This article was found at http://www.webcitation.org/ dated 2009-10-25, citing an original article, now lost from http://www.geocities.com/directactionagainstapathy/sumac.htm, published by the ‘social centres project’.

Sumac Centre : Nottingham Feb 04

The Sumac Centre is a co-operatively own social space in Nottingham, England. Its been on the go for around four years & comprises of a bar, cafe, & lots of other stuff. Eleanor’s been involved in the place for about a year & I interviewed her in the bar on a Sunday afternoon at a chillout session. We both had ridiculous hangovers but the interview came out all right.  

What is the Sumac Centre?

It’s difficult to describe. The Sumac Centre’s official title is an ‘independent community social & resource centre’, but its basically an eclectic space that people can do whatever they want with. It holds a café & a bar – so basically it’s a social space. Its only opened on the weekends as a café & bar so during the week its open to people doing other things…

How long has the Centre been going?

It started around three 3 years ago. There used to be a centre called the rainbow centre in a rented space between here & town. The lease ran out & they were gonna get thrown out so rather than just stopping it we decided to buy our own space so we can do what we want with it & it can be permanent. So we managed to get the money & buy the centre 3 years ago & it’s taking a lot of work mainly done by volunteers. There’s been a lot of building work to get it into the state it is now. The café opened June 2002 & the bar opened at the end of March last year.

So how did you get the money together?

Well there’s this really cool organisation called Radical Routes- a co-operative of co-operatives who are all working for social change. It started off as housing co-operatives basically so people can set up a co-op (a little company really) so the people that live in the house run the company & pay rent to the company. Radical Routes has recently started to fund social centres we borrowed maybe £23,000 from Radical Routes, & we got a mortgage as well, &
basically the café & bar rent the space & pay rent & four people live upstairs & pay rent & that’s how we pay off the mortgage.

So you’ve lived upstairs for a while how’s life above the Sumac Centre?

It has it obvious advantages it very nice to be able to come down in your slippers & get a pint & a breakfast. You’ve basically got a social life set up for you there’s always someone here to come down & talk to. It’s also got some disadvantages. I’ve been quite involved in most of the time I lived
here & there’s lots of work to do. It’s a bit of a struggle living & working in the same place because when you come down here your sort off working.

If your living in that space all the time it can be a bit much. I now live about 50 yards down the road, which is just right…

Other
than the café & bar what activities go on at the Sumac?

I think the sumac centres just starting to take off. It took a while for people to
realise that this space is here for them to use & to actually see it a place
where they can have ideas & do stuff. This week we had a course called
‘gardening for the terrified’. It was a course for adults & I think we
got in about 10 people who where terrified of gardening. Someone came in a put
on a course – as we’ve got a garden outside. We also have a nice thing on
Fridays were kids from in from the local school are making a garden. & Its
not really the people who are the core of the collective who are doing this but
other people coming in & using the space & that’s how the space should
be run.

There’s a home education group people that are home educating their kids come in once a
month for a social. We have meetings different groups meet here; we have open
direct action meetings here in the evenings. We decided to integrate prisoner
support with the bar so more people would come along & see what was
happening.

Every second Sunday we have El Lampione puppets theatre collective which is basically
a bunch of local parents & their kids & they’ve built an amazing stage
& theatre & the parents take on turns to put on shows for the kids.  We also have events in the bar, like the Sunday chillout,
& we have dj nights & theme nights we had a really nice night for
Chinese New Year.

&
There are some plans for expanding the building?

Yeah
we’ve got ambitious plans. It includes some shabby old out buildings currently
crammed with useful tat & the idea is to pull those down & build a
2-storey eco-building. We plan to build it with volunteers using ecologically
sound building materials. It’s not as yet decided as it’s in its formative
stages. It’ll probably hold the library it’ll hold all the computers &
offices & resource stuff & this place will be left being the social
centre. It’ll be good because sometimes we have gatherings for campaign groups
& we have to shut the centre because there’s no room. Basically this is a
space that the local community can use & if we keep shutting it because we
get all these people from all over the country it’s a bit of a pain for them.
So it’ll be nice that when we have the building out there we’ll be able to
have meetings & gatherings & good political stuff going on as well as a
nice space for the local community.

