Halfway Through the Park / Still Building the Future

Friends,

We’re halfway through the Outdoor Lectures and we’re still slightly amazed that this works.

Not because lectures belong inside buildings, they really don’t, but because every week we’ve watched parks become temporary infrastructures for collective imagination. Blankets. Trees. Curious strangers. Dogs wandering through discussions about organising resistance to a climate disaster. Someone always bringing snacks.

We’ve Been Turning Parks into Classrooms

So far, we’ve body-worked our way through relationship anarchy. Drifted into Yoga Nidra while asking what an ecological identity might actually be like. Followed snails towards slower institutions. Treated car parks as contested political terrain before building collective radio stations. Picked apart toxic things, imagined cities that nourish instead of extract and traced the physical structure of the Internet.

Bodies. Moss. Concrete. Sketchbooks. Shared attention. Serious play.

This is education as something we make together rather than something delivered to us.

The Second Half Starts Now

We’re only warming up.

The next run of Outdoor Lectures moves through self-organised neighbourhoods, seasonal time, DIY sketchbooks, new alphabets, sunprinting, solar cooking, stories that shape worlds, camera-less photography, learning otherwise, uncertainty, musical madness, mapping resistance and psychogeography.

Less curriculum. More field experiment.

We’re interested in what knowledge becomes once it leaves fluorescent lighting and returns to sunlight, weather, conversation and the occasional passing pigeon. Every session is another small rehearsal for the kinds of cultures we want to inhabit: decentralised, joyful, practical and impossible to neatly categorise.

Come for one. Come for all. Bring a notebook. Borrow one. Get your hands dirty.

Keep an eye on our WhatsApp broadcast group for details of specific lectures and locations as they’re announced. You can also follow us on Instagram for updates, photos and last-minute park-based adventures.

Next Stop: Scrappy Bookbinding workshop / 18 July

On 18 July, we’re holding our Scrappy Bookbinding workshop for the Haringey Festival of Culture at the All Good Bookshop.

Using recovered materials and gathered scraps, we’ll stitch and staple together (note)books. Our books will be made from forgotten partially used sketchbooks, misprinted paper, cardboard and paper bags.

With a unique combination of materials, no two books will be alike. The nature of this form of bookbinding is meant to be playful. Experimenting is encouraged! No experience needed! Materials will be provided, but feel free to bring along your own paper scraps.

You can buy tickets to the event from the All Good Bookshop website.

See you in the park. Then around the bookbinding table.

The London School of Solarpunk