Common Place Conversation
March 2006

BEGINNINGS

#1 So here we are, March 28th, 2006. Let's start from the top. How did The Common Place (henceforth TCP) come to be? What's its early history?
#2 I first remember it being talked about in the pub after a Leeds ARC meeting.
#1 Had it not always been talked about in Leeds ARC, about getting a space?
#2 Don't remember.
#1 It came out of ASPIRE, out of a desire to do more aspires, or have a permanent ASPIRE, for Earth First to have a base, for Leeds Bradford Indymedia to have a base, to provide a focus for actions in Leeds.
Leeds ARC used to meet in a Church, but the first meeting was in the Adelphi (Pub) and we had pizza. Vegan pizza, massive invite with 40 people coming. Back in February 2004.
All Yeah, there were plenty of pizza evenings.
#2 Should we not give an overview of what Leeds ARC did, given that it was one of the main groups that TCP came out of, like a description of the kind of activism that the groups that put a lot of early input into establishing TCP were doing? It's an interesting thing - there were asylum seeker actions, there was the anti-gentrification action on Leeds Market, there was the Menwith Hill blockade. Now these issues have been taken up by smaller groups.
#1 Its interesting how Leeds ARC was a broader campaigning group which has now kind of broken up into smaller campaign groups.
#3 TCP isn't a Leeds ARC project though, is it.
#2 TCP destroyed Leeds ARC.
#1 So there was the launch at the Church where about 50 people came when the idea of a social centre first came up.
#3 Around about the end of November 2004 there was a meeting, when we thought that we had that building round the corner, and we were waiting for the contracts - and they never arrived. The meeting was set saying that the building was soon going to be available, and we wanted to know what everybody wanted to do. So we all wrote down our crazy ideas on a board, saying that we wanted to do this and that, and then the building never came through.
#4 So what happened?
#2 There was a big one before that where we were talking about the Italian model of what a social centre is, and that we shouldn't call ours a social centre because it was nothing like that.
#5 I first got involved at a meeting at the café in Trinity church on Boar Lane, I don't remember there being any pizza but, there were lots of people and everyone went round saying what they wanted - a swimming pool, good coffee (they got their wish finally). After that we started to have regular meetings at Holy Trinity.
#2 Yes, gradually people dropped off, fewer and fewer people came; I remember when there were just a few people each week at one point.
#1 Did we have the big pizza launch and then have lots of little meetings after that?
#2 There was a big call out - May Day people, Leeds ARC people, ASPIRE people etc., and then we had weekly meetings and agreed on consensus decision making, but it kept getting bogged down every time so and so turned up, which was every time until K or B kicked them out.
#1 There was a formal mechanism used to kick people out, right?
#5 Basically what happened was that a building came up round the corner, and we went to see a solicitor about it and this guy was really out of order, a real pain in the arse. I remember you saying 'This is out of order, we've got get rid of him, he's a f'kin trouble maker.', and I remember me going 'No, no, no, we've got to overcome these obstacles.' Everybody kept falling like dominoes - I had a go at him first, then someone else was like 'No, no, no, we've got to be able to incorporate these people.', and then a couple of weeks later she was wanting me to nail him up against the wall.
#1 And then that building fell through. One day he (the landlord) just gave it to the photography people who have got it now, they offered him 15 even though we had agreed 12 with him. That was December 2004, after that we had a massive scour of the city centre, me Tash & Nick - a six hour trawl to look for buildings.
#3 Including this building.
#2 To get an idea of the timescale, in order to get to that point, it was about six months that that process took. Remember when we first looked at that building (the one that fell trough), It was in May on my birthday, 2004.
#1 In that six months we'd done things like set up a limited company, Leeds Social Centre Limited, a few of us became directors, we set up a bank account with Unity Trust Bank.
#2 We wrote the initial proposal to Dissent! to get the initial funding.
#1 Over the summer 2 of us went to the Manchester meeting to get the 10 grand; that got whacked in the bank about October.
#4 Was that meeting in September?
#5 Yeah, we should talk about that because it is really interesting in relation to social centres. It was like a bidding war at the beginning really; there were some really well prepared people, like from Glasgow, who had put loads of work in and had formal files together and who went away and pissed it all (the money) up the wall or something.
#2 But it was known that there was about 70 grand available, right?
#5 Yeah, there were seven bids and people thought that the most organised bids would get the money, but at the meeting we all decided to collectivise, take the money off them, collectivise it and then however many social centres there were you'd get that money, so it didn't limit it to seven things. I think there were just over seven, but as it turned out there weren't that many people who had got it together to open a social centre and so some of the ten grands went on other stuff.
#1 When was that then?
#3 It must have been about May.
#2 The first big Dissent! meeting was in early April, and then after that we wrote the proposal for Dissent!, which was then taken down by you lot.

FINDING A BUILDING

#6 The first building you went to look at, was that the old Big Issue building?
#3 No, the Kay building.
#2 We spent some time looking at alternative buildings like arches and storage units.
#3 Damp, dingy, no electricity, no water, lights, anything.
#5 Then there was the church - Salem.
#3 Arches - terrible buildings but we were really excited by them.
#4 That was in December that you were looking at all these buildings?
#1 Yeah, and then I remember looking through the letterbox of this place, saw that it was empty, cycled back to work, did a land registry search straight away and it came up with Mr Choudary. I gave the number to Tash and she rang him up and he said (in mock Indian sub-continent British English accent) 'Oh no, don't hire me warehouse', but Tash gave him her phone number and a week later he called her back and said 'Alright, let's talk then'. And then there was a whole negotiation but it worked out, which was around this 'We want 5 grand up front and the rest in 6 instalments', and we signed the contract in February 2005.
#4 The rest in 6 instalments?
#5 In that intervening period we were really busy though, although I can't remember what we were doing.
#3 Well in December it looked as though it had all fallen apart, because we had just lost the building and when we went on that trip round town we saw this one, we thought it was hopeless because we were looking at these massive buildings like this one and we thought we would never get it.
#5 And there was talk about that shop - bookshop or whatever, up the top opposite the Grand Theatre, some old porn shop.
#7 Yeah, I remember that one.
#1 And the place that is now La Cafetière, we looked at that too.
#3 But none were like this, apart from that old Church down by Tetley's, that was huge.
#4 What was wrong with that?
#3 They were selling it to a developer and they had cut off the water and the gas and the electricity and she was being really funny, and they wanted 11 hundred quid.
#1 She was being really cautious, because she didn't want us to die in there or anything, and she was a bit worried about it.
#3 Obviously, and she had no idea where we were coming from. She thought that we were kind of like Oxfam loving, community centre people rather than the fierce, crazy, mad anti-capitalists that we are.
#1 The thing we were doing in those six months before was all the fucking company rules, and all that, the bank account,
#5 And also thinking about the structure and how it was going to work, whether we needed a bar, do you know what I mean?, all the things that we have grappled with ever since. I remember sitting down with somebody and writing a potential budget to see if we could afford., what we could afford, like if we had a bar how much money you'd make from a bar, how much money you'd make from a café; figures plucked out of the sky. All of those debates we've had ever since, more or less. We had no idea what we wanted to do, no experience of it and no idea about what we wanted to do.

GETTING THE BUILDING

#1 So when did we sign the contract? 2 of us signed the contract, and the man who ran the yoga centre was there too. It was one Friday afternoon. And you came down too, you two and the builders.
#5 Yeah, I had met him before, so I had to be there to introduce them (the landlords) to the directors. And I had to have our photo taken, taken by yoga man. (Laughing) What was that about?
#1 A signing photograph. There was some 'Signing-the-contract' photo session with crazy Ken, he had to photograph us shaking each of the brothers' (landlords) hands, and signing the contract, holding the contract like this. Coz he didn't trust us, he didn't know who we were.
#4 Who
#1 he's this Yoga man across the road who thinks that he's the landlord's agent, but he's not really.
#5 What I remember about that signing is that it had all been arranged, all we had to do was sign, and then the Choudarys had a massive panic - 'We don't know who you are!', and everybody had to get out some ID cards. So Paul's like 'Look, here's my Leeds University card.' And then we were like 'Look, we're just about to give you a cheque for 5 grand, what's the 'kin problem?' And then I remember after signing, leaving to go and catch a bus, and seeing Mr Choudary running up the road with a cheque in his hand trying to catch a bank still open, and I thought 'They are fucking skint!'
(Everybody laughs.)
#1 He was in tears leaving the building, wasn't he?
#5 Tears of joy.
#1 My god it looked different that night, it was all just shelving, shelving, with a little sink in there.
#4 Have you got picture from the beginning?
#3 They're on the website.
#5 And then that night we had a meeting down here when we became The Common Place when everybody dressed up in those awful jumpers from up stairs.
#8 Have you got any pictures from that night? They'd be good.
#5 Yeah, there was a massive debate about what we were going to call it. I proposed TCP and I remember someone blocked it.
#4 So it was blocked and then it was unblocked?
#3 Somebody else said The Wash House, The Gas Works, After the Riot. Also there was this idea that if we were going to have a pub then we should call it The Hung Council or The Hung Jury.
#1 Yeah, The Hung Council.
#3 We should still do that.
#1 Yeah we should.
#4 The Gas Works?
#3 After the gas works riots.
#1 So where were we then? Then it was just loads of work weekends wasn't it? Endless work weekends.
#3 Endless wasted paint which then had to be covered over again.
#4 Can I just clarify, when you found the building it was in December and you signed the contract in February, so the contract negotiations were they protracted with these guys over two months? Did you haggle them down?
#1 No, we laid it on the table to them. We said we had 10 grand; it was just a case of working out how many months we were going to get.
#5 I remember the first meeting with them, Tash and I played a really bad game of cards with them - we said that we had five grand to put down up front. But they were even worse, they said 'How much money can you pay up front, we have massive debts.'
(Raucous laughter)
It was a tricky negotiation because we were really cagy about what we were going to use the building for, what we were going to do here, partly because we didn't have a fucking clue. So we just had to try and make out that we were still trying to get funding and that's why we didn't really know what we were going to do.

