Surge Coop participated in the Newham Heritage Month this year with ‘The bend in the River is my Home’. Check out Surge’s film; ‘From dawn until dusk’, a guide to making a home for lacewings, ‘Then and Now’ historic photos of Channelsea, ‘Dandelion Salve’; a film on making foraged dandelion hand cream, An ear to the river; a Channelsea soundscape and Bollards of Bow Creek, all on the Newham Heritage Month website.
Surge Coop’s purpose is to reanimate Bow Creek with affordable co-operatively run moorings, bringing historic wharves back into use, nurturing the biodiversity of the area and building lasting community links on land and water.
As part of this, at our first site on the Channelsea River we have been engaging with the local community with a variety of events and river clean ups.
This year we are continuing with a series of creative events and workshops under the banner ‘The Bend in the River is my Home‘. With these we hope to share with others our vision and love of engaging with the arts and the environment: ultimately enriching our ties to each other and the landscape.
Through our work we always return to the ’Six R’s’. The first three we all know well – reduce, reuse, recycle – and underpin all our daily activities at Surge, inspiring us to think about what we can use around us to create safe habitats for ourselves and others of all kinds. And the second three – resilience, relinquishment and restoration – are perhaps less well known, and encourage us to think about how can we create resilience in the structures we care about, relinquish actions that cause harm, and restore knowledge we may have forgotten from the past to help us move forward into a brighter future.