alt. cardiff
December 2020 Issue 1
Inside Cardiff’s cohousing movement 40th birthday for Butetown gallery Sustainability in Sophia Gardens Art in lockdown
NEWS
BayArt collective hits 40 Butetown Artists Studio Group is one of the most established in Wales
An exhibition celebrating 40 years of BayArt’s studio space and gallery opens this week, featuring work from the gallery’s Butetown Artists Studio Group. The exhibition will run from 17 November to 11 December 2020 and will showcase paintings and sculptures by members of the group. According to BayArt’s website, the group is one of the most established in Wales and features a Royal Academician, a former exhibitor at Cardiff’s Artes Mundi and four National Eisteddfod Gold Medallists. The group has occupied its current space in Cardiff Bay since the early 1980s. Curator Philip Nicol said after ten years the building was falling apart, meaning the group had to secure a Lottery grant for refurbishment. A condition of receiving that funding was to run a public exhibition space, which the group has done since 2002. “They’re affordable studios, we try to keep it as reasonable as possible,” Philip said. “We’re the masters of our own destiny as we own the building. I managed to get a gift of the freehold, so we’re not under the vagaries of a landlord,” he said. A lot has changed for artists in Cardiff since the group first moved to its current location, Philip said.
Sophia Gardens revamp resumes
Work has resumed on the restoration of Warden’s House in Sophia Gardens, led by the team behind Cardiff street food favourite Dusty’s Pizza. Internal clearance of the former warden’s bungalow began on 1 November, according to the project’s official Twitter page. Grounds clearance took place on 27 November in preparation for further transformation, including repairing water damage to the roof. Dusty’s target of £40,000 was reached in April 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the hospitality industry “to its knees,” forcing the company to halt all work on the renovation, a post on its website says. “At this point expansion couldn’t be considered, survival was necessary,” the website says, adding, “Any outstanding Kickstarter rewards will be honoured and we appreciate your patience regarding this.” “I think people are starting to take more responsibility,” co-founder Debs Lewis WalesOnline regarding the project’s 2 told sustainable principles in 2019.
By Jacob Moreton
The group occupied a co-op t-shirt factory until the 1980s
The docks were “neglected” at that time, he said, but added that the creative industries in Wales were bigger now than they had ever been. Whereas over the last 20 years artists had benefited from more commercially-minded galleries in places like New York, Berlin, or London, places like Cardiff could be beneficial because they’re small enough to know a lot of people, Philip said. “I think that’s getting more and more important,” he said, “as people have less faith in that capitalistic enterprise, which is based on the individual artists as opposed to the collective.”
Family launch festive fundraiser
A father and daughter team from Cardiff have launched a fundraising drive to raise money for their local foodbank. Wild Thing Foods, run by father and daughter team Johnathan and Sophie Williams from Llanishen and Thornhill, is selling takeaway curries in the run up to Christmas, with all profits going towards Cardiff Foodbank. The campaign has so far had two successful weekends of takeaways, having sold out by Tuesday and Thursday in the first and second weeks, respectively. They were inspired by England footballer Marcus Rashford’s successful campaign in favour of extending free school meals for eligible children during the school holidays, Sophie said. “This was a way to give back to people who are less fortunate than ourselves,” he said, adding that, “It gave us something to look forward to and hopefully bring about positivity around this time of year when it’s easy to be a bit selfish.”
INTERVIEWS set up on social media.
“People had a sense of connection, no matter how passing it might be”
Derek still uses wooden paintboxes handmade by his father
“I loved it,” he said. “I think what lockdown did was dissolve this notion of anonymity in the city,” he said. “People had a sense of connection, regardless of how passing it might be, whether it was a smile or light conversation. When it came to painting, it brought people closer to my work.” Derek was born and brought up in Risca, a small mining town west of Newport. Growing up there he was in awe of Cardiff because it was so different to the Valleys, he said. He completed a HND course in Bournemouth, before travelling to Australia. There, he found work with the National Trust of Western Australia and travelled the country illustrating their
A passion project How lockdown brought Derek Bainton’s art to a new audience Derek Bainton, 49, has been painting Cardiff street scenes for the past 15 years, using small wooden paintboxes handmade by his father in his Risca woodshed. But he has only been pushing his work commercially since April of this year, starting an Instagram account to promote his paintings. Derek resigned from his senior position at Swansea College of Art in July 2019, intending to pursue creative projects. When the March lockdown hit, he suddenly had the thinking space necessary to get
settlements and estates. Painting these isolated, bleak buildings was the seed of his love of drawing a lonely old building, he said. “I’ve always loved the notion of melancholy in art,” he said. Derek moved to Cardiff in 2000 and lived close to the docks, as the Bay was known then. He said he appreciated Cardiff’s “real Welshness.” “It used to be very rough and ready, although it’s become quite cultural now and quite an exciting place to live in,” he said. More recently, green spaces like Bute Park provided welcome comfort during lockdown. “It’s therapy. Having that in the heart of the city is one of 3 the greatest pleasures.”
