~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to comment on this item, please go to our forum at: http://kennington.informe.com/
Kennington Association
c/- 235B Kennington Lane SE11 5QU
T: 020 7793 0268
E: KenningtonAssn@aol.com
DOWN’S SYNDROME
SATURDAY PLAY GROUP
WHEN: The next session is SATURDAY MARCH 7th 2009
The hall has also been booked for the following Saturday sessions:
SATURDAY APRIL 18th
SATURDAY MAY 9th
SATURDAY JUNE 6th
SATURDAY JULY 11th
WHAT TIME: The sessions run from 10 am to 12
WHERE: At the
HOW DO I GET THERE: Lambeth Walk is between the Imperial War Museum and Lambeth Bridge just off Lambeth Road, it is well served by local buses, 3, 59 and 159 from the south (Brixton, Streatham), 344 and 360 from Vauxhall/Clapham and Elephant and Castle/Liverpool St. On street parking restrictions do not apply on a Saturday and nor does the Congestion Charge.
WHO CAN GO: The sessions are open to all parents and carers of children with Down’s Syndrome and are run as informal ‘drop in’ sessions, you can just turn up at any time, have a tea/coffee and stay for as long or as little as you wish, depending on your other commitments.
Siblings are very welcome and we endeavour to have a range of toys and activities available for children of all ages.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST: It’s FREE (kindly funded by the China Walk TRA and Ethelred Family Centre).
Hope to see you there
Best wishes
Parent of Amy, aged 3
Email: richard.hurry@infocorp.co.uk
Horses have dominated the life of the award-winning artist, first as a boy tipster, then as an owner and now as creator of the monumental white horse sculpture poised to grace the Kentish skyline. But, he tells Tim Adams, his new show is inspired by another love - football
Turner prize winning artist Mark Wallinger, photographed in his studio last month. Photograph: Karen Robinson
Last Tuesday was one of those days for Mark Wallinger. Not only was his proposal to build a 50-metre-tall white horse beside the A2 in Kent chosen to become the largest public sculpture Britain has ever seen, but the real racehorse in which he has a stake, Riviera Red, romped home in the 2.40 at Lingfield. When I saw him on Wednesday afternoon, at London's Hayward Gallery, where he was putting the finishing touches to the show he is curating, he was clutching a copy of the Racing Post. The paper carried a headline about the previous day's events that was the stuff of his childhood dreams: "Wallinger's amazing double".
Mark Wallinger
The Russian Linesman
Hayward Gallery, London SE1
Starts 18 February Until 4 May then on tour
As a boy in Chigwell, Essex, Wallinger was obsessed with racehorses. He remembers tearing home from school in 1966, aged seven, to see Arkle win his third Gold Cup. Wallinger's other passion was for drawing and he would look at the George Stubbs thoroughbreds in the National Gallery on visits up to town with his parents and go home and try to emulate them, "with no other aspiration, you know, than to try to get the legs right".
Two books changed his life. The first was James Joyce's Ulysses - "just the idea of telling a life from a single day, the fantastic comedy of it" - on which he based his MA thesis in fine art at Goldsmiths College. The second was a copy of the flat racing form book for 1976, given to him by his Uncle Dick, which he studied when he was supposed to be revising for exams.
To start with, when he was too young to bet, Wallinger would give his dad tips. Later, he got to the races whenever he could. What drew him there, partly, he told me as talked in his studio in Kennington, south London, a couple of weeks ago, was that it gave him a way of thinking about Britain, about bloodlines and ownership and politics. "Racing has always been a picture of this country, although distorted because there is no middle class." It also satisfied an adolescent desire to predict the future. "There is that great rush you get when you pick a winner. It's the momentary illusion you have some control over life." Wallinger laughs loudly at the idea.
At art college in the 80s, first at Chelsea, then at Goldsmiths, Wallinger made efforts to keep his hobby separate from his work. Racing was his secret life and he feared if he exploited it, it would lose its magic. However, he couldn't help himself in the end. "The fact is any artist eventually ends up using everything they care about."