Is
there a down side to running a bar does everyone involved in the Sumac drink too
much?

I think Nottingham is quite a big drinking city, & now we run our own pub & we sell cheap alcohol & also your
drinking for the cause & all your mates are there… Yes its only been a
year but we’ve probably all put on a bit of weight & are a bit more
haggard around the eyes…

I
guess another reason you’ve put on a lot of weight is having Veggies
downstairs. Do you wanna tell us a little about Veggies?

In lots
of ways the whole thing has grown out of veggies. Veggies are vegan-catering
campaigners. They started out by trying to provide an alternative to McDonalds
fast food etc. So they started off with a little van & started serving vegan
burgers & stuff, & that’s basically what they still do. They go round
to festivals & stuff & events like the anarchist bookfair they provide
the catering for that, but even better they bicycle into demos & serve
burgers in the middle of riots. They’re awesome. Two of them are employed on
low level wages & the rest is voluntary. Veggies were a really key part of
the Rainbow Centre & now they’ve moved into the basement.

I
wouldn’t say Veggies are the source of the big bellies in Nottingham I’d
blame it on the café. Veggies don’t actually cook here they cater elsewhere,
but the café’s the thing that make us all really lardy here. We do the best
vegan breakfast I’ve ever had anywhere, & there’s a vegan bakery round
the corner that sells us endless amount of vegan cake, & there’s a chip
shop around the corner that sells vegan battered sausages & vegan gravy,
Nottingham is lard & gack central.

Why
has Nottingham become a vegan/grease mecca?

Serendipity.

Partly
because of veggies & probably other stuff as well there’s been a long
history of animal rights in Nottingham & so there’s a lot of people who
want to eat vegan food.

Is there a lot of interaction
with local community?

We’re
quite diverse. Nottingham has quite a broad alternative type scene lots of
things going on from people making community gardens & more direct action
stuff, people putting on Squat parties. Forest Fields, which is the area where
Sumac is a bit of a focus for it so you get a lot of people who are into that
living here.

What’s
really nice is we have lots of kids in & they really like the place. On
Thursday nights we have kids night before 9pm that is basically non-smoking
& its totally fine for kids to be running around riotous. Parents are
bringing in their kids & they have a nice time.

We get
quite a nice age range we’ve got local bar props – Older guys who are in
here every night propping up the par & funky young twenty-something’s.

Nottingham
is quite an ethnically diverse city is that reflected by the people using the
centre?

The area
the Sumac Centre is in is very diverse, there’s a lot of Asians a lot of white
people & a lot of Black people. Basically we get in white people. But it’s
not necessarily a bad thing. We were thinking how do we get more Asian people in
as a lot of our neighbours are Asian & they don’t come in how can we make
them come in here? But then I was thinking there’s lots of community centres
in Forest Fields there’s the Afghan Community Centre & the Indian
Community Centre, they’ve actually got their own spaces & what would be
really cool is if we could create links between the centres rather than saying
ours is best so we can use their centres & we can use theirs. & Maybe we
could put on an event in the summer maybe a carnival or something involving
people from all the centres.   

What
kind of problems have you encountered with the Centre?

The
centre is run through a series of collectives that are different groups of
volunteers who are involved in the centre. So the café & the bar collective
are the two big ones & then there’s Veggies downstairs, there a few people
mainly involved in doing maintenance & there’s not enough people involved
organising the computers & things like that, so it runs in little groups
& then every other Thursday there’s a main Sumac meeting.

Basically
its organised by participation. & Basically it’s a clique of people who
put in the hard work & that can be a problem. Although we say that no-ones
in charge there’s clearly a group of people that know what’s going on &
are running the place. I guess maybe it has to be like that but that causes its
own weird dynamics because we say its open & anyone can get involved.