POLITICAL IDEAS AND LEGACY

#1 Shall we talk a little bit about who we thought we were politically in that opening era? We had quite a lot of chats about it then.
#6 I found it really interesting being outside the spectrum at that time, and was becoming more and more politicised - I was trying to get away from the SWAPPY people in those days, but didn't really know anyone. I had been to just one Leeds ARC meeting, and it seemed very exciting at the time to me when Leeds was becoming increasingly polarised, Marxists, Workers Power, SWP squabbling and people turning up at Stop the War meetings and causing as much trouble as possible, just as he did here. He obviously does it for a living. For me it was such a release, the first meeting I went to at the church on Boar Lane made me realise that there was an alternative to the hard left.
#5 Which was the first meeting you went to?
#6 It was probably the first big free pizza meeting. So for me I was looking at it from an outside lens and didn't really know about this until about a week after we got the building, and then I was here every weekend after that. It did seem to bring a lot of people in.
#4 Why did you do it? Why did you go through this process of getting a social centre?
#3 Good question. You'll go a long way.
#5 There had been talk of setting up a social centre in Leeds for decades - like in the 80's there had been some squatted social centres in the centre of town that had been evicted really quick, and there used to be Fat Freddie's vegan café and anarchist bookshop round the corner on The Calls, in the early 90's.
#6 It sold out and moved to posh premises and couldn't sustain itself, ended up being a seafood bar.
#5 Brian used to run an anarchist bookshop in side it for a while.
#1 What year was this?
#5 In the early nineties, and the Northern Star was next door too.
#4 What was that?
#5 Northern Star was what Leeds Other Paper became. Like a local radical paper set up by anarchists in the 70's.
#1 This was all on The Calls, this was before the new wave of trendy bars opened up in about '94 - '95.
#5 That's right. we used to store whatever we were using at Fat Freddie's, and then there was always the 1 in 12 in Bradford, and we used to think we should do something like that in Leeds.
#1 And then there was the Trades Club as well, in two locations in the city centre. That had a bar and it was where the lefties used to meet.
#5 Yeah, like Class War used to meet there for years.
#1 Where was the last location that the Trades Club had in Leeds? Was that when it was on the Headrow?
#5 No, up in Chapeltown. Off to your left near the Mandela Centre, what's now Host media centre. They used to have gigs and that.
#1 What's happened to them now?
#5 They've now got an office up the top of North Street.
#1 But what happened to the social side of the Trades Club? There used to be the Wharf Street Café on this street didn't there?
#8 My parents were involved with that. Suma was also on this street.
#4 What was that like, the Wharf Street Café?
#7 A veggie café. My mum has the recipe book.
#5 Anyway there had been talk of doing a social centre in Leeds for ages and ages.
#3 They did all those squatted social centres, and there was this big tension in Leeds between some of the people who had been involved with putting on ASPIRE, some people got involved with TCP and some people got involved with Maelstrom, and some people thought that a rented social centre was completely out of the question, and made us out to be as bad as Franco.
#5 Yes, it's important to realise that TCP had a pamphlet written against it before it even existed. (I don't think this is actually true, a pamphlet was written argueing against rented social centres but I don't think there was one against TCP)
#3 And a large number of internet postings too.
#5 That was handled really well actually.
#1 Um, we had a meeting, a reading group in Maelstrom about it.
#3 Which about four people went to.
#5 No, it was good, because we got a lot of attention out of it as far as I was concerned.
#1 I remember walking out. One of the authors of the pamphlet told us that we were doing something about as radical as BHS. She asked what the difference was between what we were trying to do and BHS. I didn't know how to take that so I just walked out at that point.
#5 Yeah, that was during some Maelstrom reading group; they refused to talk about it before hand, before the Maelstrom reading group, and I remember one saying 'Oh no, you lot are really good at talking, but we're really good a writing so I don't want to talk about it', which was really frustrating, you know. I thought that it was really important not to have a really big split about it, that we should talk it through because I thought that the politics in it were merely absolute bollocks, but you know I thought it was important not to ., and then after that we talked it through, the meeting was pretty tense but not too tense, and I said that I wanted him to read through that Moment Of Excess pamphlet that Leeds May Day lot wrote, because its unfair us slagging off your leaflet, and we carried on having the same debate at the next meeting around the Moments of Excess leaflet and in that we had the one line slagging off the anti-squatting pamphlet saying that you can't have purity in your political world and not in your thing, you know, and I was saying basically that that's traditionally going back to the communist party.

So we were saying in this Moments of Excess pamphlet 'Why should it be squatted in your political world, and not squatted in your everyday life?' You know what I mean? And I think that that is an old communist party thing, where you have trade union consciousness in the day (in your work time) and your political thing is a separate sphere and that takes place in the evening. That's what we were saying to them.

#4 What did they say to that? That's quite key really.
#5 They didn't really have a response to that. But there was this other thing about there being no such thing as purity; you just keep pushing on and every time you have to keep compromising, and you just keep pushing further, and that kind if just side-swiped them a bit. And after those two meetings we definitely eased tensions I thought. After that some of them got involved doing the bookshop.
#3 It was still weird to start with though.
#6 What was the Maelstrom thing?
#3 You Can't Rent Your Way Out Of A Social Relationship.
#1 Can I ask two things? Do you remember when we had this big meeting about how to spend the 10 grand and this woman said (along with two others from that background) that we should spend the money on a bus and do a mobile social centre. They were really committed to that; it (the meeting) was about tabling other proposals to our one, but because their proposal was vetoed really quickly they felt really isolated and defensive. That connects to the whole context of Leeds Earth First which had just stopped meeting officially, as a group, and Leeds ARC just starting up and talking about setting up a social centre; so there was this tension between the established group in Leeds which had just ended and the new group in town, and they felt really defensive, that they had lost political legitimacy as the main voice of radical politics in Leeds.
#5 Yeah, I remember that one of the main worries that they had about the social centre at the time was that we were movement builders or something; that we'd have a shop in town and that people would have to come to us to get the answers or something. I can't quite remember their objections.
#1 It was the numbers game, they said that we were obsessed with the numbers game; like the discussion that was going on in Italy at the time, that we were just involved in processing people through a movement, that all that needs to happen is that enough people will pass through TCP and we will have a revolution. What they were interested in is quality relationships; that it doesn't matter how small you are just as long as you have purity of vision that you never deviate from.
#3 It's funny in a way because I feel as though we have spent far too much time both in the past and perhaps tonight talking about this because for a lot of people who are involved in TCP this just isn't an issue, and it wasn't then either. It was an issue for a small number of people, some of whom felt personally attacked by what was said, but for others it just wasn't an issue - they had seen the leaflet, they thought it was funny, they thought it was cuckoo.
#5 It was a big issue, but I feel as though we dealt with it in the right way and we just kept going on our own platform. It did take energy out of the process.
#3 When we had the first gig on here, that first Queer Mutiny gig, a lot of people who were involved with putting that pamphlet together were involved with that, and they basically didn't do any of the things we asked them to do, keys got lost, doors got left open, they didn't sign anybody in and all that stuff.
#1 There was a massive fight and somebody got banned. Somebody who hadn't been involved with the pamphlet but who had probably put in more time than any of us doing loads of DIY to get the place together, somebody with skills ended up in a punch up.
#3 The thing about the squatted social centres that we should say is that we wanted it to be more than that, more permanent than those squatted ones, and we wanted it to be in town so that everybody could access it.
#5 Can I do my bit about "The Common Place", the name, because it relates to this actually?
#3 Go on then.
#5 Well I was at the European Social Forum and there was a debate about social centres, and there was this guy from the Malaga Social Centre and he was saying that we need to make our social centres common places, not just a nice places to go and smoke a spliff, but you know, he was going on about way back in the past when transient workers would go down the pub to find out information, you know, to find out what was going on, what the boss is like, blah de blah blah; and he was like, nowadays those kind of places are gone but we have to recreate them because the situation's the same, transient workforces, people moving through whatever. But you've got to make it a place where it isn't owned by one culture, open, hence the name The Common Place. One of my ideas was that the reason I didn't want it to be a squat was because I didn't want it to look like a squat, so it didn't look like a youth space.
(Everyone laughing) I mean, what can you co? We tried, didn't we?
#8 Yeah, but the name of the common place also has connotations with Negri (Antonio negri - c0-author of the book Multitude) though.
#5 Yeah, well, a lot of those Malaga social centres are quite Negrian.
#1 We could quote chapter and verse out of chapter one of Multitude, but that's fine because Multitude came after us.
#3 But also we kept saying right along that we wanted to escape from the activist's ghetto didn't we. We kept writing that down, that we didn't want it to be an activists ghetto, whether we knew what we wanted it to be or not, we knew that we didn't want it to be an activist's ghetto. We didn't want it to be like one of these squatted social centres, because they are exclusive spaces - it's quite a big deal for somebody who hasn't got dreadlocks and a dog to go into somewhere like that, unless it's some big party.
#4 Another thing about that is that they don't go out of their way to promote themselves for political discussions.
#3 A lot of that is to do with the nature of the space, that they don't feel particularly safe in there.
#5 I've had some pretty good discussions at ASPIRE, but then again you're freezing your fucking bollocks off in some fucking pitch dark hole.
#3 And also by the time people hear that it is about, it is gone. Maelstrom ended up being around for a while and then kind of petered out.
#5 But it is based on a friendship network pretty exclusively.
#3 It's a scene isn't it?
#5 It's a scene. I remember before this social centre process got sparked up I wanted to do some events at an ASPIRE and it was just impossible, you know what I mean? I wasn't in the scene, but I knew a few people who were, and it was almost impossible to organise anything.
#1 We did say that we would support the squatting scene, that we felt that we were an organic part of that process, but I sometimes feel as though we have drifted away from that ideal.
#3 But we have supported the scene, in fact we squatted a building. We lent ASPIRE masses of furniture and the coffee machine.
#8 And Maelstrom have stored all their stuff here.
#1 But the last big squat at the Nursery, we didn't have any connections with them at all did we.
#3 We can't drop in there and demand that they take our help.
#5 No, no, no, the last squat we helped out, the one down the boozer. I was here doing the bar and a bloke calls up and says have you got any booze to sell, so I told him to come down here and we sold him a load at cost price and that we'd sort the money out later (we still haven't sorted that out actually), and I helped him load it up.
Here's the funny bit - I finished up here, swept up, and went down to the squat with a couple of mates. We showed up and the same woman who I had just sold all the booze to wouldn't let us in, she said that they weren't letting anybody else in because of some dog or something. I thought what's the point in having a squat if you're not going to let people in? Obviously the party went on all night, just they didn't let anybody else in after a certain time. It was good in the end though coz really I just wanted to go to bed.