One of Wallinger's earliest successes came in his painted series of Stubbs homages Race, Class, Sex which were bought in 1992 by Charles Saatchi. Inevitably, he had fantasies about purchasing a racehorse of his own, "the ultimate working class dream", which he realised, in syndicate, in 1993. He paid for the horse partly with a limited-edition sculpture and named it A Real Work of Art.
He meant that, too. Wallinger is quite uncomfortable talking about his work - protective of its mysteries, wary of pretension, self-deprecating. The closest he gets to describing the kind of thing he is searching for in his art is when he recalls approaching Sir Mark Prescott, head of the most historic yard at Newmarket, to train his horse. "Prescott gave me this talk about racing for an hour or more," he says. "He had broken his back in an accident as a younger man and had lain flat out for a year thinking about horses. His insight was extraordinary. We walked round the yard at dusk, you know. Prescott would go to each stable and turn on one light and you would be confronted each time by this amazing living presence, just coming at you out of the gloom."
Wallinger recognised the sensation, that sense of sudden awe. "I spent three months in Rome at the British school there," he says. "You go into a church, put your 500 lire in and you come face to face with a Caravaggio; it is absolutely immediate. Everything else in the church looks fusty and irrelevant, but that impact is timeless."
In the end, A Real Work of Art ran once in earnest and went lame. "We'd kind of hoped she would win the Oaks," Wallinger says of what might have been. In the end, the horse only won him a Turner Prize nomination. And after that, for a while, racehorses disappeared from his art, if not from his attention. When, however, he was invited last year to submit an idea for a monumental sculpture to give some sense of symbolic coherence to the mostly chaotic "London Gateway" new town at Ebbsfleet, a horse was his first instinct. The more he thought, the more appropriate it felt.
He had in mind the great bronze age hill carvings. "The site is where the chalk of the North Downs goes into the Thames," he says, retracing that idea. "And then you've got Epsom at the other end of the Downs; then I was thinking thoroughfares, Watling Street, pilgrims, all the immigrants and travellers who had come and gone to London. It seemed to fit." He wanted the horse to "look as real as possible", like a Stubbs in a field, but to be as big as the Statue of Liberty. It was only subsequently that he realised someone had worked all this out before: the white horse is already the symbol of Kent ("... the emblem of Horsa, the brother of Hengest, who defeated the King Vortigern near Aylesford ...")
Things often seem to work out like this for Wallinger. He has a quiet genius for capturing exactly the spirit required for a place and for a moment. His Ecce Homo for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square at the millennium, a human-sized messiah in a crown of barbed wire, looked like the closest we'll get to a second coming ("I wanted to somehow point out our squeamishness about saying what we were celebrating was 2,000 years since the birth of Christ," Wallinger suggests).
Equally well judged, in a different way, was his recreation of Brian Haw's Parliament Square peace protest in the Tate. What was conceived as a copy became an immediate memorial to a loss of the right to protest. On the day Wallinger got the go-ahead to produce his work, the real thing was carted away by police. It was only when he set about installing the show that he realised half of it fell within New Labour's draconian exclusion zone around the palace of Westminster - it was technically illegal.
"The law prohibiting protest was pretty extraordinary, it seemed to me," he says. "You can't mention Magna Carta without sounding like Dave Spart, but these are big issues. Brian Haw told me to piss off the first time I approached him, but after that we got on well."
In finding these serendipities for his art, Wallinger talks about "following his nose and then confirming it with lots of research". As a result, he is that rare beast, a conceptual artist whose concepts get richer the longer you look and think. He has no interest in repeating himself ("Part of the tragedy of the art market bubble is that people started churning out trademark products"), beyond the fact that "in each case there has to be a bit of a magic leap at some point, something real has to be at stake for both the artist and the audience".
The most memorable instance of this dual challenge was Wallinger's film Sleeper, in which he dressed up in a bear suit and prowled the glass-walled Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for 10 nights. When you meet Wallinger, a big, amiable character who softens his intellect with laughter, you can't get the bear quite out of your head, it has become part of him somehow. He looks back on it now, with a grizzly guffaw, as "probably the most fun I had ever had".
