this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Where I live there's no community though, there are no volunteers or "odd jobs", people keep to themselves and don't speak in public, there are no local groups and if there are, I've never seen them, the only local people I even found on the internet was randos on nextdoor complaining about street buskers 100s of miles away.
I always hear this shit about organising and community but it's like from another dimension or something from a movie and always so vague, I've yet to see any organising or community IRL or any instructions as to what this actually means step by step.
Do you have a local Food Not Bombs, DSA, PSL, or other org?
No, I'm from the UK. There was an anarchist fed in London that ran a solidarity cafe at a gay club during the day, though eventually shifting to mostly zoom calls, but it closed because no one went there, probably because they just had Facebook and a mailing list and finding them organically online was almost impossible.
I could not walk around the City of London without coming across all kinds of political and civil service organizations handing out flyers or wanting me to get involved in some kind of petition or action.
You may also go to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where there are usually various causes and political orientations present.
If there is a record store near to you, that is another place where people often begin to organize. Check out the flyers and posters they have, often on bulletin boards or in stacks in counters of whatever.
I wasn’t there long enough to find any good book stores, but I would be shocked if there weren’t at least a few anarchist/collectivist/leftist book stores scattered about.
Others have mentioned libraries, which I’ll second. If there are any community centers or local government offices, these will also sometimes have postings dedicated to various causes.
Odd tbh, the only flyers and stickers I saw was Snapchats for buying weed and the occasional TERF one.
The only record store I saw was operated by two elderly men who seemed extremely irritated at the fact they had customers and especially me (store's in Notting Hill), and low-balled harder than pawn stars (I needed money to get to work once so had the misfortune), they also seemed to be part of a chain.
At speaker's corner I def saw political orgs too, but it was either anti-vaxxers/anti-maskere or TERFs usually.
I did find one cafe in Islington with pride flags, but there wasn't anything besides that, certainly no "bulletin boards" and the coffee was the most disgusting swill I had, don't think I've actually seen an independent book shop that wasn't Waterstones or WHSmith in my 8 years living there.
Only thing I saw close to a community centre was a mormon church, which was never open, but often had entertaining crazy spiceheads outside of it that would chase people down the street on occasion.
I guess it depends on the area. I was also advised to look on Facebook, which is a good idea as I've never been on there before. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
P.S. Btw just to avoid confusion in the future: "City of London" especially when capitalized in this way as a specific name is actually a bit different from "London": it's a district within London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London semi-autonomously operated by the CoL Corporation, judging by you mentioning Speaker's corner I think you meant just London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London which is the stuff around the City of London.
We had completely different experiences. I honestly can’t believe we were in the same spaces.
And I know about the City. That’s why I said it that way. Because the City specifically is where I met an awful lot of folks out organizing. Like I said: I lived there for a while.
Yeah we def had. And Aaah fair enough about the City. I've not lived in the City, only in North London, for a long time quite close to Hyde Park so I'm pretty familiar with speaker's corner.
I do remember also seeing pro-Russian war protestors by Bayswater next to the Ukrainian protesters outside the Ruski embassy once. It was pretty funny because between both groups there were like 10 people total and most people just went around them silently ignoring them like typical Londoners about everything, occasionally granting them with a tut