ORGANISING AND ACTIVITIES AT THE COMMON PLACE

#1 So shall we go back to those early days then?
#4 So you've got the building, but you haven't told us about how you started to make decisions about what you were going to do, or what the plans were, how you were going to organise and all that stuff.
#3 There were certain things that emerged really early on - we were talking right from the start and we did organise around consensus decision making. We didn't all necessarily know what that meant; it was kind of an evolving process. For example, we had a different facilitator every week - somebody else would take it on. It didn't always work, but actually I think it worked better before we moved into the building.
#6 I think the collectives sprung up pretty quickly - we didn't have to make that happen. That was just a logical thing that happened on its own. I remember going out with you on that day and we got that cooker, and we got that bench, and I was here for two days cleaning because it was about an inch deep in grease and I'd had to move out of the house that I was in in Armley coz of the charvers and brought my cooker down here and the fridge and suddenly the café just built itself in the corner. We didn't have to build it, stuff just accumulated there, it sprung up and before we knew it we were cooking food and there was a café collective somehow. And then we were running a can bar from the first week after we were open.
#5 Why did we decide to run a bar?
#3 It just sort of happened. I think we started to kid ourselves that this raffle ticket system was legal. 'I've seen in work in a community centre somewhere so it must be alright.'
#5 We were all pretty sure that it wasn't though.
#3 Yeah, we were all pretty sure that it wasn't ok.
#3 But we had this elaborate system - somebody would be on the door with a mobile phone and sometimes we had radios, so if somebody who looked like a cop came in they would ring somebody on the bar or run through, at which point they would separate the raffle tickets from the money and somebody standing on the bar would declare to anybody who asked that it was a party and that they had bought the booze and that anybody could have it for free.
#5 It's amazing that we got away with it.
#3 Amazing; but we didn't did we because the police said 'We know what you're doing', coz they spoke to someone from the council who'd come down and probably had a good night.
#5 I was talking to someone from The Basement the other day, they did things completely different: they did the whole place up before they opened with a really tight group and they've not had one illegal event or anything like that there and they're still miles away from getting a licence, and that was their aim. And they just can't believe that we just f'kin pissed it all away, piled in, did an illegal bar in the centre of town for six months and then got a licence. Fucking unbelievable.
#8 'Then got a licence' ?
#5 Well, alright, it was a lot of fucking work getting the licence.
#1 There were two phases really, there was February to June, which was like first life then the hiatus over the summer where we pretty much stopped and then phase two it didn't really start again until November, until the film festival. Pretty much closed until November wasn't it.
#4 Oh yeah, but, when I came to Leeds I was down here every weekend.
#1 But there was nothing happening though was there?
#4 . doing stuff. Yeah, but there was this constant recreation going on wasn't there, before we opened. That was the big reopening thing. Well I didn't come down every weekend but I remember people going 'Where you going?' 'To TCP.' 'To do what?' 'Painting. Painting and decorating.' And everyone would be in here -you'd be on there somewhere and someone would be trying to make a door somewhere from a door ripped out from upstairs.
#3 Dismantling the top floor to.
#4 A new shade of orange would go on top of a previous layer of orange.
#1 Putting a floor in one afternoon.
#4 Brought all the cinema seats down. I fucked off to Sheffield that day - I remember I came and did one row with you, and then I went clutching my back. Yeah, it was brilliant. That was a hive of activity, massive workload.

COMMON PLACE ON TOUR AT GLENEAGLES

#5 We should go back though because as far as I am concerned the first bit was all about the lead up to the G8 in Scotland. I don't think anybody had particularly thought ahead of that. Do you know what I mean? We hadn't really thought about it, in a way it was all totally geared up towards going up to Scotland and you know, getting a load of people up there basically.
#6 It wasn't conceived that we would definitely have a social centre after the G8.
#5 Did we sign for 6 months?
#3 Yeah. We ran out in August didn't we?
#1 We had a Dissent! gathering here in May didn't we. The penultimate one was here.
#3 Yeah, it wasn't a full Dissent! gathering though was it.
#7 The Day of Dissent!?
#3 We had the Day of Dissent!, which was like a series of Leeds events.
#1 It was really badly attended. All the students from York came.
#3 And we had that Schnews thing in the evening.
#6 Have I got Schnews for You? That was brilliant, that was one of the best ever events we had here. That was fucking brilliant.
#8 Oh yeah that was when I found a load of pot, randomly hidden under a table. I gave some of that to my dad and he whited on it.
#1 We didn't really have systematic gigs or events, it was pretty ad-hoc. We didn't really have anything weekly.
#3 No.
#1 We had Rob Newman and Chumbawumba that time.
#5 But that was all to do with getting money to go up to Scotland though wasn't it.
#1 Yeah, yeah.
#5 And we did all that thing where we tried to mail out leaflets to everyone, and by that stage we had fucking a thousand members or something.
#1 We did a mail out to a thousand members asking them to come to Gleneagles with us.
#4 How many came?
#5 I don't know.
#1 Well, in the buses we took three minibuses which was nearly 60 people.
#5 More people came from Leeds and ended up with us. But anyway, yeah, it wasn't eight hundred.
#4 So basically, as you said, the whole place was geared towards mobilising, it was a good space to use, you were thinking about the future but really everything was taken over by the G8 stuff that you were doing.
#5 Definitely, in my head.
#8 I don't agree. For example, I'll speak on behalf of someone who wasn't thinking in those terms. Some were thinking much more about this space being in the future somewhere where we could have decent DIY bands play, and a space where we could have political bands to play and stuff like that. That's just to put another side on it.
#5 I think that we thought that it would keep going on. I think we thought 'Right, we'll take those people up there and then.', coz you know, when we got back there was so much energy, people were so excited......and then we closed.
#1 It did have a number of different lives though didn't it - there were people preparing for the G8, and then there were people who just wanted to do stuff at TCP, wasn't there. There were a number of different lives going on at the same time.
#5 God I remember the debate about whether we should shut during the week of the G8. TCP moved to a marquee in Stirling didn't it.
#1 We had a thousand badges done - stickers.
#6 TCP on Tour.
#5 Whatever happened to them?
#1 They're all upstairs.
#5 Also there was a lot of effort put into taking TCP up to Gleneagles, doing the kitchen and all that.
#1 We hired a four tonne Bedford flat back.
#4 What, to take all the pots and pans up?
#1 It was totally full - all the hoses and pipes from Doncaster.
#5 Marquees.
#8 Shall we put it on record that I probably failed my economics exam because of that?
#5 Yeah. I think it should go on record that during that whole period Rohan was going 'Oh, I've got an exam tomorrow but it'll be alright.'
#1 'It'll be alright', and then you failed?
#8 I didn't fail, well.
#5 I think with Gleneagles, everyone got excited, it was an intense experience and then when we got back we had some meetings about going up there and., no, we got hit straight away by the fucking fire regulations thing didn't we. We didn't quite realise how difficult it would be.