This being Wallinger, there was a complex backstory to the idea. It came to him first when he was at the bear enclosure in Berlin Zoo and came across a big sign explaining how the brown bears were not allowed to breed any more because there are too many bears in captivity. That struck him as poignant, lonely and full of Cold War significances. "Not least because the brown bear is the symbol of Berlin - and the bears in Berlin Zoo were on an island and the zoo itself had always been an island in this divided city ..." Anyway, he had a feeling that Berliners might respond to the surprising sight of a human bear trapped in a night-time gallery.
He was right. He had feared it might be dull mooching about in his bear costume in the early hours, wondered if he should smuggle a Walkman in under it. But in the event he wasn't bored for a second.
Did he discover his inner bear?
"Most of the time, there was some activity outside the glass; people were bringing things for the bear, little gifts which they would leave outside. Or they would try to communicate. I quickly felt I had a responsibility to them."
He suffered for his art. "It was damn hot. I would take the suit off after a night and put it on a radiator and it would just about be dry of sweat by the next night."
On the seventh morning, as he was taking off his suit, a man who had been taking photographs of him wondered if he had seen "the other bear"? They walked around the back of the gallery in the half-light and Wallinger was confronted with his ursine double peering in at where he had been. "The suit was identical," he recalls. "We went to try to approach him and he stayed in character, completely." It was unnerving. The other bear was with a young woman. Wallinger asked her if she knew who he was. "No," she said. "We thought the bear had broken out."
Were there any moments when Wallinger lost his own bearings?
"Well," he says. "I do remember being there at 3.30 in the morning and for once there really wasn't anyone around. And I could see the Philharmonic Building and Potsdamer Platz and here I was all alone in the world looking out of this bear's mouth. Strange thoughts do come into your mind at that point." Not least of them were these two: "It's a funny old life, isn't it?" And: "Mark, how did you get from Chigwell to here?"
Wallinger was from a family of fishmongers. "My dad was a frustrated writer," he says, "obsessed with American detective stories. Him and my mum left school at 13, then the war came along and he had to take over the family fish shop." Wallinger used to go with his dad to the market in an old Lyons Maid van. "It had a big hole in the floor under the passenger seat and you could see the road going by - I thought it was terrific."
When frozen fish came in, his dad was forced to look for another line of work. "Such was his naivety he went for a job at the press shop at Ford's in Dagenham thinking it was to do with journalism. He found it wasn't, but he took the job anyway." Sometime later, he went into life insurance.
Wallinger is 50 now, but the Essex boy he was never seems far away; he is childless but in some ways childlike. "The whole identity thing was a big thing for me. You have to be true to where you come from." At art college, he was turned off by "this Esperanto art that could have come from anywhere. It was all American abstraction, it was more like a creed." Working figuratively, as he did, was a minority sport. The life-drawers were all rounded up and put in a little room.
At Chelsea, there was a course called "Is there life after art school?" The short answer to that, at the time, was no. The course taught you how to sign on, advised you not to get a job that interested you too much. Wallinger followed the advice.
He got himself a pound a week studio with no electricity in Brixton, a job at the Communist party bookshop Collet's and signed up for the MA at Goldsmiths. At the time, no one thought that being a Young British Artist would be a lucrative career option.
When he started teaching at Goldsmiths, he watched that fact change. Damien Hirst arrived. "I used to give him the odd tutorial, but I was only six years older. It was a bit 'who are you?', but it was clear he was going to be a major player. At that point, people thought he would be a kind of Malcolm McLaren figure. He was doing spot paintings and medicine cabinets. I remember he had a show in Windsor and asked me if I fancied going along. I didn't really, to be honest."
Wallinger got roped into the Sensation cabal by Saatchi, but he never felt he belonged. "To a degree, there was a sense they were Thatcher's children. They had all that entrepreneurial can-do and stuff. I was old Labour really and never had that." In the long run, that has been liberating for Wallinger. "The big advantage of coming from my generation was the lack of expectation of making a fortune out of it."
