Village Raw - ISSUE 15
Village Raw is a magazine that explores cultural stories from Crouch End, East Finchley, Highgate, Muswell Hill and the surrounding areas. The magazine is created by the community, for the community. If you like this issue you can support the project through a subscription or donation. See the links below. The fifteenth issue of Village Raw includes: UPSTAIRS AT THE GATEHOUSE - A look at Highgate’s fringe theatre. GETTING TO KNOW - The poetry and music of rapper and artist TaliaBle. FROM PAINT TO PRINT - How lockdown closures led an 81-year-old to a new career. SPACE TO THROW - Local ceramics studios offering courses. INSIDE THE SHEPHERD’S COTTAGE - Inside a 17th century Highgate house. RIGHT UP MY STREET - How to set up a community street party. UPON MEETING A FOX (OR TWO) - Launching the On Local Nature community. FILL ’ER UP - Exploring the local zero waste refill scene. ASK OLA - Refocusing the mind and dealing with hay fever. AND MORE…
Village Raw is a magazine that explores cultural stories from Crouch End, East Finchley, Highgate, Muswell Hill and the surrounding areas. The magazine is created by the community, for the community. If you like this issue you can support the project through a subscription or donation. See the links below. The fifteenth issue of Village Raw includes:
UPSTAIRS AT THE GATEHOUSE - A look at Highgate’s fringe theatre.
GETTING TO KNOW - The poetry and music of rapper and artist TaliaBle.
FROM PAINT TO PRINT - How lockdown closures led an 81-year-old to a new career.
SPACE TO THROW - Local ceramics studios offering courses.
INSIDE THE SHEPHERD’S COTTAGE - Inside a 17th century Highgate house.
RIGHT UP MY STREET - How to set up a community street party.
UPON MEETING A FOX (OR TWO) - Launching the On Local Nature community.
FILL ’ER UP - Exploring the local zero waste refill scene.
ASK OLA - Refocusing the mind and dealing with hay fever.
AND MORE…
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VILLAGE RAW<br />
ART & CULTURE<br />
These pages: Turning Earth Haringey, which opened in January.<br />
inspired by the culture of hobby ceramics in the US when she was<br />
touring the country as a theatre manager. “I was living in the US<br />
from 2009 to 2012 working in theatre, and I realised that there were<br />
community access pottery studios in most cities. They were aimed<br />
at hobbyists, not professionals, and you could come and use them<br />
in your spare time.”<br />
Returning home, Maughan saw an opportunity to shift the culture<br />
to make pottery available to more people through affordable<br />
classes and practice space. “Pottery has always been an inaccessible<br />
craft because it requires you to have the right materials and<br />
someone to fire your work and you also have to understand what<br />
temperature to fire your clay at, and how to make the glaze, etc.<br />
So it has to be curated for you,” she says. “I’d been to a community<br />
college class in Hackney and got two hours a week access<br />
which wasn’t really enough because it takes 10,000 hours to master<br />
something. What you need is to be able to come and go as you<br />
please. Also clay dries in a very specific way, so you need the freedom<br />
to come and check on it.”<br />
The first Turning Earth opened in Hoxton in 2013, operating on a<br />
gym-membership-style pay per month scheme where people had<br />
flexible access up to <strong>15</strong> hours a week with shelf space to store their<br />
materials and projects, as well as access to classes. As the first ceramics<br />
studio of its kind, interest was high from the start, as Maughan<br />
explains. “That was the very first time that it had been done in the<br />
UK. And it was immediately, crazily popular. We quickly got to capacity<br />
which is about 200 users a month, and we ran about seven classes.”<br />
Four years later, Turning E10 opened in Leyton, occupying over<br />
8,000 sq ft of the top floor of an old hardware factory. Today, as<br />
we chat, Maughan is excited about the next chapter in the Turning<br />
Earth story. It’s the first week in January and she’s preparing<br />
to open the doors to new students and members at a brand new<br />
space - Turning Earth N22, based in the Crawley Road industrial estate.<br />
“When I first came back from the US, east London seemed<br />
like the safest place to open up, which turned out to be true. But<br />
I’m from Haringey and I live here, and now enough time has passed<br />
and ceramics is now so ingrained that it seemed the right time to<br />
take a punt and open a large ceramics centre here.” The centre was<br />
opened by Keith Brymer Jones (The Great Pottery Throw Down) and<br />
Mayor of Haringey Adam Jogee in December 2021.<br />
Over in Highgate, artist couple Basil Olton and Veronika Seifert<br />
teach fine art and ceramics courses for children and adults at Highgate<br />
Art School, which came out of their studio HalfaDozen in a shop<br />
on Archway Road - where passersby can see the artistic processes<br />
at work. Basil explains: “The idea of HalfaDozen studio was breaking<br />
that link with the art and process, so the process of making isn’t hidden<br />
because it’s in a shop front - and the art school is on the corner.”<br />
The pair have worked locally for over ten years. They took over<br />
the lease for the studio building in 2016, then opened Highgate Art<br />
School next door in 2018. The studio offers membership at different<br />
price points for artists of all disciplines, and the art school teach-<br />
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