‘Concrete Soldiers UK’: Screening of the Housing Documentary I Narrate at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, Tuesday February 26

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Tuesday February 26, at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, will be the first screening of 2019 for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary film about the housing crisis, directed by Nikita Woolfe, which I narrate. I’m very pleased to note that, recently, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ was awarded ‘Best Documentary Film’ in the European Cinematography Awards for 2018. You can also now watch it via Amazon Prime.

The Facebook event page for the screening on February 26 is here, the listing on the Rio’s website is here, and if you’d like to attend for a reduced rate of £5, quote “£5 Tuesday Deal” when you get to the box office (it can’t be used to book online).

Focusing on the struggles against the cynical estate ‘regeneration’ industry, using examples in south London — the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth — the film demonstrates the scale of the problems faced by those living on estates, which councils want to knock down in deals with private developers and dubious housing associations. Crucially, however, the film also offers hope to campaigners, suggesting that people power can triumph.

The trailer is below, via YouTube:

At the screening we’re also launching ‘Inspire2Resist’, a handbook for anyone resisting ‘regeneration’, or who wants to know more about it, which we’ve compiled from the feedback received since the film came out, and through our own research. Niki and I spoke about it on Dissident Island Radio this week, in an excellent interview for this fortnight’s show, which is broadcast at 9pm tonight (Friday February 15), and which will be available as a podcast next week.

We launched ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ just over a year ago, and last year took it on an unconventional tour, showing it to housing groups and other interested parties, and travelling as far as Scotland, where we spent an inspiring weekend with the activists of Living Rent — primarily seeking to rein in rip-off private landlords — in Edinburgh and particularly in Glasgow. It also had resonance in Lewisham, where I live, and where I’ve spent the last year and a half involved in the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, a struggle to save a community garden and a block of structurally sound council flats in Deptford from destruction by Lewisham Council and the developer Peabody.

Niki describes the event at the Rio as “an evening of films about regeneration and people power”, and I’m pleased to confirm that some very interesting short films are also being shown, as well as ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, and that Niki and I will take part in a Q&A session following the screening.

The schedule is as follows:

7pm: A short film about Ridley Road Market, a vibrant street market just down the road from the Rio Cinema, where developers are circling like vultures.

7.10pm: Screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK.’

8.10pm: A work in progress by Tom Cordell, the director of ‘Utopia London’, about Macintosh Court, featured in ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a sheltered housing project in Lambeth whose residents saved it from destruction in 2015, but are now faced with a new attack by Lambeth Council.

8.30pm: Q&A with Nikita Woolfe and Andy Worthington.

Further information is below:

About ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’

An exhilarating and inspirational journey which reveals the battles being fought against the big developers and local councils who are splitting apart communities in the name of progress. Against all odds, these campaigners are winning and showing the way for people power. Interspersed with surprising facts about the UK housing crisis and the Grenfell Tower disaster, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ shows how it all feeds into the ethnic and social cleansing of cities.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ is produced by Woolfe.Vision, a film collective working to inspire social change.

About Macintosh Court

For the last 15 months, the tenants at Macintosh Court, a sheltered housing scheme for retired people in Lambeth, have been subjected to endless shoddy building work. In despair they called in the building’s original architect, Kate Macintosh (herself retired and 81 years old) to help them fight to save their homes. But at each stage the building’s owners, Lambeth Council, seem more interested in covering up what has gone wrong than fixing the building. What could they be hiding? This film is a journey into the bizarre world where private business is remaking London, and where nothing is ever what it seems.

See you in Dalston on February 26, hopefully!

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.