As a result, he has felt free to follow his obsessions and hunches. The show he is guest-curating at the Hayward, which will go on tour, is a kind of autobiography of these obsessions. Called The Russian Linesman, it allows Wallinger to pursue his interest in what he calls thresholds, disputed boundaries, the moments in time and space and form when one thing may become another. The show, half hung when I saw it, has the feel of one of those Victorian museums of curios, eclectic but unified by a singular sensibility.
It includes life masks of Blake and Coleridge, dioramas of Nuremberg commissioned by Hitler, film of tightrope walker Philippe Petit walking between the Twin Towers, unnerving footage from borderlands - in the former Yugoslavia, and Pakistan - Robert Hooke's engraving of a flea, to name but a few. Wallinger makes sense of it all in a wonderful precise catalogue essay, which also acts as a primer to his interest in the way each of us internalises big historical shifts.
Some of his walk-on parts in history are genuinely uncanny and he leaves them at that. He spent the afternoon before 9/11 cutting out postcards of jet planes, removing an aircraft-shaped space in the sky from each of them and pinning them to a white wall. When the Berlin Wall came down, he was in Hamburg exhibiting his Subbuteo re-enactment of the disputed goal in the 1966 World Cup final (hence The Russian Linesman). He had made the piece as a little cameo of ambiguity and patriotism, but even as he was showing it, one side, West Germany, ceased to exist. "I heard the news on the radio in a taxi and within the hour there were more Trabants on the streets than BMWs."
Wallinger is a remarkable visual poet of these weird little epiphanies and his show is clever at placing you in all sorts of no-man's-lands. Some things, I guess, though, are beyond dispute.
Was Geoff Hurst's goal over the line or not?
"I was watching the final on holiday on the Isle of Wight," Wallinger recalls. "I'm a West Ham fan. Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst lived up the road in Chigwell. Was it over the line? Of course it was ..."
Early life
Born in Chigwell, Essex, in 1959. His father was a fishmonger who later moved into life insurance and his mother an office worker. He was educated at Loughton College, Chelsea Art College and Goldsmiths, where he later taught.
Career
1990: Creates Capital, a series of large paintings of his friends dressed up as homeless people, which are bought and later exhibited by Charles Saatchi.
1992 Saatchi buys Race, Class, Sex, his Stubbs-homage horse paintings.
1993 Buys a racehorse, calls it A Real Work of Art, and races it.
2000 His sculpture Ecce Home, a life-size figure of Christ, adorns the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
2001 Represents Britain at the Venice Biennale.
2007 Wins the Turner prize for State Britain, his recreation of anti-war activist Brian Haw's Parliament Square protest. For the Turner exhibition he showed Sleeper, in which he wandered the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at night dressed in a bear suit.
2009 Wins the commission to create a massive work of public art in Ebbsfleet, Kent.
Personal life
Lives with his partner, the artist Anna Barriball, in south London.
Ally Carnwath
• The Russian Linesman runs at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1 from Wednesday to 4 May and then tours
By Glen Owen
Last updated at 10:05 PM on 14th February 2009
Alistair Darling took cheap lodgings with one of the peers at the centre of the 'cash for amendments' scandal while he was claiming nearly £20,000 a year in accommodation expenses.
Before he moved into his Downing Street apartment in 2007, the Chancellor was bedding down in a South London flat owned by Lord Moonie, one of four Lords accused last month of offering to influence legislation in exchange for money from lobbyists.
According to electoral roll records, Mr Darling rented the Kennington flat - which Lord Moonie bought from Gordon Brown in 1992 - between 2003 and 2006. Lord Moonie, who was also living there at the time, sold the flat for £265,000 in 2006.
Alistair Darling in 2006, when he was renting a flat owned by Lord Moonie, right
During the time Mr Darling stayed there, a typical rent for that kind of accommodation in that area would be around £125 a week.
Over that three-year period, Mr Darling claimed £50,183 - an average of £321 a week - on his second-home allowance.
