In 1985, one of the world’s greatest scientists rang the alarm. After a career in biology, Edward O Wilson was convinced that Earth was being stripped of its variety of life. Scientists hadn’t even counted all the species sharing the planet, yet they were already disappearing fast. In a paper soon to become seminal, he set out the looming catastrophe.
The chopping down of tropical rainforests meant that, within a century, about 12% of all bird species in the Amazon basin would be lost for ever. This was a mass extinction – “the most extreme for 65 million years”. Titled The Biological Diversity Crisis, his essay helped give birth to a shorthand: biodiversity. This new discipline began from the premise that all species matter – indeed, that when one dies out they all suffer.
An expert on the unphotogenic ant, Wilson wryly acknowledged “the natural human affection for big organisms”, for sleek dolphins and cute chimps. But he also knew that even a mouse “is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Bach fugue, or any other great work of art”.
Although an environmentalist, his warning applies to post-industrial Britain too. Because our economy has become more and more unbalanced, with our fortunes hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country, while we let other sectors, such as manufacturing, slide.
That last sentence is not mine, but taken word for word from David Cameron’s very first speech upon moving into No 10 in 2010. And he was right: the UK’s lack of economic diversity led it to be utterly flattened by the banking crash. Shamefully, despite identifying the problem, he did almost nothing about it.
A decade after the crash, finance grips London more tightly than ever. No longer penned into the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, it now gropes its way along the South Bank and has turned Mayfair into a shadow-banking quarter. The rest of the city centre provides butler services to the super-rich: luxury developers and estate agents, fad restaurateurs, tax-loophole spotters, reputation launderers in PR.
For Cameron’s Conservative colleagues, this is success, to be celebrated. In 2014, the capital’s then-mayor, Boris Johnson, rejoiced: “London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat.” Groovy for the great apes, not so fun for us worker ants. Economic diversity in the heart of the capital now hides out in some unlikely places. Go to Bermondsey, just a tube stop away from London Bridge. Follow the signs to the old further education college, whose students and teachers have long gone. Upstairs is a former home economics kitchen, the kind in which you tried and failed to cook an apple crumble. Except now it’s a farm.
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Over by the windows, mealworms are breeding. Running along the walls are tanks of fish. In the middle is a mini-greenhouse with huge water tanks where tomatoes and squash will sprout. Any free space is crammed with leafy green plants. And just wait till you hear the plans for a trout farm. Here, slap-bang in the middle of the capital, lies agriculture. Nestling in this abandoned college are a whole bunch of companies. And the laser cutters and 3D printers make it a manufacturing site too.
Most of all, it’s a challenge to Britain’s crocked model of how to shape a city, how to a run an economy, and how to affix value. As challenges go, it’s rough and ready, and a tad dog-eared – but it demands attention.
This deserted campus was spotted by a not-for-profit company called 3Space, which convinced the landlord to give it the keys until demolition day. Since then it has made it a base for an army of eager startups, who pay a modest rent. This income then subsidises other rooms that go free to non-profits. And one day in 2016, 3Space boss Andrew Cribb rang up a guy he’d met a while back. “Hey, Ande. Remember your crazy green idea?” he said. “Fancy doing it?”
Cribb was wrong: Ande Gregson didn’t have one crazy idea – he had a couple. The green one came from reading about food. He’d see numbers, like the UN forecast that, by 2050, 9.8 billion people would share the planet, and he’d worry: how are we going to feed all of them? Then he’d read how 1.3bn tonnes of food are wasted every year, and he’d think: I’m going to help fix this.
Him. Without government backing or a multinational’s budget. Him. With no background in food or environment. When he was nine, Gregson wanted to be a marine biologist – but as a child of the 1980s he was given a Commodore computer, and from that point it was technology all the way. His CV was peppered with names such as Apple, BT and Sky. What did he know about public sanitation?
That was a big obstacle, which he hurdled with yet more unusual thinking. He opened a laboratory – called Green Lab – which others could use to invent solutions to the looming crisis in food and waste. He wouldn’t employ any of them, but they’d share the space and the hi-tech equipment, and make their own ideas fly.
Green Lab is a makerspace, and Britain has more than 150 of them. But You can find thousands of others from Barcelona to Shenzhen. Gregson’s approach is the makerspace ethos in action. Rather than rely on big institutions to solve the food crisis, he just dived in, displaying the same bloody-mindedness that led him to compete in the Marathon des Sables (the “toughest footrace in the world”) not once but three times. Instead of snaring himself some qualifications, he brought in a pool of expertise. And when things got mucky, he got his hands dirty – clearing the kitchen of years of debris and turning old timber into benches and tables.
