A wooden finger on Peckham’s creative pulse

The memories of the last moments of Damilola Taylor caught on CCTV a few months after the opening of Peckham Library that is seen behind him are only just beginning to fade.

The award-winning Will Alsop library which opened ten years ago, a few months before Damilola’s death, is now firmly at the heart of the community, and with the Peckham Pulse leisure centre now next door, Peckham Square with its regular farmers’ markets has become a healing focus.

But in Alsop’s plan there had been another building that he called the Peckham Pier, a reference to when the Grand Surrey Canal came here, and it was to be an all-purpose community centre. Funding wouldn’t run to it, and though the space was prepared the idea was abandoned.

Until three years ago, however, and next month the Peckham Pier is realised under the new name of Peckham Space, to bring art into one of the most troubled communities in the country, and to bring art out in that community as well.

The initiative for Peckham Space was originally that of the Camberwell College of Art, part of the University of the Arts and a few yards along Peckham Road, which has gone into partnership with Southwark Council to create somewhere to connect art, the people and the place through commissions, exhibitions and events.

“Camberwell has students coming from all over England, and they were aware that very few were coming from the Peckham communities, so they wanted to find a way of encouraging young people here to discover an interest in art, apply for the college and maybe even follow a career as an artist” says Emily Druiff, Peckham Space’s director.

The opening on June 11 will be something of a tribute to her. Trained at Camberwell and Goldsmiths Colleges, she had been a freelance curator when she was given the task of reviving the Alsop idea three years ago, and with only a single assistant she has pushed the project through with activities and events, often in collaboration with Peckham schools.

In particular she has worked with the Harris Academy, a secondary school serving the North Peckham Estate where Damilola and the school where he would have gone. “We’re pretty pleased with ourselves – not only have we got students from the academy to apply to Camberwell, three of them have been accepted for the foundation course, the first time” she says.

Peckham Space is jointly funded by the college, by Southwark Council and ACE, and is costing a very modest £300,000. Designed by Penson, the vivid green of the angular structure might disguise the fact that it is being built entirely from treated wood – less expensive than other materials, but hardy and easily maintained.

“It’s here for people to discover art and to live with it” Druiff says “and we know that there will be a positive response because of how people have taken to the work we’ve already been doing”.

Because Peckham Space has been operating without its building since Druiff launched it in 2008 with a series of commissions, Peckham’s communities are already familiar with it, and it will get more so with what might seem quirky public events, “with a whole new approach to commissioning, making and exhibiting art”.

Peckham Peacocks is the launching event for Saturday shoppers on June 12, devised by local artist Rachel House, and will involve a rally of mobility scooters, and the Red Wheelies scooter formation team.

Peckham Space opens with a group exhibition by Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Clegg and Guttman, FREEE and Southwark TV, a community media venture for which the artists have worked with public organisations to produce public art.

Lopez de la Torre has made two films exploring the notion of neighbourhood, and helping secondary school children make their own film about their neighbourhoods and the young people that live there.

Inspired by William Blake’s vision of Peckham Rye of two centuries ago, FREEE, a Peckham-based collective of three artists, have asked nearby shopkeepers to imagine their businesses in a Peckham of the future.

Clegg and Guttmann have made a five-sided column with five sections which each revolve, and he public are being asked to chalk a human shape on each of the surface, which then swivel to make surreal figures.

Southwark TV are showing films in Peckham Space they have made with year ten students from the Harris Academy.

“It’s whole ethos we want to engage people in by using artists” says Druiff. “I’m passionate about art placed in the community context, and seeing what it can do.”