My studio is a dark room at the back of Marine Studios in Margate, and I’ve been there ten years now. I nearly didn’t take it, but my friends Keith and Marj told me I should, so I did.
Marine Studios was set up by Kate and Rick, when they moved their museum design company from London in 2009. It was part of a pre-Turner wave of things opening in Margate, and felt like an important step - proper workspace, with a public programme, and space for coworking, just five minutes from Margate Station, on the edge of the Old Town, with views over Main Sands. In taking over a space that had been derelict after years at the centre of the town’s tourist offer - first as boarding houses, then a popular restaurant, then a casino - it also felt like a marker of what a new visitor economy might feel like.
We're an interesting group at Marine Studios - designers, architects, community activists, writers, musicians, poets, and more. As a studio, we have an interest in climate justice, and the impact of the creative industries. We run a public programme with events for writers and our regular First Friday.
And we have a couple of permanent desk spaces available at the moment (£100/month - easy in/easy out terms), as well as hot-desking and meeting rooms for hire. If you want more info have a look at the website, or come and visit if you'd like a look around. I’d love to show you my studio.
Storrington in West Sussex - so dull it makes my childhood home Worthing (just down the road) seem exciting - has been named the UK’s first European stork village.
Brilliant Bamboo are hosting Neil Thomas from Atelier One and Jörg Stamm, the international bamboo master-craftsman, for a talk about their work. It's on Monday 31 March 2025, at the University of Staffordshire Flaxman Film Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent.
Whenever there's a disaster, people come together to help out - it seems to be a universal law. Here are people helping ahead of Tropical Cyclone Alfred in Australia.
Which rather ties in with this report, that finds that people in general are much too pessimistic about the kindness of their communities - there’s more kindness in reality than people expect. And it finds that belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought. All in the World Happiness Report 2025.
John Couzin, one of the organisers of the sprawling Spirit of Revolt archive, has died. Spirit of Revolt is a collection of Glasgow’s and Clydeside’s anarchist and libertarian-socialist past and present, but there are all sorts of interesting things in there - and I think it proves what’s in the report above!
At a time when academic freedom is under threat, Aix-Marseille Université is launching the Safe Place For Science program, offering a safe and stimulating environment in France for scientists wishing to pursue their research in complete freedom.
More than 130 acres of land in Leicestershire has been bought by Harborough District Council for a major rewilding project. That’s about 80 football pitches, in standard measurements, and it cost £1.9m. The Market Harborough Rewilding Project will be supported by the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust. We’re hoping there will be beavers.
Meonside Farm in Sussex (up and to the left a bit from Chichester), working with the University of Southampton and the South Downs National Park Authority, has brought beavers back to a chalk stream near Petersfield.
Four years into the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project, researchers have reported an increase in the populations of lobster, brown crab, angelshark and short-snouted seahorse. 96% of the Sussex Kelp Forest between Shoreham-by-Sea (where I was born) and Selsey had been wiped out by 2019, largely due to the great storm of 1987 and bottom-trawling fishing. But kelp forests provide habitat, nursery and feeding grounds for marine wildlife, hold huge quantities of carbon, improve water quality, and reduce coastal erosion - so great to see them back.
The UK government has announced the appointment of a new National Centre for Arts and Music Education. Plan is, it will support the delivery of arts education through online training for teachers, promote opportunities for children and young people to pursue their artistic and creative interests in school - including through the government’s network of Music Hubs - and boost partnerships between schools and cultural providers.