Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art opens as Justice for Cleaners wins victory

The Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art is a new public gallery on the Goldsmiths campus in  New Cross (entrance via St James SE14). It is located in part of  the former Laurie Grove Bathhouse, including the water tower for the swimming pool which closed in 1991 (see history here) 

The opening exhibition features the work of Argentine-born artist Mika Rottenberg, much of it film-based. If the idea of contemporary video art sounds daunting, I recommend going to see this colourful and very accessible show. Some of it would be great for kids - one film shows long nosed men sneezing out rabbits - but it also poses deeper questions, particularly about women's work in the global economy. Several of the film pieces feature women engaged in obscure labours. There are cute rabbits assembled from pearly beads....

A woman is seen crushing coloured light bulbs, in the process creating a brittle collage.

 It is not always clear what the seemingly meaningless work is for, but somewhere we imagine a market is being fed. 

Of course there often seems to be a contradiction between the radical/critical rhetoric of some of the contemporary art world and its actual economy of wealthy collectors, corporate sponsors and poorly paid gallery staff. This contradiction played out at the opening of the new gallery on 7th September  when the Goldsmiths Justice for Cleaners campaign protested against Goldsmiths continuing to outsource its cleaning to the private company ISS. The general demand that cleaners should enjoy similar employment terms to directly employed staff was given additional impetus over the summer with a restructure of shifts threatening a further deterioration in conditions for cleaners at Goldsmiths.

A banner asked 'Who Keeps the Cube White?'

 Following the protests,  Goldsmiths last week announced its intention to end the outsourcing of cleaning - a great victory though the campaign has warned that some cleaners face hardship and job losses between now and the end of the contract. They have set up a hardship fund, saying : 'Goldsmiths management have recently announced that they will be bringing cleaning staff in-house after a six month transition period. However under the current management of outsourcing company ISS, at least 20 workers have been unable to return to work for a month following a shift pattern restructure. This has left many with crippling financial losses. A number of these workers are now facing or have already faced dismissal'.

Laurie Grove Baths event at Goldsmiths

An interesting event coming up tomorrow night (Thursday 15 June 2017, 5:30 to 8:30)  at Goldsmiths focused on the Laurie Grove Baths. This building hosted swimming pools and public washhouses for a hundred years or so before it closed in 1991 and was taken over by Goldsmiths, for among other things, artist studio space. I've written about its history here before. More recently I came across this tragic episode-

'Dives To Death In Baths

Large crowds at Laurie Grove Baths, New Cross, London, saw Arthur William Burgess, 29, of Biggin Hill, Kent, dive to his death. Burgess climbed to the top diving board, piunged into 6ft. of water and struck his head on the bottom. Mr. A. J. Gould, baths attendant, of Deptford, dived fully clothed and brought Burgess to the surface. Artificial respiration was administered, but Burgess was dead when he was examined at hospital in Deptford' (The Newcastle Sun, New South Wales, 18 Nov 1952)

.

Here's the details of this week's event:

'Slippages and Water Matters: Inheritances of the Laurie Grove Baths

Slippages and Water Matters is an exhibition opening with panel discussion followed by drinks and snacks. It marks the launch of Water Cultures - a series of public work on the urban sociology of water, organised by the Centre for Urban and Community Research. Slippages is an exhibition co-curated by the Feminist Methods Masterclass. It features work by Katerina Athanasopoulou, Yani B, Ama Josephine Budge, Hari Byles, Clare Daly, Chloe Turner, and Santiago Rivas.


Over the years the Laurie Grove Baths has been used as a place for washing, swimming, dancing, playing music, wrestling, boxing, bowling, fine art, and urban research. In this exhibition we immerse ourselves in work which exposes and explores slippages; institutional, emotional, social, historic. This collection of collaborative work speaks about the slippery qualities of inheritances such as these, and the ways that humans, non-humans, materials and things have occupied, subverted and transformed them. How do we continue to do so?


Exploring topics from gender, to mental health, ecologies, colonial legacies,  knowledge production, graffiti, and more, we occupy toilets, waiting rooms, and stairwells. The panel discussion will feature:

- Les Back, talking about his work on the local history of The Baths;
- Sophie Watson, discussing her research elsewhere in London on water as material for public space, 
- Alison Rooke in conversation with the authors of the installations.


The event will be followed by drinks upstairs in the Council Room.


Water Cultures is a series of collaborative public work, organised and supported by CUCR on the urban sociology of water'.


The event will take place in  Laurie Grove Baths, 21 Laurie Grove, London SE14 6NH.

credit : Francisco Calafate-Faria

Deptford Citizen

The Deptford Citizen was a local paper published on a monthly basis from October 1931 to September 1939.

It was launched by Deptford Labour Party (with its HQ at 435 New Cross Road) and the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, so its content was a mixture of socialist politics and adverts for co-op products. For instance, the co-op had its own cocoa works in Luton so there were adverts for 'Lutona Cocoa'.


One of the striking features is the listings which give a sense of the importance of the labour movement in local life at the time. For instance the first issue tells us that the local LP had six women's sections, and there were also six local co-operative guilds: Brockley Cross Women's, Brockley Men's, Deptford Women's, Deptford and New Cross Men's, New Cross Women's and Hatcham Men's. All of these groups were meeting on a weekly basis at venues including Hatcham Liberal Club, the Primitive Methodist Mission Hall in Besson Street and St Georges Hall in Shardeloes Road.

There was a Labour Party choir, a football team, a sports club, a swimming club and dances at Laurie Grove. One such event advertised in February 1932 featured Vic Filmer's Mitre Club Orchestra - Filmer was a well-known jazz band leader.