One
thing I’ve been thinking of recently is that as a bar we need to have a
licence & we’re run as a private members club. Running a bar is a
reasonably complicated thing & involves lots of legal aspects so basically
when your run by volunteers not everyone knows what’s going on & not
everyone takes it so seriously or it could possibly end up in situations were we
go outside our legality – which can be a problem.

Some
people feel very responsible for the place & some people seem more like just
visiting & don’t understand how much time & effort & how much work
goes into the keep the place together.

Can
you explain how the bar works?

The
set-up is a bit like a working mans club, to come in & drink at the bar you
have to join the club. & The other way to come in is to be signed in as a
guest. In practice it’s not difficult to become a member you just fill in a
form.

We’re
just reapplying for our licence right now & there’s all sorts of
regulations you have to meet basically the door is always locked so you have to
ring the bell & get signed in. So it’s probably a bit strange when you
come at first.

Does
the café need to meet any legal requirements?

Only
health & safety stuff I think after the café in the Rainbow Centre – The
Circle A Café – apparently people where happy to up their standards to meet
the legal requirements because apparently it was quite minging.

One of
the things people felt quite strongly moving on from the old Rainbow centre to
the Sumac was the old centre used to be quite counter cultural & a dirty
little whole really & the idea was to have a space that is kinda available
to available to everyone that wasn’t covered in graffiti & is kept clean
& neat. & Inviting for families to come in & use as well as punks
& crusties…

Is
there a lot of difference between a legal Social Centre like the Sumac &
squatted spaces? 

There
are quite a lot of differences between a squatted social centre & legal
centre, one of which is the legality issue. In a legal space we are confined by
the law; the café for instance won’t used skipped food because it has to go
to health & safety standards, & the bar closes at 11pm it won’t stay
open after its legal closing time. So you have a lack of freedom basically,
where as in a squatted social space you can do whatever you like.

We’re
also constrained by the need to make money. We need to get people in here
drinking we need to make money to keep the place alive.

But
basically the place is ours for a long time the place could be here in 20/30
years so you can put major time & effort into it over the months & years
your involved because you haven’t got the temporary-ness off a squatted space
where you put lots of effort in & then you get evicted & a lot of energy
can be lost.

When
legal social centres started to happen there was lots of debate within activist
circles about how most of the people involved in setting up the centres are
people involved in direct action & some people said ‘your taking your
energy out of proper political activity & your gonna drain yourself setting
up these community centres, what are you doing?’

But I
don’t think it comes down to whether it’s a squat or a legal space. The
things that are important are the people involved & what they do. If we’re
doing good stuff it doesn’t matter that we’re legal even if we’re working
within the system we’re still doing good stuff.

Has
there been any interest or problems from the authorities, police council etc?

The
centre is a political centre- that’s what its about very much about politics
& making the world a better place. Using the idea that people can have a
space to come together & take back a bit of control over their lives. It’s
a space that full of literature from all sorts of radical campaigns so you get
information to all sorts of people. Demonstrations & things have been
organised from the centre but as yet we haven’t received any police attention.

The
other thing is that we have to keep the centre totally legal we don’t want to
have people taking drugs here we run the bar legal. We organise lots of things
from here so if lots of revolutionary activity starts to pour out of the Sumac
Centre they haven’t got an excuse to easily shut us down or cause trouble for
us.

I do
think if we did start to receive police attention for being anarchists or
whatever we’d have a lot of community support. It would be quite a scandal if
any police or magistrates tied to cause trouble for us. In some senses I’d
like to see it – let them try.

What
kind of advice would you give to anyone trying to set up a Social Centre?

If your
gonna embark on the crazy adventure that is setting up a social centre for the
community you mustn’t underestimate how much work it is. We never realised how
much work it would be to get the building up & running some people said if
they realised how much work it was they might not have done it & they were
at the very limit of their capacity.

You need
to have a crew of people who are not just excited about it but also have the
time & energy to dedicate to the place.

I’d
say its really really rewarding its great. There are times I feel like I don’t
want to go near the sumac centre & then I come here & the re are people
having fun & doing things in a way they wouldn’t in a normal pub &
seeing all sorts of different groups using the centre its really rewarding.