Pavement Artist
Steve Wheen is crouched by the side of a street in Bethnal Green, pouring mud into a particularly large pothole. He fastidiously pats the soil flat and takes out the tools he needs to finish the job: a few brightly coloured flowers.
Meet the Pothole Gardener , the 35-year-old Australian on a one-man quest to brighten up the streets by planting miniature gardens in the unloved nooks and crannies of London’s roads.
“I came up with the idea during university,” Steve says. “I love gardening but I didn’t have a garden myself, so I was inspired by guerrilla gardening to go out on the streets.”
Steve’s blog has received hundreds of thousands of hits from all over the world; fans even send him toys for his gardens, which replicate everything from doll-sized tennis courts to miniature playgrounds. But not everyone is charmed by the tiny plots.
“People have very strong reactions,” he admits. “I’ve had people tell me it’s a waste of time,especially with gardens in the middle of the road.” But Steve isn’t bothered by the fact that a cartyre could wipe out his creations at any moment. “I’ve seen one run over by a delivery van right outside my house,” he shrugs, “…while I was planting it.”
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Words & photography Zing Tsjeng
Pay It Forward
The state is shrinking. But as the rollback of government funding carries on apace, the self-deluding aesthetic of the so-called ‘Big Society’ struggles to emerge in the void.
In economic environments like this it’s all too often the vulnerable who suffer the hardest – and the longest. But crisis often presents opportunities. All over the country, small groups of committed individuals have been filling the gaps between government projections and street-level realities for decades. And now that the disconnect is widening, they have become more important and energetic than ever.
One such organisation is Southside in Bath. Launched 20 years ago, this social enterprise – located on an island of social ills in a sea of relative economic prosperity – is a prime example of how, even in the darkest of times, passion can burn on through fiscal meltdown.
“All my life I’ve been seen in black and white,” says Gary Hoskins. “Southside sees me in colour.”
Gary, his wife Tara and their three boys under the age of six are typical of the types of families that have been empowered by Southside’s dynamic approach.
“I was brought up in care and suffered abuse all my life,” he says. “I’ve been in and out of secure units and prison for years. Our lives have been made to fit into boxes on bits of paper. Southside has given me a chance to begin to be the best that I can possibly be.”
“This is key to what we do,” says Southside’s founding director Penny McKissock. “Tara and
Gary have life experiences to pass on to other members of their community who are suffering from similar problems to the ones that they have challenged. Southside provides the hands-on help to get them to a place where they are able to help themselves.”
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Words & Photography Michael Fordham
Bank Robbers
Peer-to-peer funding does what it says on the tin, cutting out the banks and allowing people to lend or donate money to others. We meet the leading lights of this brave new financial world.
Giles Andrews CEO, Zopa
By matching people who want to borrow money with people who want to do something with their savings, Zopa offers both sides a better rate than they’d get from a bank.
How do you offer better rates than banks?
There’s a thing called the ‘bank spread’, which is the difference between what the banks pay their savers and what they charge their borrowers. Bank spreads have been widening dramatically since the credit crisis, as interest rates have plummeted while borrowing rates have gone up. Our job is simply to exist within that bank spread.
Have you noticed a rise in popularity as attitudes towards banks have changed?
Pre-credit crisis, people didn’t really like banks but they sort of tolerated them. Since the credit crisis two things have happened: one, the bank spread has widened, so our job has become easier. But people’s attitudes towards banks have also changed – it’s gone from a benign dislike to a more malignant dislike.
That must be good news for you.
We’re delighted that people say nice things about us. But the challenge of a business like ours is not so much the quality of the press we get. If you go searching for Zopa you’ll find lots of nice things about us, but we get a bit drowned out by the financial services noise. That’s something you can only change by massive investment in marketing, or by time and word of mouth. We won’t pay for marketing because we don’t have the budget for it, so it’s a patience game really.
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Interview Steven Watson
Illustration Matthew Hams
Social Stories
Dave Eggers likes to give back. In the preface to his best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he personally offered $5 to the first 200 readers who sent in a proof of purchase and a photo of them reading the book, “or putting it to better use”. He established a tutoring centre for kids – complete with a pirate supply store (to satisfy retail zoning). He’s set up foundations for the subjects of his books: What is the What about Sudanese refugee Valentino Deng and Zeitoun about New Orleans resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Oh, and he also created Voice of Witness, a social justice oral history project. But what’s behind all his giving?
What led you to start your first tutoring centre, 826 Valencia?
It wasn’t really complicated. I knew a lot of teachers who said their students could use one-on-one tutoring help, so we opened a centre where they could get that help. After that, 826 Valencia grew in a hundred unexpected ways. But it started with a pretty simple idea: kids, tutors, tables, chairs.
The tutoring centres have expanded across the US, with storefronts such as a pirate supply store, a time travel mart and a superhero supply company. How important is a sense of fun?
If you’re a kid, and you’re falling behind in school, the last thing you want to do is go to some after-school centre called, say, ‘Centre for Kids Who Are Falling Behind’. We find that if you set up the centre as a fun place, a strange place, and one where kids are learning at all kinds of levels – even advanced levels – then you eliminate the stigma, and kids come happily streaming in.
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Interview D’Arcy Doran
Tech trends to smile about
Alli Mooney, Head of Trends & Insights at Google, shares some happy ways to use tech in 2012.
Get Smarter
Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s outdated. The free exchange of knowledge is at an all-time high. You can get top-notch tutorials from Khan Academy on YouTube and learn to code (while having fun) with Codecademy . We’re also seeing some cool uses of Google+ Hangouts for education; the Social Skillet is a cooking school held via videoconference.
Outsource Your Chores
Remember the days when your neighbour would run errands for you? Me neither. But here in the US, community-powered sites like Fetchmob , TaskRabbit and Zaarly are using the web to make peer-to-peer transactions smarter, simpler and safer. You can quickly hire someone to do whatever you don’t have time for – pick up your groceries, book your holiday or clean your garage. It’s the 1950s, digital-style.
Listen Up
Hear that? Sound is the next big thing in digital. Audio recognition technology is driving not just cool, but immensely useful innovations: Siri is your personal assistant, Google Translate lets your mobile speak in another language for you, and SoundCloud has a huge network of sound creators sharing music and audio.
Get Fast Cash
The time has come to ditch your wallet. Google Wallet , which lets you pay with your smartphone via Near Field Communication (NFC), is set to come to the UK this year, while start-ups like Venmo are making it easier to settle debts, and Square , which turns your phone into a credit card machine, makes more shops as efficient as the Apple Store.
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Words Alli Mooney