Free legal advice was provided at 435 New Cross Road by Mr. L. Silkin, 'Poor Man's Lawyer'. I assume this was Lewis Silkin, a solicitor who became Labour MP for Peckham in 1936 (his sons Sam and John also became Labour MPs). There were also summer outings - in 1933, Deptford Labour Party took 1800 children on a trip to Epsom Downs.

Reading it with historical hindsight it is sad tracing the drift through recession, the rise of fascism in Europe and on towards war. The paper seemed to have been to the left of the Labour Party leadership, with a sharp socialist analysis of events. An article in December 1931 denounced the coalition national government -which included national Labour leaders like Ramsay MacDonald - as 'a purely class government masquerading as "national" but really "capitalist"'. In April of the following year a headline read 'Capitalism causes war and poverty.'

As early as May 1933 the paper was warning that 'Hitler's fiends use mass murder and torture to smash German labour movement'. Bear in mind that in the 1930s both Lewisham Conservative MPs were cosying up to Hitler and Mussolini.

A report from the Spanish civil war in June 1937 warned prophetically 'Guernica in April 1937 may be London in April 1938'. And indeed by 1940 the air raids on Guernica were being repeated in Deptford and across the UK. With the outbreak of World War Two, Deptford Citizen came to an end.

There is a full set of Deptford Citizen on microfilm in Lewisham local studies centre, upstairs in the main Lewisham library.

The History and Future of Laurie Grove Baths

The recent Goldsmiths graduate art show provided a rare opportunity for the public to explore the grandeur of Laurie Grove Baths in New Cross.

As stated in a recent planning application (of which more later)'The swimming baths, slipper baths and laundries were designed in 1895-98 by Thomas Dinwiddy, a local architect and commissioned by the Vestry Board of St Paul’s Deptford (the precursor to the Borough of Deptford) under the Public Baths and Wash-Houses Act 1846 following the rapid population growth in the area since 1862, which is illustrated in the map extracts opposite. The building is of Jacobean style with separate entrances, originally for men and women leading to two main pools housed in roof lit double height spaces, each with changing cubicles around the perimeter and balconies above. The pools closed in 1991 before being taken over by Goldsmiths, University of London in 1994'.


Today the building is used for art studio space, but the original features of the baths are intact. Indeed the students are each allocated one of the old changing cubicles to store their gear in.


The building has rich history. The baths could be boarded up for dances and concerts. In 1936, the South East London Dance Band Championship was held there with Black American jazz musician Benny Carter present as a judge - though he declined requests to play 'on account of being much out of practice and not having his instruments with him' (Melody Maker, 11 April 1936). US rock’n’roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis played there in 1964.

In the early 1950s, at at time when black people were banned from many pubs and clubs in the area, the pioneering Anglo-Caribbean Association (which fought against the colour bar) held some of its events there.


In 1932, the baths hosted unemployed demonstrators. 130 marchers from Kent taking part in a national hunger march arrived in Deptford 'accompanied by police. Two thousand unemployed met them at Woolwich, and marched with band playing to Deptford Town Hall'. The marchers ‘all wearing red rosettes in their caps’ were put up at the Borough Hall, Laurie Grove, being given dinner, a mattress for the night and free use of the public baths. The next morning they 'joined the main body of unemployed at the Broadway and, nearly 2,000 strong, set off for Hyde Park, headed by a drum and fife band. They marched along Queen’s Road and Peckham Road, accompanied by a large force of foot police, several mounted police, and preceded by men with collection boxes’ (South London Press, 28 October 1932).


The building even has its own ghost legend: 'Peter Powers grew up in the baths, his father was the last official manager, and he lived in a small flat in the building between 1969-87... Peter told us that during the eighteen years that his father managed the baths numerous members of the public - even several police officers - witnessed strange phenomena. Almost always at night, these included lights coming on suddenly, doors opening or slamming for no reason. The said 'poltergeist' was affectionately known as 'Charlie' because he was given to whistling the tune 'Charleston.' Three members of staff left because of Charlie's antics, two without giving notice. We've not seen anything of Charlie but as Peter has told us his antics were usually confined to night time and Sundays' (Goldsmiths history of Laurie Grove Baths).

Old picture of pre-Goldsmiths swimming pool:




The baths are recalled in 'Sundays we wore white', Eileen Elias' reminiscences about a New Cross childhood before and during the First World War. As a pupil at Aske's Girls' School she went swimming there regularly, but didn't have very fond memories: 'The local Baths at Laurie Grove were within walking distance of our school. They were huge ugly buildings, with forbidding marble portals, through which we went, in an orderly queue, sniffing the peculiar smell of chlorine. I was wary of the Baths. I didn't like the muffled shouting and screaming that you heard on the way to the changing cubicles; I didn't like the claustrophobic feeling of undressing on slippery wet duckboards in a little wooden cubicle with curtains over a stable-door; most of all I didn't like the first moment of coming out onto the tiled verge and catching a glimpse of that expanse of water below, grey-green and faintly rippling , and cold, cold, cold like the North Sea'. It's interesting that in 1978 she saw the buildings as ugly, as many people regarded Victorian buildings in the post-WW2 period.




The water for the baths was pumped from its own well, and held in a storage tank at the top of the building. Last weeks this was opened to the public to raise awareness of the plan by Goldsmiths to turn it into a permanent art gallery space. Planning permission has already been secured (see the planning document, which has lots of interesting background information about the building), but the funds haven't been.

The water tower today (above) and as it might look if it is converted to a gallery (below):


The baths were not just a place to swim, but a place to wash at a time when many people didn't have running hot water in their homes. Up in the water tower, there is a roller mechanism which is believed to have been part of the system to wash and dry the large numbers of towels used in the baths.

Inside the water tank:


I haven't really done justice here to the work in the exhibition, suffice it to say that much of it was excellent. I was particularly struck by Smoke, an installation by Eun Hye Shim