Up until 2004, under Commons rules, Mr Darling was obliged to nominate his London digs as his main home and his £1million family home in Edinburgh as his second home.
Last night, it was unclear whether he had kept London as his main residence but between 2001 and 2007 he claimed a total of £101,406 on his second-home allowance.
Mr Darling's arrangement bears certain similarities to the row involving Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's expenses for a 'second home'.
Between 2003 and 2005, Lord Moonie claimed an average £387 a week on his MP's second-home allowance - a significant amount given that he bought his constituency home in Kirkcaldy for just £60,000 in 1985.
If he was nominating his flatshare with Mr Darling as his second home then he was claiming more than three times the market rent from taxpayers.
Mr Darling bought the Edinburgh house where he lives with his wife Margaret - who was brought up by a single mother on an Edinburgh council estate - and their two teenage children for £570,000 in 1998.
Experts predict it would now easily be worth £1million, despite the economic downturn.
Neither Mr Darling nor Lord Moonie was available for comment last night.
News
Pissoirs yet to take off
Thursday, 12 February 2009
he pissoir on Clapham Common South Side was removed
OPEN-AIR toilets – or pissoirs – costing £200,000 were installed months ago, but none have ever been used.
The urinals rise from the ground when activated and are designed to stop people urinating in streets and doorways.
The three French-style pissoirs cost Labour-run Lambeth council £30,000 each and another £20,000 to install.
A fourth, on Clapham Common, had to be removed last year when it was found council officers had breached planning rules by placing it on parkland.
The others are in Brixton’s Electric Avenue, St Luke’s Avenue in Clapham and Kennington Lane, Vauxhall.
All three are fully operational, but have yet to be brought into service.
A council spokesman said: “The pissoirs are fully functional and operational, but there have been slight delays in bringing them into service.
“We are waiting on the delivery of extra hand-held controller devices as we want to make sure we have two sets of controllers for each facility so that there are spares.
“There is some remedial work that needs to be done to the footpath near the Brixton pissoir and it has been decided not to open that one until the work to remove trip hazards has been completed.”
The spokesman said the council was “keen to launch the three units together” and was hopeful they would be in use shortly.
Email: newsdesk@slp.co.uk
Kennington Association
Monday 2nd February 2009
Dear Neighbours,
Our Chair puts pen to paper
Happy New Year! Perhaps celebrations were a bit muted for some of you due to the 'credit crunch' - I know some locally who have lost their jobs, others whose positions are far from secure, many who are having to make cut backs and some facing crippling debts. Not such a happy new year from this perspective; however, it doesn't equate that 'economic gloom' equals 'community gloom'. Far from it. It is during the harsher times that belonging to a community, which shares and looks out for one another, becomes a real asset to our lives. Whilst there is always more that we can do to improve our community, there is much that is good and valuable about it. I know there are a huge amount of other exciting groups and activities that work hard to make our area thrive. ‘Hats off’ to all who offer time and energy to make our community far from gloomy.
Ethiopian Millennium Summer Festival in
Thanks to an ‘Awards for All’ grant of £8,085, ACE-UK managed to stage a successful Ethiopian cultural festival on 23rd August 2008 in
Annual General Meeting at The Little Apple PH
We are very grateful to The Little Apple PH for generously hosting our AGM in October. KA members will find a copy of the draft minutes enclosed.