4
Diggers and Dreamers
Cohousing is most popular in Scandinavia | Image via Creative Commons
Is Cardiff ready for Scandistyle cohousing? alt.cardiff investigates
I
n the north east of Cardiff, nestled between Edeyrn’s Church and the busy A48, is a narrow, unremarkable strip of land. It was, until recently, being viewed with growing interest by a local group, Cardiff Cohousing, which wants to do something novel with the plot. Daniele Procida, the group’s founder, eagerly visited the site, only to find it “utterly blighted” by noise from the nearby motorway. “The noise is horrendous,” he reported back to the group, via their Slack channel. They were finding, like many similar projects, that setting up a new development is far from easy. Cohousing, which is popular in Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe, is a relatively new but increasingly popular phenomenon for Wales. According to Cohousing UK, cohousing communities are “intentional” communities, created and run by their residents, including both private homes and communal spaces. “It’s really about sharing the space and the amenities and the material things,” Daniele said. “I think in practice real communities come out of sharing physical, material things and taking care of them together.” Advocates of cohousing say such projects can fight isolation, increase wellbeing and reduce unnecessary consumption. In research released by the Wales Co-operative Centre in 2019, cohousing residents reported improved happiness, increased confidence and better quality of life, compared to traditional housing models. Daniele, who has lived in Cardiff for 25 years, started Cardiff Cohousing in September and began to reach out to those who, like himself, wanted to live in a less wasteful, more sustainable way.
5
LONG READS
“Dreamers can be an obstacle to progress because they tend to sit around talking and nothing ever gets done” “They’re dissatisfied with ordinary suburban living where everyone’s got their own car, their own house, their own lawnmower. They would be quite happy to sacrifice a bit of privacy and gain some community,” he said. Though the movement is still in its infancy in Wales, some projects have managed to get off the ground successfully. Dol-Llys Hall, a former regency country house near Llanidloes, Mid Wales, is home to six families who share communal rooms, a laundry and a workshop, Dol-Llys’ website says. Closer to Cardiff is Swansea Cohousing, which is looking to set up cohousing where each resident has their own apartment with shared facilities and the option to buy, rather than rent, co-founder Leonie Ramondt said. Nearby is Golem, a Radical Routes co-op with two properties that has been growing for eight years, she said.
More urgent problems But making progress is not simple. In Wales, which has the UK’s second highest rate poverty in the private rented sector according to a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a lack of affordability presents a significant obstacle to cohousing becoming a real alternative, particularly for young people facing immense difficulty in owning their own home. Casey Edwards, Community Led Housing Advisor at Wales Co-operative Centre, said without assistance it would be difficult to figure out how cohousing projects could be affordable, especially in a place like Cardiff. That support was hard to find when councils had been trying to get people with urgent needs off the streets, Daniele said. At the same time, the Welsh government is scrambling to meet their target of 20,000 new affordable homes by 2021, while the Covid-19 pandemic has complicated matters even further. Long-term planning isn’t easy at a time of historical crisis.
Changing perceptions
The cost of housing is rising in Cardiff
6
Daniele also thinks an obstacle to mainstream adoption is that cohousing “just sounds so weird to many people.” The idea of privacy has been very strongly encouraged ideologically, he added. That cohousing isn’t a larger part of the government’s plans might be down to perceptions of cohousing as an alternative or bohemian lifestyle choice among the public and some politicians, Casey said.
Experts say perceptions of cohousing as bohemian have hampered its success
“A lot of people see it as an alternative form of housing, geared to rural communities who want to live off grid. Maybe people think it’s a commune,” she said. In reality, while some cohousing projects do emphasise radical self-sufficiency, many projects are simply focused on sharing spaces pragmatically. At the Wales Co-operative Centre, Casey said, her team had worked with “alternative” people who want to live off grid in really rural areas as well as people who lived in cities and towns all over Wales. That tension between utopian ideals and pragmatic reality within the cohousing movement even plays out within existing groups. “There’s a lot of dreaminess in the cohousing sector,” Daniele said. “Dreamers can be an obstacle to progress because they tend to sit around talking and nothing ever gets done,” he said. Is cohousing going to solve Wales’ housing crisis? Probably not, Casey admits. But while she couldn’t see it being delivered en masse any time soon, she said, it was definitely on the up. The Wales Cooperative Centre had 50 clients on their books, she added, with plans to deliver 290 affordable homes over the next decade. Meanwhile Daniele is determined to find the right piece of land. “I don’t want to still be sitting here talking about what we’re planning to do in three years time,” he said.