Makerspaces are full of such stories – of begging and borrowing, of just doing it, of fools rushing in where angel investors fear to tread. “Animal spirits” is how John Maynard Keynes referred to it, the bullishness that gets businesses investing and consumers spending. In his canonical The Maker Movement Manifesto, Mark Hatch writes: “Make. Just make. This is the key. The world is a better place as a participatory sport. Being creative, the act of creating and making, is actually fundamental to what it means to be human.”
Britons get their furniture from Ikea, their lunch in Pret and their love lives off Tinder. We buy, break and junk – and to hell with the environmental consequences. Instead of that pre-digested individualism, Gregson and other makerspacers want to improvise, recycle and collaborate. Gregson calls Green Lab a “Willy Wonka factory”: a crew of enthusiasts pursuing their own outlandish projects, all to do with making the most of our food supply and reducing waste. Fish skins are turned into leather; tiny green vegetables are grown in repurposed airducts. At Entocycle, black soldier flies are bred on spent grain from local breweries to turn them into a high-protein meal for salmon – a possible replacement for the far more land-intensive soya beans.
This work has social value, yet most of the people here wouldn’t get space to do it elsewhere in the capital. The fish tanner, Anoushka Cole, is going through the same London hell as most other 28-year-olds: the only way she can afford her small flatshare on the city’s outskirts is by cramming three people into two bedrooms. A former cycle courier, Jon Katona spent half a decade carting around heavy, urgent deliveries on a precarious contract with no sick pay or holidays – a work-history that leaves him with little cash to get his sustainable drinks business off the ground.
Gregson has a solution: outfits such as Entocycle, which has gained funding, can use Green Lab but “silver will cross my palm before you walk through the door”. Others such as Katona pay nothing, but are expected to help out with the composting system.
Politicians in Westminster and London’s City Hall have essentially created a business model for the capital in which young people are expected to live and work in intolerable conditions; that in turn starves the city of the new ideas and energy on which it relies. Makerspaces are usually found in rundown buildings, with rudimentary toilets and equipment straining under all that shared use. They are small-scale factories, run not by a big company but by communities of the idiosyncratic and inventive. They are also oases of cheapness in a city that extorts money from its residents – and the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs knew the value of cheap.
“For really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” Green Lab bears that out to the letter: it’s a home for the genuinely speculative in an economy that thrives on financial speculation.
Politicians love makerspaces – for all the wrong reasons. They coo over their digital technology and are wowed by their occupants’ relative youth. Yet they overlook how makerspaces’ tolerance for the uneconomic makes them so important – and so fragile in a city with galloping rents.
Green Lab runs on borrowed things – most of all, borrowed time. By the end of this year, it will be booted out of that college, which will itself be bulldozed to make way for new flats and shops – and London will have lost a bit more of its economic diversity. In just the seven years to 2013, the capital saw almost 604 hectares – about 750 football pitches-worth – of industrial land disappear to make way for housing. The simple-minded assertion that London needs more houses, so often chanted by politicians and pundits alike, takes little account of how affordable they should be and where their occupants are meant to work if the space for employment has been magicked into concierge towers.
Gregson is “building a piggybank” to move elsewhere, but is resigned to being edged out of the centre. This is happening to makerspaces across the city. Some die natural deaths: their animal spirits only carrying them so far. But others suffer the lethal blow of runaway rents. Machines Room is about to lose its east London home because its rent has doubled. “We’ve been talking to people for ages about possible new sites,” says Nat Hunter of Machines Room. “Just. Not. Happening.”
David Cameron promised Britain that “the new jobs, the new products, the new ideas that will lift us up will be born in the factories”. Although they will never create thousands of jobs, makerspaces do fit the “new ideas” bit. Britain now does proportionately less research and development than Slovenia, but a place such as Green Lab is full of experiment and innovation.
If politicians really do want to do more with makerspaces than use them for photo-ops, they could do so cheaply and relatively easily. Local councils could identify empty sites for makerspaces to set up, and could collect registers of residents and other businesses who are willing to help with accounts and marketing and old kit. Most of all, they could lean on Ikea, DFS and other retailers to tell their shoppers about these nearby scrappy little places (who pose no threat to such giants), where kitchens and furniture can be customised by young artisans who are inventive, and a damn sight more interesting to talk to than a self-service checkout.
None of that requires money – just some of the effort and inventiveness shown by the makerspaces themselves. The reward would be young people getting a start in their careers, and a city retaining a bit of economic diversity.
• We’d like to hear about your experiences of makerspaces, or similar. Share your stories via our form, or email them to alternatives@theguardian.com, and we will be in touch
• This week’s instalment of The Alternatives forms part of the Guardian’s Upside series, a project focusing on possible solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Send us your ideas for further coverage to theupside@theguardian.com
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