Secret Santa
Great news: with generous donations from His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales Duke of Cornwall, and The Dog House PH, towards Secret Santa we were able to build on the Art Auction funds and deliver a cheque for £1,650 to
Welcome Pack
The Kennington Welcome pack has come on in leaps and bounds since last year. Submissions were eventually received on almost all suggested topics; however, the task of editing all of the information so that it is consistent and will fit into one pack is large, and has stalled slightly. Consequently, about half of the Welcome Pack has now been placed online by James Hatts (who runs the London SE1 website) so that it can be viewed by members of the Kennington Association, and the other half is due to appear soon. Once all of the material is up on the website, we hope to be in a better position to decide how to proceed with printing the material. Some fantastic photos were also provided in 2008, and these should appear in the printed version. The URL for the website to view the first few submissions is here: http://www.welcometokennington.org.uk/
Bazaar – Saturday 21st February
The total raised in November’s bazaar was nearly £700 after expenses. A marvellous result and we thank so much the entire Bazaar Team for their very hard work. Special mention must go to Gisella who, with her unflagging energy and attention to detail in the background, pulled together the best team ever! Our next bazaar will be held on Saturday, 21st February. Until we are sure that Sinan’s van will be available to us, we’d be very grateful to hear from anyone else who might be able to offer us a back-up van. The Pelican Nursery that occupies the hall during the day is now open until 6pm on Friday evenings, so we are not able to accept deliveries or begin setting up until after this time. Along with KA membership fees, bazaar proceeds are crucial to our cash flow so we do hope you will make the most of this opportunity for a clear out and the chance to grab a few bargains!
‘Tree of Hope’ on Kennington Cross
Thanks to community fund-raising efforts and a grant from the Princes Ward purse the lights have now arrived and will be installed over the next month with a view to having a switching on ceremony at Easter time. These LED lights, which use very little energy, are envisaged by many to be a symbol of hope particularly in response to some recent tragic events.
Kennington Village Fete – Sunday 7th June 2009
The fourth Village Fete will take place in
Annual Autumn Art Auction at City & Guilds Art School – Thursday 17th September
Last year’s Auction raised over £2,600 (less expenses), which enabled us to donate £500 to the Art School bursary fund and set aside funds for a banner to be designed by a student and hung on the railings outside the school for this year’s Auction. The rest of the profit raised went directly to our Secret Santa scheme as usual. We are very grateful to the community and artists for contributing works, to Red Devil Self Storage for housing the artwork, and for pledges and promises from local businesses including Rimmington Vian, Kennington Tandoori, William Rose (formerly Hester’s) butchers, The Dog House PH, Marsh Ruby, Amici Kennington, Franklins, Morphic Design, Pop-In Hair & Beauty, The Cut Hair & Beauty, Tai Chi UK and Tomorrow’s People. This year’s Auction will again take place at City & Guilds Art School on Thursday, 17 September 2009 with viewing the evening before.
Hade Lbi Eritrean Cultural Group in Kennington
Hade Lbi Eritrean Community Association would like to inform the KA membership that we have decided to freeze for the moment our association with KA. We have been operating for the last 4 and a half years teaching local Eritrean children their language and culture. We have achieved greatly in our objectives with our young people; however, since September, due to many parents leaving the borough for reasons of children's schooling, the participation of parents has slowed down. We had been offered, in principle, funds from Capital Community Foundation’s Grassroots Fund. But, as we could not sustain some of our major activities, we have decided to turn down the funds until we restructure our association and recruit some more parents and volunteers to resume, in an effective way, our core work. Until then we would like to thank, from the depth of our hearts, the Kennington Association, and in particular the KA Committee members for all the support they have given us.
Sports & Fitness ProjectS
Volleyball
The Ecuadorian volleyball games (i.e. three-a-side) go from strength to strength. The group has been invited to contribute players for a
Tai Chi
Thursday, 2 - 3 pm –
Great news! A successful grant application to the 'Grassroots' fund (administered by Capital Community Foundation) has secured funding for the Thursday Tai Chi classes for another two years. The classes are currently taking place in the Kennington Park Community Centre,
Saturday, 11am - 12pm - Brit Oval Cricket Ground
Thanks go to Surrey County Cricket Club and Steven Blackwood, Community Executive, for agreeing to fund another 40 Tai Chi classes in 2009 at the Brit Oval. Classes take place at the new earlier time of 11 am -12 pm in the Lambeth Hall, which is part of the new OCS stand at the Vauxhall end of the Oval ground (enter by the Alec Stewart Gate). On match days, the class will move to
KA and Local Planning Matters
Beefeater Gin
In August, Desmond Payne of Beefeater Gin distillery on
The KA attended the October Inquiry into the building of a hotel etc. where our statement of support was presented. Items of concern raised at the Inquiry were public safety due to the neighbouring gas works; and the impact of the proposed hotel on the neighbourhood. A copy of the Appointed Inspector's report was to be sent to the KA in the New Year.
