Each week YT spends Wednesday at Limehouse Town Hall tending the Yoshi stack and participating in hall activities, not least a recently convened food coop.
We adopted the Co-operation Town model of mini co-op where groups of max 20 individuals select from local wholeseller lists of seasonal organic vegetables for £100 budget. A basket of goodies for a fiver each week can easily get topped up with free extras when there is surplus produce.
The torrent of fruit and vegetables arriving to London markets does result in food waste that these initiative could help mitigate. This weeks Christmas box was doubled up and here we are after sorting out the 23 individual boxes which included pears, onions, parsnips carrots and of course brussel sprouts!
Last week we got to visit the newly completed apartment buildings at Church Grove in Ladywell. RUSS is a Community Land Trust whose members campaigned, raised funds together and negotiated hard with Lewisham Council planning for over a decade or more before at last reaching completion. The freshly planted gardens gardens will see their first spring in 2025 and all the spaces have been fully allocated and occupied.
Each apartment is equipped with Openreach high speed fibre termination points ready for residents to make up their own minds for broadband supply. The options remain limited but Zen have been the successfully supplying a good deal at £35 pcm. FTTP is a leap of quality and speeds compared to legacy ADSL most homes in the area still pay the same price for. A single 1gb fibre lease line may well have been more cost effective between the 36 homes but perhaps in anticipation of difficulties distributing access and delegating such costs, a more conventional solution was chosen.
Down at ground level you will find public community gardens, a good size event and meeting space, laundry and playground for residents. We met with Liz, resident from one of the two shared houses and visited others along the walkways linking the two blocks.
Spacestudios invited SPC to quote for installation of distributed wifi access at their latest artist studio building with 34 studios on 4th floor of Attic Storage in Enfield. A BT lease line fibre service is a long term commitment and substantial expense despite prices leveling off in recent years. Rather than assume a new service installation (the building already has fibre at first floor for landlords) we visited the neighbouring business centre Gor-Ray House and talked with their network architect about the range of services they already offer their in-house manged offices and how a suitable alternative to engaging directly with BT might be possible with them.
Either way service will need to be routed up into the coms rack via this service shaft which seems to rise from the ground floor. It looks a bit tight to climb so let’s hope there is an acceptable pathway to follow that leads through to next building.
Back in the nineties we first became aware of telecom regulations not least those governing the network interlinking of buildings which prohibits any crossing of the kings highway with cable without a telecom license. It was this realisation that prompted us to install the first wireless ethernet link between Winchester and Soho wharves on opposite sides of Clink Street in London Bridge. In 2000 we began co-ordinating Consume, the community wireless initiative which explored how to distribute unmetered telecoms and formalise relationships between those sharing access, with a Pico Peering agreement.
Today wireless data technologies permeate every environment and use light licensing to govern consumer uses. We have a pair of 60ghz radios with which to bridge short gaps that run at up to 1gb/s where previously this would have been completed with 2.4ghz or 5ghz systems.