REOPENING AND THE FILM FESTIVAL

#4 So what happened there?
#1 Somebody had been to an event and phoned the fire brigade and said they thought that the building was unsafe, especially upstairs. We'd been having the cinema upstairs, exhibitions.
#5 Toilets on the top floor.
#1 So we got a letter and I rang them up and arranged a visit., no, no, sorry there's a whole bit missing here.
We applied for a whole premise licence before we went to Gleneagles, a whole, full building licence, just like the one we've just got, and as a result of that everyone comes to visit you to check you out. So, the fire brigade is the first lot to turn up. He just came in didn't he - do you remember? It was you and me here wasn't it? And he comes in and gives it 'You're not quite finished yet are you?' And then he goes 'Oh my God! It's Friday afternoon, I just wanted to go home and you've given me such a headache - this is a nightmare. Look at the state of this place - you're not using upstairs are you? Oh my God.' He just couldn't believe it. 'You've applied for a licence for +this+ place?'
#3 Yeah.
#1 He just had a fit. It was May time, something like that.
#3 It must have been earlier than that - April or May.
#5 So what, he just fucked off did he?
#1 And the consequence of that is like, 'Right, I'm going to condemn upstairs, I'm going to submit a request that your application is rejected, and I'm going to come back when you've done all the works.' He gave us a long list of things that needed to be done which included everything we have now done, and he just went 'Forget it mate, forget it, forget it.'
#3 Looking back we must have been unbelievably naive, like just two weeks before our hearing was due the guy is walking round going 'You need to build a fire lobby there, a fire lobby there, you need fire exits, emergency lighting.' and that's just for starters. 'Look at that roof; you're going to have to get that treated.' So you're not going to pass us in two week's time!
#5 I thought he came because of that complaint.
#1 No, we applied for a licence.
#5 So what was the complaint for then?
#3 That came later. The application was rejected outright.
#4 This was April / May time?
#1 And then we had this big debate about shall we carry on or shall we just like stop doing anything. And we just thought we'd just carry on because we were going to Gleneagles in a month. And then while we were away it all kicked off - somebody came, made a complaint and that's when the police wrote to us and said 'Are you having stuff?' And then as part of this reopening thing we decided, because the council got in touch with us, you know, we started to talk to the council about doing the film festival, and that's when we realised that if we got the money from the council for the film festival we could do all the changes.
#4 When was that? July?
#1 August; who had the first.?
#3 I met them first with you, and we came along with them here didn't we? You'd spoken to them first about doing some films elsewhere and suggested we could do it, and then we met them here didn't we.
#1 The guy from the film festival was like 'I love this, it's like a Dutch squat - we could work together.' And that was like in August, we had just got back. Coz that was just after that meeting after we just got back to keep going with it.
#3 We hadn't decided to keep going at that point; it was prior to that because it was only at the meetings over the following couple of weeks that we decided we would use the film festival to give us some focus in order to carry on.
#7 I remember that time as being really touch and go and like, every meeting I would go to I would change my mind as to whether I thought the building would last another month.
#8 I remember this as well.
#3 We were also negotiating with the landlord at the same time for a new contract. And he was saying '850' and we were saying '750' and he was saying '850', he'd climbed down from 1500 already.
#5 I remember having a visioning session down here and basically everyone had decided to go apart from me, that we'd go to somewhere else, and I was going 'Look, if we haven't got the energy to do this place up why are we going to have the energy to do anywhere else up?'
#3 Yeah, it was funny wasn't it because the whole of the room was like 'No, we should leave.' and then there was like 'Any other comments?' and you said that, and then we all went 'We shouldn't make a decision today, let's put it off until next week.'
#1 And then in between we had met the people from the film festival.
#5 And our other great hope, our big white hope was fucking that what's his name from AMICUS.
#6 We never got his money did we?
#5 No, but he was like he could give us a couple of grand.
#1 What AMICUS promised two grand?
#6 Yeah, that was one of the reasons we decided to stay on here because if that money had come through.
#5 It was actually wasn't it? It was a useful hoax.
#1 He came to a meeting didn't he?
#6 He said that they wanted to recruit more young people and students to AMICUS, and that's why they were willing to give us a couple of grand if they could put literature in here. That was one of the things that turned it round at the visioning session, because we thought that we had two grand coming in from AMICUS possibly.
#4 Just to clarify, all the cinema stuff happened around the visioning session, or afterwards?
#3 No, it happened afterwards.
#1 And that's when we put a proposal in, a half-baked proposal to the list saying that we've been offered two grand from the council which will pay for all the changes that the fire brigade wants doing, and we can have a film festival - it'll be great, we can have ten days, we can relaunch, have a licence and there was no kind of formal consensus decision that we should do it but we just did it.
#3 No, there was, there was a meeting. The thing is is that the meetings were getting smaller and smaller, but there was about 15 people at the meeting where we decided on this.
#1 Really?
#3 Yeah, definitely. Everyone was up for it.
#7 I remember thinking at the meeting that the film festival really did save TCP because everyone was really miserable and thinking that it was all going to die and then this opportunity came.
#3 It's got to be noted that they have screwed us over and not paid all the money that they're supposed to. We're not very good with money are we?
#5 In a way, when we first got that money, we were like 'Well, money doesn't really matter; this just gives us the impetus to do it.'
#8 Oh yeah, you had some ideas about holding some squat gigs in Sheffield at Matilda's didn't you?
#5 That was an idea wasn't it - to raise some money.
#8 You never did that either did you?
#5 But they did offer to do that for us.
#6 There were some things like Community Day; we made some money out of that. Cake at Community Day made a couple of hundred quid.
#5 Yeah, it was just important to keep going in some sort of form, wasn't it?


COLLECTIVES

#1 Shall we mention the collectives just so that we can get down some facts?
#5 You list off all the collectives and we'll tell you whether they are just paper collectives.
#8 There was the cappuccino collective wasn't there?
(All, long debate about negotiating to buy an espresso machine from Milo's for £350)
#3 Yeah, so that never happened, and there was also Helen's juice collective which never happened.
#5 That was a bloody good idea that one.
#3 Yeah, it was a bloody good idea. You see a lot of these ideas are based on the fact that TCP is actually open, which it's not. There's also the café collective.
#4 Was the café collective the only real collective to begin with?
#8 There was an events collective to begin with.
#3 It was originally called the gig collective because it originally didn't have responsibility for taking bookings. It was just there to put on gigs, but that soon changed.
#5 There was the bookings book then wasn't there?
#1 And there was the art collective, which did use upstairs didn't it.
#7 Yeah, like a month or a couple of months before we went to Scotland we spent days and days and days clearing out the top floor, for about a month, and then we came back and we were like 'Great, we can't use it.', and it kind of died.
#8 Yeah, it did get quite clean actually; you could wander around.
#4 Without breaking your neck.
#1 Was there a cinema collective right from the beginning?
#3 Yeah.
#1 When did we get those chairs?
#3 That was Tommo wasn't it, he came along in his car and we shifted them in that old Micra and in Tommo's car.
#1 When was that? Was that in the spring time?
#3 Yeah.
#4 So where did you get those chairs?
#8 Donated from Hyde Park Cinema.
#5 We got offered a lot of those kind of chairs coz we got offered some from the Playhouse as well.
#1 Did we? You're joking aren't you? Why didn't we take them?
#7 No, that was the Grand wasn't it?
#5 What, was it? Were they selling them were they?
#8 No, the Grand refurbishments.
#7 No, the Grande Theatre.
#5 Oh, the Grand, The Grand.
#7 Weren't they like really big plush ones.
#3 Yeah, we could have had preview seats at the back.
#5 Or a box on the wall.
#8 I still think we should do what they did at Hanover Square where they had sofas arranged in tiered seating. That was fucking awesome.
#5 That was one of the reasons why it was crap.
#8 Why, cause you die in fires (caused by non-fire retardant upholstery).
#5 No, because when you walk into a squat you know you are not obeying the laws. It makes you feel rebellious.
#3 There was the bookshop collective. Bar collective. There was a bar collective early on.
#5 Membership collective.
#3 How many people were in that then?
#5 Well, I was in it for a while.
#3 Finance collective, gardening collective.
#8 We made a collective for practically everything.
#4 And were they different people?
#8 Yeah.
#5 I mean, there were a couple of ones that were actually collectives, like the café and the events, and the others that just depended on one person trying to push it.
#8 No, it was me; it was me on the gardening collective to begin with.
#5 Oh, was it?
#8 Yeah. Well, some guy came.
#5 Yeah, that's right, some guy came along and said 'I want a garden out the back'
RO So it became a gardening collective but with no one actually in it. So I did a load of stuff with that to begin with.
#5 And then Tanya took that over.
#8 We did that flower bed to begin with, it was shit
#7 I remember building that little wall out there.
#8 Removing all the rubble to begin with, that was the starting point. So it was more like trying to remove loads of rubble without getting hypodermic syringes in you and stuff.
#7 That night that those two big bags of mud came and we had to carry it all round the back!
#5 I remember trying to drag them round there, thirty people on each one.
#8 I remember after a meeting one night there was one (bag of topsoil) that had been left just there, and we were like 'We can't just leave that in the street'. We did it in the meeting; that was quite funny.
#1 It is probably worth saying that since we first got the building in February 2005 we have religiously had a Thursday meeting every single Thursday; it just shows the obsessive desire for people to come down here on a Thursday evening without fail. Apart from when we went.
#6 It was the busiest night of the café for a while; it was the biggest money earner for the café.
#1 Was it?
#6 We were having about thirty or forty people down here, and everybody was coming here to eat as much as they were coming down for the meeting.
#1 There has always been about twenty people wanting to come to the Thursday meeting to organise stuff, which is quite amazing. It doesn't sound so much, but it is quite good though isn't it, twenty people who are interested in quite boring, tedious stuff. Consistently, it has never really dropped below twenty, has it?
#5 Plenty of times it has happened at occasional meetings. But no, yeah, I think that's quite a good number.

WHAT'S THE POINT?

