Benhill press residency, 2018

In 2018 as part of my MA at Goldsmiths College, I conducted a series of mini-residencies to explore situated design practice. The residencies took place in Rugeley, a midlands ex-mining town with a deserted high street (save a few oat cake, charity and pound shops) overshadowed by an Amazon warehouse.

Economic and infrastructural circumstances defined Rugeley’s sense of identity for generations due to its rich geology and situation - coal, electricity, and most recently consumerism. Amazon, with its promises of employment, and fulfilment (for who?) sits on the outskirts of the town, an enormous monolithic warehouse known locally as the ’purple cloud’.

I arranged a residency in Rugeley with a local printing press. Benhill Press is located in the centre of the town, in a building that looks a bit dishevelled and abandoned. Inside the building, a wealth of printing history sat cloaked in dust, cared for by the community of people working at the press. A 19th Century letterpress and an extensive archive of printing plates dating back generations became my focus, and I started to craft collages in response to conversations and my observations of the town.

In conversations I unearthed uncomfortable xenophobic narratives towards Amazon employees from Rugeley residents, mingling in a pervasive nostalgia towards a golden past of working class heroism. Both narratives ultimately cloaking the dismal reality of a town in the state of being forgotten. All this told the story of the complex, uncomfortable socio-political reality of Britain in 2017.

I began collaging and producing narratives through my work, informed by a sense that if anything I had to give Rugeley a political alternative that didn’t take the form of racism, xenophobia, and nostalgia.

I produced a series of prints that were nostalgic but utopian, calling for a future where class justice sat hand in hand with economic revival and hope. By hand-producing propaganda in a mechanical printing press, I intentionally referenced revolutionary printing practices throughout political history (Paris 1968, Camden 1977). My collages contained calls for the UBI (Universal Basic Income) and Automate Everything. The messages feature alongside found images of a post-war era play park: play, leisure, prosperity and the lost-progress of the post-war period (still in living memory), working with but distorting and elevating the nostalgia I encountered in everyday conversations. These acronyms, images and words use nostalgia to redirect us towards a new future. Was there a place for this future in Rugeley, a town so wedded to its past?

I presented my prints and the ideas they contained to the community in the form of a screen-printing workshop pop-up shop. I rented a shop in the town centre and invited the community to participate in screen printing teatowels using the images I had made in Benhill Press. The shop became a forum for political conversation and the exchange of ideas, a translation of the printing presses of history to the present day. No money was exchanged. It was a place where the currency was the labour of the participants.

On closing the door to the shop, having shared many cups of tea, glasses of beer and conversations with the residents of Rugeley, I knew that this small drop in the political activity of Rugeley was going to disappear beneath the rubble of history. Behind the crumbling barricades of Rugeley, a future exists, but to what and who’s end?