictive TV’s Welcome to the Forest, where local musicians were sampled to create a song about, you guessed it, the Borough of Culture! Much rapping about the gems of the neighbourhood like Lea Bridge Road and Chingford ensued before Greenaway and Greenaway’s sensational multimedia story of the borough and music by Mercury-Prize winning musician Talvin Singh. In this, we are urged to close our minds to the realities of life for one day, to immerse ourselves in the art and to celebrate the place we call home. The story of the borough takes us from old men in pubs to the swaying trees of Epping Forest, through the war and everything since. We hear voices denounce austerity, gentrification, fear of crime and ever rising house prices making it hard for people from the borough to stay here. One man questions “how it’ll feel, when I’m on my knees” while another questions why people hate others because of the colour of their skin. The show’s impact lies not just in its technical brilliance but its aim to get people thinking about the place we live and the one we’d like to see. The projections end with a young schoolgirl reciting a line from William Morris “The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”
Naturally, with an event like this, there are voices of dissent that the borough of culture exists at all when we see more and more homelessness or shocking crimes on our doorstep. With the bad, we have to revel in the good and celebrate what we can achieve, even if average house prices of £500,000 and child poverty sit uneasily side by side. Kudos to the team behind this for focusing on the inequalities in the borough as well as the groovy stuff. By the end of the show, I felt prouder than ever to see the faces behind the creativity and talent in the place I live and this was a well-deserved celebration of all things Waltham Forest. This was a great start to what I hope will be a brilliant year.