#4 So there's one thing that we haven't really got to, which I think we should try and get to which is like, we keep skirting around it; what's it for?
#5 What's the point?
#4 What's it all for? Cause we said 'Oh, we want to do all these things.', we didn't really know what we wanted to do, and then we wanted to have a base, we've been wanting to do one in Leeds for years but, like +why+? This is my frustration from the second visioning day, was that we never got to the 'Why?' What are we doing? So what is it all for?
#3 I guess because instinctively it feels like the right thing to do, doesn't it. But then you have to try and unpick that and think 'Why would we want to have a space that we can do what we want in?
'Why would we want a space that we can organise things in?', because we can go and organise something in a church, but its different somehow. It's the same reason why people have squats isn't it.
#1 I think it is really different for different people; I think one of the wonderful things about TCP is that it holds together, it's a really open, complicated space that accommodates really very different people, which I think is amazing. So within it you get, I think, people who want to do it for the artistic stuff; you know putting on gigs, DIY music stuff, boom, its really important to them, that's brilliant. And then there are people who do it for almost kind of like radical social service provision, you know, doing stuff for asylum seekers, putting on classes and stuff like that. And then there are people who just want to do it as a kind of interventionist statement, like, 'We're here, we should be here.' You know, people might only have in their mind one of those, because that's what like their thing is, and that's the beauty of it. There are all these different things, you kind of get pissed off in a way because the people doing the social service provision type stuff are trying to organise stuff for asylum seekers around people who are putting on big mental punk gigs and naturally they just don't go together, but like that's the magic of it, isn't it. You have to deal with those two together.
#5 There's always been a bit of tension at TCP between making it an open space where different groups can get involved, where it is not owned by anybody; but there is this other dynamic going on where there are lots of people - a group came around, emerged, in order to make TCP, people who didn't know each other before, and they got together and have gone through a particular journey, do you know what I mean? There's sort of like a Common Place identity, beyond those user groups or whatever, and that has always been a sort of tension that's run through it.
#3 Consumerism.
#5 It's not even consumerism, it's more about wanting to make this space open yet at the same time everyone is going through this process together - Gleneagles, people get politicised, and this process kind of results in an identity; the reason we were going on about what we didn't want it to be was because the identity emerged in response to all these other things that were going on. You know, like, i.e. somebody having a go at you, wanting to be like pure, a squatting sort of thing - but well, you know, we're not pure here, and that is sort of the identity of the people involved in it.
#6 I think it has been an open space with like multiple identity politics as it were, lots of people with quite distinctly different specific and quite fiercely autonomous political identities have gone through a process of mediation and I think we have quite successfully found ways of making different discourses or whatever run very well next to each other.
#5 The good thing about why you want to do a building like this one, my mate from the 1 in 12 Club has for years and years said that the process teaches you that it is something solid that you have to do all the time, and that's what it is - the people who congregate round here are people who want to get their hands dirty basically. They want to get involved in all the complexities of something, they don't want pure things. It makes you face up to loads of stuff all the time because it's a really complicated, difficult process. That's why it's good, its really solid and it exists and you can't have fantasy politics because of that; you've got to fucking really work things out.
#4 But what's it sort of, ah, I'm still struggling with what it's for as opposed to it being this place where loads of people can congregate and do stuff in; ultimately, what are they doing? Because you can have spaces like that in Leeds for people to congregate in, but what is it specific about this place politically that makes it worth doing? What doesn't exist in Leeds that makes it necessary to create this place?
#6 I think for me it is the horizontal base from which multiple identity groups or political groups with broadly similar aims are pushing their aims upwards, parallel to each other, not necessarily having to work together but having a base from which these similar aims can all be advanced. They exist in some sense as insular political identities, but they now have a base whether it's No Borders, whether it's the cinema collective, autonomous actions around the G8, people have a way of moving resistance and radical social change forward in their own specific field, their own specific interest group.
#5 Also, I don't think there is a space like this, there can't be a space like this; do you know what I mean? The reason it is important to have a space, to have it as open as possible, is so that this general thing of people, whatever it is, is because there is only a very broad ideological base to it - anti capitalist, whatever that means - it needs somewhere to materialise. To come together. It used to be in the work place, obviously, the basis of politics - that's where the social centre comes from.
#6 I think another important piece of history in Leeds that should be mentioned here is the Duchess of York, which although first and foremost was a pub where there were gigs, you could go into the Duchess any night of the week and on the tables there would be leaflets about AFFA (?), about Hunt Sabbing, as well as fliers for whichever bands were playing - Chumbawumba, whoever was playing. There would be political literature - Black Flag and things like that. When the Duchess of York turned into a Hugo Boss shop it said everything about gentrification to me.
#5 It was a classic wasn't it - when it closed down it got boarded up and there was a poster on it saying something like 'Improving Leeds' or something like that, but it just fucking ripped the heart out of it, you know what I mean?
#1 Yeah, the bastard who sold up, he could have kept it but he just took the money and ran. It was a choice by him, he wasn't kicked out, but like that's what you do when someone offers you a million pounds, isn't it?
#4 So, there's the shutting down of these kind of places as well.
#5 Yeah, that was another dynamic - when the Duchess shut down, Leeds had always been badly served for venues, but when the Duchess went there was no city centre venue basically.
#6 That was like the 1 in 12 Club of Leeds gone really.
#5 Basically the Duchess had this huge history of everybody - Nirvana - these +huge+ fucking bands that passed through it basically.
#8 They didn't just make money selling up to the contractors, they made a hell of a lot of money selling off sofas that Kurt Cobain had slept on and stuff.
#6 Oasis played to six people there.
#5 So there was no place for gigs of that kind until promoters started putting stuff on at the New Roscoe and stuff like that. it's a shitty little pub. And so there was, I remember, me and Paul went really early on in this process, there were some meetings on up at Oblong by people who wanted to set up a venue, and we had talked about wanting to amalgamate these projects, and they had had the idea of setting a venue up in Armley, on Armley Town Street - sheer fucking madness.
#4 Who was that?
#1 Oblong wanted to set up somewhere, do something similar to us - they ended up getting a full time funder to help them and they still haven't got anywhere.
#3 Are they not going to do something with the Brudenell Social Club? Yeah, they are doing something.
#1 Yeah, they are aren't they, but what I am trying to say, not slagging them off, the sense that because we were quite able to be responsive because we relied on our own energies, that they had got tied up with official funding person to do it all for them, and they didn't do it, couldn't do it.
#5 But there was this genuinely felt need to have a venue in Leeds.
#1 Music venue?
#5 And a venue for events, not political necessarily, but kind of social events. And those two things, the need to have somewhere political, because at the time as well it was thought there needed to be a political presence in Leeds city centre as a sort of focal point for things to amalgamate around.
#1 It is a wonderful thing - we are almost like an anomaly surrounded by all the things that we are surrounded by. I sometimes just look at us and think 'I can't believe that we actually exist. I can't believe there is still a gap for us right in the city centre.' Still I'm shocked by it. I don't know if it gets anybody else, but you just look around us and think 'We shouldn't be here, we shouldn't have this look.' We belong to a different era before gentrification.
#7 I think it is also important to maybe not ask the big 'Why are we here?'; maybe there doesn't need to be a big reason, and to think, as you say, that it is just a big exercise to see what we can get away with and what we can do - what the collective imagination can dream up.
#8 A process with no kind of aims or destinations, it's kind of what you develop along the way.
#1 And it's about social centres - you know, it has created al lot of kind of social connections hasn't it. Like when I first came to Leeds I knew a few people but now, after a couple of years of TCP you can't walk through the city centre without bumping into three or four different people - 'Alright mate, how you doing?' - 'Yeah, yeah.'
#5 I think that's an important part of it though.
#1 It's ace isn't it. It's created this social thickness you know, that if something happens you know you could rely on a quite a lot of people to respond.
#5 I was talking the other day about it - he was like 'It's great, but what's it for?' And I was like 'Politics moves in events, doesn't it.' What's going on in France now - there's this huge event happening - we've had sniffs of that in Britain, the poll tax riots and all that, and it will happen again - or look at the anti-war movement, look at the first day of that. When something like that happens, all the networks that have evolved around this will mean that it's so much easier to., you know, this could be a huge focal point, and all those networks will come into existence. This place is run by networks - all those people that go out, nobody even comes close to knowing all the stuff, how far out they spread, you know what I mean? That's why it's so important to try to, you know, all the bullshit and all the tensions in these places, this is why it is important to keep them on talking terms because when a big event happens you need as many people as possible.
#4 I think that this is one of the major things about this place that is good; I wouldn't usually have a conversation with about ninety nine percent of the people who come in here, even if I hung out with them, even if I went on an action with them, I'd never even talk to them, probably. I don't know them, and I wouldn't even dare to go up to them and start talking about politics, this, that and the other, but through this place, through gradually meeting people and getting into a comfortable moment to have a chat over coffee you build affinities with people. Not like 'affinities' as in affinity groups, less intense than that, but maybe even more constructive because it is with a much larger number of people; we're not all 'best friends', but we all trust each other and we all know that people have put time and effort into this place, and if something did happen, let's say that suddenly the council suddenly came to knock this place down, I think we'd have a thousand, two thousand people suddenly very interested in supporting it, and that creates a social movement in itself. It would be really fascinating to happen. That is one of the major things that has happened with this place is the circulation of people through it, and out again, and then they bring three or four more people. That isn't the number game, like what we talked about before.
#5 It's the network game.
#8 It's like trying to recreate society almost, because the whole focus of gentrification is like as if government and business are trying to create atomised individuals and trying to really destroy any social setting, so the best you get is going down the pub. Of course you have to play to certain kinds of things - you have to be wearing the white shirt or whatever. The idea of doing this, of creating a space where it's not to do with conforming to certain norms, it's somewhere where we can actually come down and have a social co-experience. I think that that is important in itself, and that is getting away from any ideas of any certain political networks or anything, it's just creating a social space.
#5 I agree with you but I still think that change does happen in events.
#8 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
#5 .and I can imagine a situation where there is an event in Leeds, or at least a social movement starts in Britain, and shit, I'm not talking about a revolutionary situation - something like what's going on in France now, and I can imagine there'll be a ban on, you know, meeting in Leeds city centre, the city centre is privatised, so there is no guarantee you could go there. I can imagine that if a squat were there centre of this thing, then there would be much more pressure on the council to evict it, and things being tricky, but here, if you have got a solid base - this is legal, do you know what I mean? It gives some sort of protection, and it could be really important in those sorts of situations.
#8 Yeah, but that's kind of the same point that I was making, in that the reason why governments want to destroy socialisation is because they realise that they can get really fucked over by it. People start talking to each other and think 'Hang on; we don't actually have to live like this.'
#6 It's interesting how we completely took the piss for six months, got away with everything: in no way shape or form was this building fit to be open to the public, it didn't have a bar licence or anything, but by accumulating here through numbers of people using it, we became sort of legal in fact even though we weren't legal in law.
#5 We became real.
#6 We became legal afterwards; it shows how people engage in a cosmopolitan process. You don't stick to what the law tells you to do, you change it through.
#8 We became de facto, as opposed to dejure, which is the law.
#5 But it's jurisprudence, not the law.
#6 In time we had the numbers to actually make it work. If we had been threatened with closure straight away, there is no way we would be here today, but through getting away with murder and accumulating a membership along the way.

