Planning Pub 01 : 18.01.2017 – A New Year starts at the Lord Nelson

The Lord Nelson on the Old Kent Road hosted our first Planning Pub evening.

Over the last few weeks the Weeklies have been soul searching. We’ve been meeting consistently for over 2 years but recently we’ve struggled to find a shared agenda or purpose. Last week we conducted a kind of group therapy, asking each other what draws a ragged group of individuals together to a cold church hall on a wintery Wednesday night and what keeps us coming?
Armed with a pint of lager (only £3.20!!), Nobby’s nuts, a roll of brown paper and colourful sharpies, we set about debating the following.
– What motivates us as individuals and keeps us coming back for more?
– Should the focus of the Weeklies shift locality for the next few months and use its energies and skills to support the Livesey Exchange?
– If we shift our focus away from Rye Lane and more to the Old Kent Road have we lost the motivation of locality?
– What/why do we produce and who are our audience?
– Will we ever finish the 8 magazines?
By the end of pint No.2, the world started to make a bit more sense (beware, this was pre-inauguration!). Our main focus for the next few months will be working towards an LFA event in June responding to the theme Memory. The Livesey Exchange and surrounding area would feature heavily but that we should reach out and form collaborations with the wider OKR communities. Also, to feed into the event and keep up momentum, we’ll be producing a number of small publications exploring Memory.