Humans Of Lambeth (part II)

Our Humans Of Lambeth series celebrates the individuals behind the Lambeth Fringe Festival. In the second part of our series we meet Roger Hartley (along with Sid Vicious the wheelie bin), from The Bureau Of Silly Ideas, one of our brilliant venues.

“At The Bureau Of Silly Ideas and Club Silly, we’re the antithesis of all the other clubs that keep popping up around the place that are very expensive to be members of - this one, it’s free membership… you still get grassroots access into making big things. We worked out we're the last place in central London where you can make something big. And that's probably true.”

“A disruption on the street - the audience is more interesting than if they’ve paid to come and see a ticketed show. Because you've got a wide cross-section of society and a common bond of place. I stopped working in theatre, which I’d first run away from school to do, because I didn’t like the audience. Most shows have political intent or soft messaging, but you're preaching to the converted. You're not actually making any change. It becomes this self-congratulatory pat on the head - ‘aren’t we all brilliant and we all think the same’- and it’s predominantly middle class, rich white people watching it. What’s the f**king point? When you take a wheelie bin into a community and start moving it around, you’ll end up with an audience. They’re watching it. They didn’t buy a ticket. They didn’t decide that theatre was for them. But there they are - laughing, connecting, reacting. That’s the power of public art. You’re taking the theatre to the people, not asking the people to come to the theatre.”

“Lambeth’s amazing. I moved here as a young punk in the early eighties. I chose Lambeth because I’d read that it had got an elected gay lesbian Jew called Linda Bellos, and it had a good squat scene and all the rest of it. So that was my magnet. It’s that ability to have an elected person and the, you know, the removal of barriers that are caused through class and race and all the rest of it. Lambeth sort of celebrates that on one level.”

“You had the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which was the big place of celebration of performing arts when they were banned on the north side of the river, and how that all escalated. Philip Astley started circus as we know it in Lambeth. Dan Leno used to live here - he was Old Mother Hubbard, one of the most celebrated vaudeville  acts. Charlie Chaplin was born around the corner in Kennington. Buffalo Bill used to live in Brixton when he was touring with Geronimo. Then you also have the first market street to be lit by electrical lights - Electric Avenue. You’ve got a mixture of all those sort of outdoor celebratory cultures - from circus to carnival with the West Indian community coming in. It just makes itself. You’ve also got one of the very, very first ever public museums - it was called the Lambeth Ark. Samuel Pepys wrote about it: ‘The Lambeth Ark, well worth a visit, quite close to London.’”

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Do you want me to talk more about how brilliant Lambeth is?!”

Humans Of Lambeth is put together by Beatrice Updegraff for Mobius Industries - stay tuned to see who is featured in Part III...