ACTIVITIES

#4 So, we know how the place is organised, and we know who uses the building, but we've been talking a lot about the problems, the issues and the tensions but what we want to ask people is really, what is really good about this place, and what are the things that are problematic and that people would like to see resolved or improved because all spaces have got this potential but its never ever reached, that's what we find anyway.
#7 I'm not going to say that there aren't any problems, but I think that I have issues with saying that there are problems with potential that hasn't been reached because the amount of people who are involved, who have come through these doors have fulfilled, or at least, they have done what they could. And nobody can do anymore. Maybe we have had lots of ideas that haven't been realised but that doesn't mean that we should see that as a failure.
#8 It's that aims and destinations kind of thing again, isn't it.
#7 Like, we've done some fantastic things.
#5 One of the biggest things that we have failed at is having it open as a café which people who work in the city centre can use in the week, and having a bookshop open and using it as a place to find out about campaigns and all that. Regular opening is probably impossible with our current structure.
#8 Unless you have people who can actually commit the time then it is actually impossible.
#6 There is a debate to have here, whether we could actually have two people paid to work here through the benefit scheme; with the idea of anybody being paid to work here we'd be met with so much opposition.
#5 Not recently; it was originally.
#7 I'm not sure whether not opening during the week is a major thing. Maybe it is, but it is not the most important thing.
#8 It's not being open on a regular basis that's the problem. It doesn't mean being open during the week, it could mean just being open every Saturday for food or something. Just something so that people do know it's open and can come.
#3 .or even if our website was accurate. People haven't got a clue when we are open. It's like 'You open?' 'Dunno.' And then they'll turn up and they'll be like 'Oh, fantastic, you're here!', and we'll be like 'We're closed.'
#4 That is one of the downsides of the spontaneity of this place. Even though we are law abiding now, it is still very spontaneous. Like, if the café's open, it's open because someone has decided that they are going to do a shift, and it happens; no one necessarily knows that they are doing a shift. You come in and you find some food that was cooked the night before, and you think 'Well, what was going on last night then? I didn't know anything about that.' Well, that's great, but if there was more coherence amongst us all then why shouldn't we be able to open for like, a couple of hours each day? I think we should be able to open every day if we can - two hours, two different people every day and then we would be able to cater for a completely different kind of people in the day. At the moment we are basing ourselves round our own invitations and our own free time and not and not necessarily thinking about investing a bit of that time to bring more people in.
#8 I do take issue with the idea that if the website were up to date then it would be great because you know, not every one has internet access, not every one wants to check the internet every time they want to pop out for a cup of tea and a bowl of soup for Christ's sake. It's absurd.
#3 It's lucky we've got it on record - we'll have to check what I said, but what I think I said was that if the website was up to date it would help a lot.
#8 It would help more if it was open on a more regular basis.
#3 Yeah, it would, but the fact is is that it is not going to be open every day, not at the moment anyway.
#8 No, I don't mean every day.
#3 .people; we do live in a highly internet-connected society these days, particularly in Leeds city centre, if we are talking about people who work here as a potential user base.
#5 I'll tell you what though right, I agree; Sundays I've been in here doing the reading group in the evening, and people drop in after films and whatever and they kind of hover about a bit saying 'Have you got a leaflet saying when your events are on?', and I'm like 'You know what, no I haven't got one, there was supposed to be one, but I don't know what happened to it.' That would be a really good thing, having a leaflet which is outside.
#5 The front of the cover is done but nobody ever did the list of events for the inside, put them together or printed them. We could quite easily improve on that by having it outside, having all the announcements up to date - monthly, weekly lists of things. But you know, it needs people to take them on and it is hard because we are bogged down as it is in all the fucking daily grind.
#1 Do you know what I think as well, looking at other countries like Italy and Germany and all that, they kind of make social centres part of their lives; that struggle is part of their every day life, but for us I kind of get the impression that most of us just pop down here and it is kind of a thing that we try and find time for.
#5 I think that is a brilliant thing; I look at Germany and the Dutch squatter scene and think that that is how not to do it, do you know what I mean?
#1 For you, but why?
#5 Because, especially in Germany - the Dutch squatter scene was a huge social movement which got narrowed down to a sort of like squatter life style, there was a code of dress, it was like a parallel society, it was fantastic; you had your squatted laundrettes, squatted café bars. It was a parallel world - but in Germany it was much more of an internal thing and you started to have these analyses. You'd hear all the time from the Germans that there was no working class in Germany - 'Zeer is no vorking class in Charmany.' You know, that the revolution will come from the outside, that we are surrounded by the enemy - this small like internal, pure group. You follow that through several years and you come to the anti-imp movement - all this sort of weird, fucked up shit they have over there. It's got a lot better now, but in the early nineties at one point a van load of us from Leeds went over to Hamburg for a riot - some leaflets went round saying 'Come to Hamburg for a riot'; it was just after all the poll tax stuff and we were all like 'Yeah, fucking great this.' So, we all went over - you know, some people from Leeds moved over to Hamburg, some people from Hamburg moved over to Leeds and all this sort of stuff and we got there and we thought it was fucking great. All these people had these parallel existences and Hamburg was sort of the centre - the Rieperbahn it was - but it was this total thing of 'This is what we do. Our whole lives are running these squatted things.' There was this completely separate society and we don't have any dealings with the outside; this is a totally over the top exaggeration of what it was really like, but at it's worst tendencies was this.
#4 A ghetto.
#5 Yeah, a ghetto.
#4 But a ghetto that believed that it was much more than that, like almost a different society that they were creating.
#5 Sort of, almost, but their view was not like 'We must include other people from Germany', you know what I mean, the worst tendency was the anti-imps, the anti-imperialists. That the revolution will come from the periphery - the third world - that we will help by being a fifth column within the German ranks. But I have always looked at that as like the worst thing; after the poll tax riots in the early nineties the British anarchists were saying that they were just a load of lifestylists, but now I look back and think that there were loads of good things about it.
#4 But there is a balance between having a social centre which is part of your daily life but which is not necessarily your life, and then there is what we have got here which is much more of a Friday to Sunday thing with a few days thrown in for meetings, with the concentration of labour being around Sundays with the cinema and breakfast. I don't know, maybe aside from this we are heading towards one of those conversations with everyone about how we can get the café open a couple of days a week.
#3 We never dealt with that.

