Thames Barrier park cafe Redesign
Having signed a 6 year lease, our plan was to set up our first community café/shop/space in Thames Barrier Park (Newham). Our ambitious model was to have a space that connected community, commerce and creativity, where profits from selling food, homewares and from our events, would then used be to self fund community projects for under-represented groups.
Within a couple of months of setting up our CIC, Covid hit, which totally stalled an already challenging project. Suddenly everything stopped, all building work, the whole hospitality industry shut down and we were left with a huge amount of passion to create change, but no longer feeling at home in a space far from our Hackney community in need of support.
Due to lockdown, our directors made the decision of focusing on responding to needs of our local communities, and out of this was born an emergency Food Response making 40,000 culturally diverse meals.
What was meant as a short-term emergency project to a momentary global crisis, soon developed into something beautiful, something that kept on growing, bringing a much needed sense of purpose to cater for our Hackney community amongst all the uncertainty and fear.
Having crowdfunded, re-designed and overseen the renovations of the cafe, we are happy to say it’s now being run by a like minded community organisation, whilst we grow in Hackney.