Both of these proposals are to convert a redundant office building into primarily high-rise residential buildings. The KA met with both sets of developers and is not supporting either of these projects, as they do not meet the housing requirements for the locality.
We have been alerted by residents of
Vauxhall Supplementary Planning Document
KA is examining Lambeth's proposal for "A New Heart for Vauxhall", officially known as the Vauxhall Supplementary Planning Document. We are in dialogue with Lambeth regarding this proposal for redevelopment of Vauxhall.
The successful applicant will be expected to assist the Yard Manager with the day to day running of the yard, care and welfare of equines, teaching able-bodied and disabled clients, schooling horses and supervising and training staff and volunteers as well as Deputising for Yard Manager in their absence. Occasional cover of farmyard when required.
Applicants should have a proven ability of working with horses, young people and managing staff.
Pay £15,000 per annum
Hours 37 1/2 hours per week, weekend, early morning and evening work is required.
Closing date 6th March, interviews 12th March. Position not to start before 01st April 2009.
The post will be offered subject to an Enhanced CRB check and successful applicants will need to disclose any warnings and/or charges against them during employment.
For further information or an application form please contact Linda Hinds on 0207 582 4204 or e mail linda.hinds@btconnect.com
THE
MONDAY FEBRUARY 16
Christopher Woodward, Director of Lambeth's newly-refurbished Garden Museum, will trace the story of gardening in
DURNING LIBRARY
6.45 for 7.15pm
Suggested donation £2. Refreshments
Friends of the Durning Library
The daughter of a woman killed in the 9/11 attacks and the partner of a victim of the 7 July bombings have warned children in London against the dangers of extremism.
Carie Lemack, whose mother Judy Larocque was killed when her American Airlines plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001, is visiting the capital as part of her campaign to stop similar attacks from happening.
The 33-year-old was joined by John Falding, whose partner Anat Rosenberg was killed in the 7/7 Tavistock Square bus bombing. The pair are supporting a Home Office scheme to improve relations between communities and challenge misconceptions about Islam, by discussing the effects the attacks have had on society.
Ms Lemack encouraged pupils at Kings Avenue Primary School in Clapham to think about their heroes, hopes for the future and happy memories to explain how racial and religious differences should be no barrier to cohesion.
Mr Falding, who was on the phone to his 39-year-old partner when the London bomb exploded, told how the terrorists had failed in their objectives.
The retired journalist, 65, said: "There are differences like religions, but does it matter? We are all following different paths to the same end.
"Anat's death and the death of the other people have not changed anything. It did not make the world a better place or a worse place. So she died in vain just because some people have a strange view of their religion and the way the world should be."
Mr Falding, of Marylebone, explained how charity administrator Anat had left her home country of Israel to move to London - she lived in Finchley Park - in order to escape the threat of bus bombings.
He said: "Tragically she was killed in London by a bomb on a bus."
Ms Lemack said she was lucky as she could honour her mother every day. She said: "My aim is to stop violence, stop extremism from being able to take root.
"Projects like this show that communities want to acknowledge there is a threat and that communities can handle it if they are engaged."
Her 50-year-old mother, from Massachusetts, worked as a management consultant. Ms Lemack - who lives in New York and Boston - and her sister Danielle, had to tell their mother's colleagues of her death.
Ms Lemack, who co-founded Family of September 11, which works to prevent future attacks, said: "A lot of things in the world get people angry. The question is how do you deal with it? Get violent? No, you speak out. The only way is to get communities involved." Pupil Britney Noble, nine, said: "It's the first time I heard about it, and it was very interesting. I felt sad for the people who died for no reason. People should stop and think about what they are doing."
Ms Lemack also visited the Lilian Baylis School in Kennington.
Benedict Moore-Bridger