WORK AND DOLE

#4 It is really difficult to deal with it because getting involved in the café collective is different to getting involved with the café. There is the café collective which is effectively a very tight ship, but which I don't want to join whereas I'd be quite happy to come down here on a Monday for example and try and bake some bread or something. I don't really feel as though you can't really do that. You have to know where everything is, you have to know who's ordered the food, you have to become really part of it.
#5 I think you could do that, but I think that it is a much bigger, much more structural problem because society has changed. When there were all these initial ideas about having a social centre in Leeds, like when the 1 in 12 Club was set up, people were unemployed - you were anarcho-punks, you were unemployed and you had no intention of getting a job. Being an anarcho-punk was all about living as cheaply as possible basically. They had a couple of paid workers to do some stuff on the building, but otherwise people just put months and months into doing up that building; people could do that and they would be quite prepared to work at the club for no money.
#1 It was a home for an idea that had already existed wasn't it? The idea for the 1 in 12, putting on DIY music and that, that idea wanted a home whereas this didn't really become a home for an idea did it.
#5 But I think the material basis for that was that there was a massive expansion of unemployment, you didn't get hassle on the dole - you know, 'Come back next decade, we'll talk about it then.' People were going to live on the dole, they were not going to get jobs, and if they did get jobs it was for small periods. It was just different; that's partly what is wrong with that culture is that you get older and you fall out of it and there is no way you can be involved in that culture if it is based on that. But also there has been a contraction of unemployment, there has been a crackdown on unemployment benefits; it's harder to do that nowadays and so people are busier and like, got to pin down full time jobs, and do this at the same time, do you know what I mean?
#6 I definitely think it has got a lot to do with the difficulty of maintaining the lifestyle on unemployment benefit, it seems to be impossible. You know, X and his mate who lives with him have managed to remain on the dole for more than 10 years which is phenomenal.
#3 X is the exception though, let's be honest.
#6 I don't know anybody like that.
#4 I do, I know quite a few people like that.
#3 But in terms of this place.
#6 But everyone I used to know, if you weren't a student you were on the dole. It was very different in the late eighties, early nineties.
#4 But that is interesting, because shouldn't this place be about confronting that material existence of how we live now? Because I don't feel it is, I feel as though this place is something that we do that we fit into our lives, as precarious or as insecure as they are - not to confront it, not even to escape it, but to kind of confuse between the two - are we here to fight the system, or are we here to gather all our friends, and potentially new ones who vaguely agree with our ideas and just pass the time away? Thinking about it, talking about it but not necessarily doing anything about it.
#3 It's sort of that safe place within the system.
#4 Yeah, I think it is, it's a safe house.
#5 But the concept is right that basically, so when you are up in Gleneagles or whatever, off going mad or whatever, but you can't live at that sort of pace, with that precariousness. It's really creative when you get outside your habitual life, and you're having to make all these decisions that really matter, but it's really hard to live them, so you need all these safe spaces like a convergence centre before you have to go off and recoup yourself. That's what I think social centres should be, like a safe space where you gather your forces before going off on a mad adventure.
#1 I see it also as fulfilling this role where we are still stuck in this thing where it is additional to our lives, it's a nice addition. We have our lives and then TCP is an addition to that, the icing on the cake. But I want to see it more as a replacement, where I can start subtracting elements from my life and start replacing them with a kind of infrastructure of radical spaces and stuff so they become this genuine counter power. So for example, TCP could have a farm or a book shop attached to it, so it could provide work and stuff - genuine alternative, so you can start subtracting stuff from our lives and start withdrawing. At the moment I just pop down here for a latte, or a film, this is just an addition to my life, not a replacement. We always talk about these networks, creating these autonomous infrastructures, bits and pieces but we could genuinely do that. We could set up a school to educate our kids, and a farm to feed ourselves - do you know what I mean?

GEHTTO POLITICS

#5 Let's go back to that because there is a project running fairly similar to this, set up by some friends of mine in Chapeltown, my sister sent her kids there for a while and that. I was asked to get involved, you know, it is a Steiner school up there, and I thought about it and thought that I didn't want my daughter to go to a private school separate from society; I wanted her to go to a comprehensive like everybody else from her area so that she gets to become mates with people from her area. Life is quite tough it's horrible, when I was a kid I'd much rather have been taken of into some fantasy world school, do you know what I mean? But I am glad I didn't because at the end of the fantasy world school you get chucked back into real life again. I want my daughter to be stuck in the middle of it, so, my mate is the fucking head of the governors of our school and we are dealing with it that way.
#1 But why do they get characterised as fantasy though? That's the key isn't it - I'm not talking about creating little ghettoes, I am talking about creating open spaces where we try to get everyone involved in. Self managed.
#5 Yeah, but this Steiner school is a good example because it is completely monocultural, only a certain sort of people is attracted towards it so; the good thing about school is that it is the one time that everybody is chucked together. So it's that whole thing that if you go and set up your own school and separate yourself off from what's going on in the rest of the world you've gone too far. I am not saying it is a terrible thing; some of my friends are involved in it.
#4 So this is key now then isn't it? How can we go from being neither confronting the system nor escaping from it? Within this kind of purgatorial state where we're just sort of coping - like it's a safe place, it's a safe house that we come to; we manage it ourselves, we're quite good at it now, we've done certain things out of it but, you know, the Little London campaign that a few of us have been involved with, we didn't need this place, this place has not really served any purpose for that campaign - not really.
#3 Well, in terms of.
#1 .getting us together - we wouldn't have met otherwise.
#4 True, exactly. But sure this place could be more than just a catalyst for something to happen. Should it not be more confrontational, or should it not be more of a laboratory for more projects to come out of because at the moment I don't see any real radical politics? I see a lot of management of the building, again going back to this thing - doing all the things we've got to do to create the safe space, but then what is going to fill the vacuum?
#3 That's a symptom of the fact that I have been feeling pretty negative about the place. The last time I went to a meeting was before Christmas. When was that visioning session that we had? November? No, December after the film festival; I was really disappointed after that. I was placing a lot of emphasis on us having that visioning session. You asked the question 'What are we here for?', and we all struggled to answer that. Some people are able to come up with some good sort of Negri stuff, but other than that. generally we do all struggle to answer that question. It's not just us here, it's everybody. We couldn't answer it on that day and it was supposed to be the one key thing that we were supposed to get out of that day. 'What the fuck are we doing, we've been here a year; why?'
#1 I've got it in the back of my mind is that what I have always thought what I would like to get out of TCP is that TCP becomes a voice, not a homogenous voice, but a commentator within the city. I have this little fantasy dream where the Yorkshire Evening Post rings us up as a group and asks us what we think or what we think should happen in the city because we become an important, independent voice. That TCP has a vision, lots of visions and it becomes a commentator. So like we say 'This shouldn't happen in the city', and almost.
#5 But how could we say that?
#1 . I know it sounds a bit weird but I am just talking it through.

