I have a weekend habit. I don’t know why weekends feel like free time but at the weekend iIfeel free to do my own thing. So I have got into the habit of doing my Street Daft at the weekend. I use the name Estranged Anfield, because I have found that the police will arrest a yob with a can of spray paint, but be thoroughly encouraging if you’re making a stand for your community. I can’t call it Street Art, because it’s so far below the standards set by true street artists, who are talented and awesome, and seen by millions. I just do odd daft little things that make me smile.
A couple of weekends ago, I made a rough scale model of Stonehenge, about eight feet across, and installed it on the grass in front of the latest street to be demolished. It was, not that anyone knew who saw it, called English Heritage, because the houses being demolished are full of history, full of human stories, but they are deemed worthless, unlike a pile of stones on Salisbury Plain.
But this weekend, i had printer ink and black card, so I decided to make some bats to hang in the trees on the rec, and fairies to dance along the grass verges. And then I made up a leaflet about the Anfield Bat, which I’m going to put through the doors of the houses facing onto the rec, and give to some teachers at the new school. On the face of it, the leaflets are perfectly innocent, like something you’d see on the noticeboard outside a village church, cute and thoroughly middle class.
But the section where Donald the Anfield Bat introduces himself has suggestions on how to help him, including sending an email to the council, to ask them to delay the demolition. The link to do that is Liverpool council website’s “report antisocial behaviour” interface. What could be more antisocial than demolishing family homes and destroying our community?
And I made some posters. The chippies and offies round here have an endless cycle of posters in their windows, advertising circuses and funfairs, so i’m going to ask them to put up my fliers, which advertise Anfield.
It’s not a real campaign, just a weekend hobby. A tatty, cheap response to the neglect I see all around me in Anfield. It’s something I ve learned from my time at Homebaked – sit around watching the place go to hell, or do something positive. It may not help, it may come to nothing, it may have consequences I didn’t predict, but it’s better than doing nothing. I love to think the children going to the new school, a spaceship that’s landed in the middle of the demolition zone, will see little bits of magic in the tragedy.