TACTICS AND IMPACTS

#5 Yeah, I think it relates to our tension of like, are we this thing that's going in a certain direction, because that is intention that is, or are we.? I would like to do that, but I don't think we can go that far but I would like to have much more political discussion and work out what the fuck this place is for but I don't think you can do it in a visioning session, I think it is really hard. For ages I going on about wanting to talk about precariousness, precarity, and about how you know, how we could fit it, a role about how the world has changed and we need to work what we could do about it and all that kind of stuff. That was the intention about trying to keep this place open, do you know what I mean?
#1 Well, we've got all this knowledge bound up in TCP and we could become this kind of commentator on all these issues in the region - all these current issues - sustainability, precarity, blah blah blah, gentrification, we could almost create this alternative fucking thing, voice, commentary about how the city should be. It doesn't have to be one vision, we could throw out all these, bombard the city with all these alternative examples.
#3 But that is what we do, through our events and our meetings.
#1 But do we? Do we?
#3 Well, supposedly, that would be one thing that we do do. Yeah, by having a series of films on this or that, discussions.
#4 We don't really have an excuse not to do any of this do we? The battle to be legal and to have no more worries about security is gone, we just have to make sure that we abide by what we said we'd do.
#7 But it's just been replaced with a different problem, which means that we have become legitimate we have gone that little step further into the system which means that it is harder to do stuff that confronts the system that we have just stepped a bit further into.
#5 I don't think that is true. What it does mean is that we have to come up with more money to pay more and more things.
#7 Well, that's the perfect example of us stepping further into the system that we are trying to confront. We have to make money, which takes away our energy from doing the things that we want to do. Isn't money the thing that we are trying to fight against?
#3 Not necessarily though; I remember when we first moved into this building and I put up an anti-capitalist poster up there. This whole wall was shit, but the anti-capitalist poster was alright, but it caused lots of problems because people were like 'Ooo, that's aggressive.' 'What's the problem with capitalism?'
#1 The ironic thing is that it was the squatters - the people who squat took offence to it.
#3 Yeah, they said 'Ooo, I think that'll put people off.' So, you know, I don't think we have ever agreed that we are against the system of exchange through money or capitalism even.
#6 I don't think there has ever been an overwhelming consensus that we are against the idea of financial transaction at all.
#5 I know but, say we all passed a resolution saying that TCP is now against capitalism, which I always assumed it was, what the fuck does that mean? I am an anti-capitalist, I will completely say this now right, but I have no idea what that means; I have no little blue plan in my bedroom about how society should be run. It is meaningless; it is like, what we do now basically.
#8 We are actually talking about TCP as if it were a singular entity, like it is TCP that does this, not like this is the space in which people can get together and use to do those kinds of things. I think it is a different approach in that what you could kind of say is that we are creating the safe space, the shell, and within that shell things grow. It doesn't necessarily have to be coming out of this structure, some collective or something that we as TCP set up. That is the mistake in the approach that we are going through there.
#5 There is a danger of this thing of like, we're the activists, we're the ones that do things, do you know what I mean? And there is the sort of thing like, well, we're not the people who are going to change things, we're just fiddling round the edges trying to make things useful. Events happen, movements happen like in France; a small group probably took the initiative at certain points to occupy a university or whatever but who really knows how movements happen? They pick up speed, do you know what I mean, and it is beyond us, beyond our control - we can intervene at certain stages perhaps as small groups - but what we can do when these events aren't happening is try and develop things like this, tools, ways of doing things, like, you know, spaces, networks which will be useful when events like that happen.
#4 Sure, but don't you think that we haven't even fulfilled being an infrastructure for radical politics? We aren't even an infrastructure. We are a lousy building for all those kinds of things. We've only recently got these computers working again, and they'll no doubt fuck up in a bit. We've become a bit slack I think. I've definitely become slack here - I've got into a comfort zone - 'Brilliant, put on a bit of cinema on a Sunday, that's all I need to do here.' I want to do more, but also I am getting to a point where work and life are coming together and this is becoming a burden and this shouldn't be a burden, this should be the place where you come and find a solution. I don't get solutions here, I just get problems - shit to clean up, and just get pissed off that things get left. That's the problem for me.
#6 I agree with that to an extent, but I think that there is a correlation between this building opening and some direct action happening in Leeds which wasn't really happening before. There is not enough of it and there needs to be a hell of a lot more of it. Things like Hillary Benn doesn't really like speaking in public in Leeds now, and things like the buy nothing day, more squatted spaces in The Calls - we've done it once, but we could have a whole campaign of Balls to The Calls, and squat a whole load of buildings.
#3 It's ironic; I've been talking to a few people the other day who said that it is the complete opposite. We were talking about the Maelstrom squat - another thing that they said was that it would drain people's energy, that people would end up doing less because they would end up involved with doing bureaucracy and I sort of think that they were right on that one particular point. We've done very little direct action in the last year and a bit - we did the buy nothing day the year before as well; there were more people out that day and we didn't have a social centre then.
#4 Direct action isn't this thing in the abstract that you do; this is direct action - we are trying to directly take control of a space, and organise it ourselves - that's direct action. We're not relying on paid labour, hierarchical structures.
#5 If you want to have a debate about why do this place, I want to have a debate about why do direct action. Direct action for me is about, you know, going to Gleneagles is not about stopping Tony Blair meeting, I couldn't give a fuck what he does; it's the same as this place, it's about building up different networks.
#3 But is it about selling beer? Opening up for student art exhibitions?
#4 It's very interesting this gradual invasion of capitalist behaviour in order to keep the place open - we thinking a little bit like capitalists, talking occasionally like it, we're thinking about the bottom line all the time, we're complying with business rates, we're working out how to get discounts going all legitimate, and that strain of meeting all those things, we are now like a social enterprise but we are not a social centre in the way that I thought or think that we need. That doesn't necessarily mean that there is this pure thing out there that you do, but it means that you could pay a thousand pounds more than we are doing and still be confronting something by doing it. But at the moment we are not confronting, we are just being compliant.
#5 But confront what? What do you mean?
#4 We are not confronting anything in the city.
#1 I think it is really important, we are doing a lot of creating and we're making stuff here, and I think we have got to create and resist at the same time. Coming back to this commentary thing, all the bread and butter stuff that we say is really important to us like schools, public services all the bread and butter stuff that we've always talked about, privatisation this, that and the other. There's the biggest building in the north of England built on our doorstep, which is a complete waste of money, it's destroying the city and all that blah, blah, blah; I think we should intervene - we should create here and intervene outside. That means everything to me from occupying the offices of the people who are building it to subvertising it, to putting statements out about why we think it is wrong and why what we are doing is right. It is that dual movement of creating in here and intervening outside. Resisting outside.
#5 Yeah, but that is just creating a campaign on your own isn't it.
#1 But why not? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that?
#4 Yeah, but who are we? I am not in a group. TCP is a collective to me and I would want to seek to get everyone involved in a campaign I was going to start, and I wouldn't start it by myself. The Little London thing is difficult because it is much more of a community based thing than something where people can directly go 'Yeah, let's take MacDonald's.' It's much more difficult than that - it's like, 'Little London, don't really know it, don't live there, it's not much to do with me.' But it really is, because if you can stop PFI there then you could halt the whole process in Leeds, you can make governments shit themselves and think twice about PFI. If you stop PFI you are confronting the way in which governments have neo-liberalised their economies. You're basically putting a spanner at the bottom which goes all the way up to the top, and we are just not thinking strategically. I am not criticising, but we should maybe now start to think of us being part of social centres, not as a lifestyle choice, but more as a political strategy in itself.
#3 This is really important as it gets back to this whole 'Why are we here?', and we don't have a shared vision of that. So for a lot of people, honestly, that is not an issue. Some people in TCP are interested in putting on DIY gigs, some people are not even interested in providing cheap, healthy food - some people just want to cook. We just don't have this shared vision about halting neo-liberal policies in Leeds, honestly, for some people, what is that?
#4 Do you not think that we need to therefore change the website, our pamphlets and leaflets that we put out?
#3 We don't have any.
#4 Some things that people put out you think that that must be an amazing space if that is what they are doing, but the reality is slight different. It also means that we are potentially putting off thousands of people who could do all those things, just come down and be themselves in this space where you can do anything you want. But we have this image of being an activist's world, and people don't want to get involved with that.
#5 There is that thing as well that there is no such thing as an open space, and it is a question of trying to get that balance between being open as possible without losing yourself.
#1 I think pretty much everyone who came through the doors of TCP would agree with those bread and butter issues. That the privatisation of education is bad and that.
#3 I am sure they think that that is part of the accepted belief that I am required to have in order to use this space, sure.
#1 No, they wouldn't say 'That's nothing to do with me, I think we should close schools down.' would they though?
#3 Yeah, but they wouldn't necessarily give a shit either.
#5 No, it's not that they wouldn't give a shit, it's about saying 'Well, what can I do about it?' And what could they do about it, because I don't know?
#1 Well that's the basis to facilitate that conversation. It's not happening anywhere else in the city is it?
#5 That is one of the biggest things - those kinds of conversations are not happening here and this is not the place to have those kinds of conversations. But I don't know how you do it.
#4 I think that the cinema was supposed to be when that happened, but it doesn't because we just watch films. It is just really not conducive to having discussions because of the fucking seats.
#1 But you create an identity where TCP does intervene in that way so like, somebody reads in the paper that Common Place members said this, that and the other about, you know what I mean. It's a kind of multi-pronged.
#5 Honestly, how the fuck can TCP say. that's the trouble that people have. I have no problem talking to the media, but the media does not work on a thing where there are different voices coming from, with people from TCP thinking this and others saying that. You need to be a unified, cadre organisation in order for somebody to talk. The reason why you have 'experts' like Monbiot, or people who are involved in hierarchically organised organisations who represent movements because media does not recognise networks basically, do you know what I mean?
#4 This is interesting because it doesn't, no, unless you have got a really savvy journalist who say that, you're right, and that is why the media is a bad deal. But a., there is a load of potential with the local media - we got front page of Leeds Weekly News (not a big read) about Little London; just 'Write this, here's a picture - put it in.' - Front page! Easy, easy.
#5 I agree, but that is something you do incidentally, it might be something that you get away with, but you can't focus on trying to get a voice in the media. I just think it is a bad idea.
#4 What we could do though, let's say we had a Sunday discussion group about gentrification, PFI, we had some films and then a really good discussion and we had an action planning session for anybody who was interested in doing a campaign on it - as a Common Place anti-gentrification collective we could then network with other small businesses or groups in the city who are also being shafted by this process and create a network that would be able to be represented because it would be like 'so and so, from the Stop Shafting Us Little Small Network in Leeds said.' It wouldn't be TCP, but we could be a spark for that because we, politically see what's going on and we have got the space to do something about it. We are not a social enterprise that has got a profit margin to keep, we are a social enterprise that has a political raison d'être. That could be to create a network of.
#5 Yeah, but how do you stop gentrification in Leeds?
#4 You can't stop it, but you can fight it.
#5 Yeah, but how do you fight it?
#1 Well, one way of doing it is that it is an idea, it is a vision of the city that has been sold, and most people have bought it - these are the ingredients right - but we say we have got a living example of different ingredients here, and we put those forward and say, look at these other ingredients, other ways that you can live. And the more and more we commentate and excite and inspire people about these different ingredients, people will see them as workable and will go 'Yeah, yeah, we could do that.' It's not all about biggest building or best shop or whatever, it's about solidarity and self management. It's about having a not for profit space to hang out and read a book.
#5 But that's what we do.
#1 Yeah, but I think that we should do it more basically, and intervene more, and take it out more.
#5 I've just asked you how you fight it and you say we do what we're doing here, but you're just publicising it. I'm not having a go, but I just think that the trouble is that the reason these things aren't going on is not because people don't care, but because people just don't have a fucking clue how you get to fight, I mean, it's so fucking huge and fucking powerful basically, you know what I mean? And when I thing about it, sometimes there are things that defy political logic, things that we can't plan for, such as what is happening in France in the minute. You don't create it, we don't change the world, activists; we have to be modest and say we do fuck all. If we are lucky this place might have a tiny little intervention at some point, you know, have a positive influence on a big social movement; we might totally do that. Every now and then small groups of people, "activists" invent something, a tool like the anti-poll tax unions. That's all we've got to do, we cannot create social movements.
#1 I know, I am not saying that our ultimate aim is to foster a million people on the street, I'm not saying that. We do what we think we can do. We intervene in what ever way we can, in small ways. That might not necessarily mean seeing a million people on the streets, but that doesn't matter does it, because that's not up to us.
#5 That's what I am saying; it's not a point of us needing to go out there to campaign. To do what? How do we do it? What do we do? I've not got the fucking foggiest - if I knew I would fucking join in.
#1 I've got loads of ideas, but it's not for here is it?
#6 I think in some ways we do add more ingredients into some people's ways of thinking. A good example for me is when we did the buy nothing day and they put the free shop in the Victoria Quarter. Fuck loads of people were coming up to it, ordinary people were coming up and taking stuff. And a lot of people who were definitely not the kind of people who would shop at Harvey Nichol's, who were obviously from the council estates - chavs in track suits - were coming up and taking stuff from the free shop and really questioning the logic of Harvey Nichols. So, it doesn't create a social movement but it is a small piece of direct action that maybe made fifty to a hundred people who were passing on that day stop and speak to us and go 'Hang on, you know, we don't like this either.' Even the police were saying that they agreed, that it was a good idea we were giving free stuff out outside the posh shops.
#1 You do know something, you write pamphlets and hold workshops, discussions. We all have our own ideas and strategies...
#5 I think one thing that TCP needs is some means by which we can discuss these issues. Like what TCP is about, what's it for; do you know what I mean?